Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

Holubnychy’s argument remains an outstanding attempt to come to grips with basic issues necessary for an understanding of the Famine and must be considered seriously. However, it is difficult to agree with his analysis that it was caused merely by the circumstances existing at the time. In fact, the May reforms of 1932 came about not, as Holubnychy would have it, because of Ukrainian pressure on Stalin, but—as we shall see—because of difficulties in the Transvolga. Thus, Stalin responded differently when Volga Russians were threatened with starvation in early 1932 than he did when Ukrainians were starving only months later. This is a key to any understanding of the political reason why millions of Ukrainians were allowed to starve to death. While it is quite true that there is no evidence to assert that the Famine was caused because Stalin “planned” it, both the situation in the Volga in early 1932 and in Ukraine later that same year allowed him to decide who would be requisitioned into extinction and who would not

During this same year, the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich published the collection Genocide in the U.S.S.R.: Studies in Group Destruction in English. None of the members of the institute’s Ukrainian section who had written on the Famine were asked to contribute, and the article on the Ukrainians made no mention of the issue. 72 Interestingly, however, Wassili Glaskow’s contribution on the Cossacks treated the Famine as a major episode in Soviet attempts to destroy the Cossacks. 73

Roy Laird’s 1958 study, Collective Farming in Russia, mentioned the Famine only briefly, quoting Belov. 74 There is no evidence that he was acquainted with either Dmytryshyn’s book, Timoshenko’s paper, or the issues that they raised. Indeed, the next book-length study of Soviet Ukraine and the first ever to be published by a major university press, Robert Sullivant’s 1962 monograph, was in many ways a step backward from Dmytryshyn’s work. Although Sullivant dealt in some detail with the official Soviet sources which mentioned the “breakdown” of grain procurements and agriculture and the official measures taken in response, there is no evidence in his book that he was even so much as aware that anyone had actually starved to death. 75

Merle Fainsod’s 1958 classic, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, is a book which no Sovietologist would ever admit to not having read. Based upon the Smolensk Oblast9 Communist Party archive, which was captured by the Germans and then fell into American hands, it portrayed the impoverishment of the collective farmers in the region east of Byelorussia but gave the Famine in Ukraine only passing mention. 76

……………………………..

72 Alexander V. Yurchenko, The Ukrainians,” Genocide in the U.S.S.R: Studies in Group Destruction (Munich, Institute for the Study of the USSR), pp. 138-146.

73 W. G. Glaskow, “The Cossacks as a Group,” Genocide in the U.S.S.R., pp. 242-252.

74 Roy D. Laird, Collective Farming in Russia (Lawrence, Univ. of Kansas Press, 1958), p. 64.

75 Robert S. Sullivant, Soviet Politics and the Ukraine, 1917-1957 (New York and London, Columbia
University Press, 1962), pp. 187-195 et passim.

76 Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (New York, Knopf, 1958), pp. 267, 444. The former reference is to a police report of a peasant stating that he had seen Ukrainian peasants begging in Moscow; the latter to an order to recruit local Jews to repopulate Jewish collective farms in Ukraine which had become “depopulated” during the famine.