Chapter J

Wasyl Hryshko’s Moscow Does not Believe in Tears, first published in Ukrainian in 1963, was revised and expanded over the years and finally appeared in English in 1983 as The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933. According to Hryshko, the forced collectivization of agriculture entailed a national aspect from the initial wave of dekulakization, which he called the first act of the Ukrainian tragedy:

Here lies the essential difference between Ukraine and Russia during the liquidation of the kulaks. Although the campaign claimed many Russian peasants as victims, the implementation of the campaign was less severe in Russia than in Ukraine (since Russia proper, with the exception of the non-Russian regions adjacent to Ukraine, was not considered to be a “crucial grain growing region”) [the author is here referring to the fact that in collectivization the main grain producing regions were given priority—JM], and the campaign had different national consequences. There was less dekulakization and deportation in Russia in proportion to the peasant population, and the peasants were deported within the boundaries of Russia. The Ukrainian peasants, however, were deported en masse to a foreign land, where they were assimilated and lost to the Ukrainian nation. Thus, from its very beginnings collectivization had in Ukraine a national aspect that was not found anywhere in Russia. 84

Citing the figures given earlier by Holubnychy, Hryshko pointed out that the main cause of the Famine

was not the chaotic and hasty collectivization ordered by Moscow, but the deliberate policy of plundering Ukraine by ordering excessively high grain deliveries… What is most striking here … is that Ukraine had to deliver a much larger percentage of its harvests than any other republic. 85

Hryshko, with some reason, blames the communist leadership in Ukraine for its aquiescence in carrying out Moscow’s disastrous peasant policies until early 1932, when those same Ukrainian authorities unsuccessfully attempted to get Moscow to lower the quotas.

This was the beginning of what Hryshko called the second act of the tragedy. Moscow responded by proclaiming policies which were designed to kill as many peasants as possible. One of the most notorious was the infamous law of August 7, 1932 on socialist property. Others were the November 20, 1932 Ukrainian decree canceling the distribution of food advances to collective farmers where the state procurement quotas had not been fulfilled; the November 17 Ukrainian resolution denouncing recalcitrant local organizations for being “agents of the kulaks and Petliurists,” Le., of Ukrainian nationalists abroad; the December 6 Ukrainian decree imposing an economic blockade upon villages which had “criminally sabotaged” the procurements; and demands in December in Pravda that “Ukraine’s shameful lagging behind this year” be overcome by the “application of more severe methods” and the implementation of “a decisive struggle against remnants of the kulaks, especially in Ukraine.” 86 All this was justified by Stalin himself who declared in the All-Union Central Executive Committee on November 27 that among the collectivized peasantry there were

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84 Wasyl Hryshko, The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933, trans. Marco Carynnyk (Toronto, Bahriany Foundation, 1983), pp. 77-78.

85 Ibid, pp. 79-80.
86 Ibid, pp. 79-85.