Chapter 1

reserves, and the rapid growth of the urban population led to a sharp increase in food requirements in towns, while livestock products declined precipitately with the disappearance of so high a proportion of the animals. The government tried to take more out of a smaller crop… Procurements in 1931 left many peasants and their animals with too little to eat. The Ukraine and North Caucasus suffered particularly severely. Collectivized peasants relied almost exclusively on grain distribution by kolkhozes for their bread, since money was virtually useless in this period; bread was rationed in towns and unobtainable in the country save at astronomical “free” prices. These excessive procurements threatened the very existence of the peasantry in some areas…
All this led in 1932 to trouble, pilfering, indiscipline, concealment of crops. As a result, Stalin evidently decided to relax the procurements pressure somewhat, and the procurements plan for 1932, which had originally been fixed at an impossible 29.5 million tons, was reduced to 18.1 millions, while greater freedom was offered to kolkhozes and remaining individual peasants to sell on the free market, providing the delivery plan was fulfilled first
However, conditions grew more chaotic. Procurement organs relaxed their pressure, and … grain flowed into unofficial channels, and in particular into the peasants’ own storehouses, since the harvest was not a good one and the food shortages of the previous winter were vividly recalled. Discipline collapsed in some areas. The reduced state procurement plan was threatened. In the North Caucasus the harvest was particularly poor, a mere 4.4-5.9 quintals per hectare, a miserable crop on the best land in the USSR…
This led to state countermeasures, which in turn led to the great tragedy: The famine of 1933. ‘All forces were directed to procurements.’ … Somewhere along the way over 10 million people ‘demographically’ disappeared. (Some, of course, were never born.) Many died in the terrible early thirties, and I myself spoke to Ukrainians who remember these horrors. Yet neither the local nor the national press ever mentioned a famine… Clearly, historians who believe that there is no fact without documentary proof would be hard put to it to describe the events of the period. 97

Nove’s account deservedly became a standard one, but based on what we already know and on what we will see below, it requires modification. It is not known whether the food crisis of 1931 was, in fact, worse in Ukraine and the North Caucasus than elsewhere, but we do know that in early 1932 central authorities acknowledged difficulties only in other areas. Indeed, grain over and above the 1931 quota was seized from the North Caucasus and transported as aid to the east, while in July 1932 the authorities in Ukraine were bluntly told that the necessity of aiding other areas took precedence over Ukraine’s difficulties. As for the 1932 May Reforms, the quotas were lowered only to the level of what was actually procured from the 1931 harvest Moreover, the promised freer trade was to be allowed only after all state quotas had been met at the official end of the procurements campaign, that is, no earlier than January 15, 1933. In reality, then, these reforms represented little in the way of either lessening the burden on the peasants or giving them an incentive to produce. In addition, we shall see that there is a great deal more documentary evidence for what happened than was known in 1969 and that it indicates that Stalin’s “war of starvation” was waged primarily against the peasants in certain specific territories.

Moshe Lewin dealt with an issue closely connected with the Famine in his 19/4 article, ” Taking Grain’: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War” 98. His analysis of the Famine deserves to be quoted at length. In the Fall of 1932, he wrote:
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97 Ibid, pp. 177-181.
98 Moshe Lewin, u Taking Grain’: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War, Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1974), pp. 281-323.