Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

individual detachments which are going against the Soviet power and are supporting the sabotage of grain deliveries. It would be foolish if Communists assumed that the collective farm is a socialist form of economy and therefore did not respond to this blow by individual collective farmers and collective farms with a decisive blow. 87

What Hryshko called the third act came at the turn of the new year. With nothing left to seize, procurements fell off, and Moscow responded by using this as an excuse to accuse the Ukrainian authorities of “criminal laxity.” Stalin intervened, appointing Pavel Postyshev the de facto dictator of Ukraine on January 24, 1933. In a passage found only in the 1983 edition, Hryshko explained Postyshev’s appointment:

Although Postyshev assumed power when the famine was already underway, he was the real commander of the famine and the physical personification of Moscow’s anti-Ukrainian policy. Moscow prepared the famine with the aid of Ukrainian Communists who were blinded by their faith in “class struggle” and “internationalism,” but it was able to realize its genocidal intention only with non-Ukrainian hands, because even the Ukrainian Communists, if they still thought of themselves as Ukrainians, were marked for extinction. Thus, to carry out the final decisive phase of the genocide—genocide in its pure form—Moscow had to send the Russian Postyshev, accompanied by a handpicked staff that included such prominent members of the Moscow Party center as M. Khatayevich, Ye. Veger, and others. 88

Hryshko also pointed out that Postyshev fulfilled a dual mandate:

As for the famine, Postyshev not only failed to prevent the catastrophe, but in his first speech immediately after assuming his duties in Ukraine announced that there could be no talk of issuing grain to the Ukrainian collective farmers to stave off famine or of issuing seed to the collective farms… Realizing later that given this attitude there would be no Spring sowing and no harvest to expropriate, Moscow made Ukraine a loan of its own grain, exploiting this opportunity to make cynical propaganda about its own charity. But no relief was ever issued to the starving peasants. Only during the Spring sowing, to force the collective fanners to work, was some food given them, although only in the fields, during work.
Postyshev’s particular mission in Ukraine was to use the famine, which had paralyzed the Ukrainian peasantry and excluded it from the political struggle, as a basis for a purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian elements in the Communist Party, which had been reborn during the period of Ukrainization, and to liquidate the consequences of Ukrainization. It was with a dismantling of the Ukrainization program that Postyshev began his work in 1933, quickly letting Ukrainians understand that he had arrived not to save Ukraine from the famine, which he refused to notice, but to save Ukrainians from the Ukrainian language, which supposedly had begun to diverge from the Russian language because of “wrecking” by imaginary Ukrainian nationalists and “mistakes” by the Ukrainian Communists, who had supposedly permitted a dangerous “national deviation.” 89

All in all, a very good summary of what actually happened.
In 1964 the prestigious British journal Soviet Studies published an article that for two decades remained the standard English language work on the Famine, “The Soviet Famine of 1932-1934″ by Dana Dalrymple.
Dalrymple began by observing that
…………..

Ibid, p. 82.
Ibid, pp. 85-86. Ibid., p. 88.