Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

A new offensive was launched—and first of all a terroristic wave against agencies and local authorities still too reluctant to re-engage in excesses. Thanks to powerful ’stimulants’, new records of anti-peasant repression were to be beaten. The local authorities had no other way out than to return the pressure downwards. Formerly attacked for their ruthlessness, they now saw themselves attacked for their ‘rotten liberalism’ towards the laggards, especially in the three principal granaries, the Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the lower Volga (responsible for some 60 per cent of all zagotovki [state grain procurements—JM]). Officials understood well the meanings of the calls addressed to them to engage in a ‘truly Bolshevik struggle for grain’, to ‘carry blows’ against the squandering of grain (this aimed at … unauthorized distributions to field workers and kolkhoz funds), and finally, to get the grain ‘at any price’ (vo chto by to ni stalo)—another of those vague directives with a clear meaning, but still easily disowned by the leadership when necessary.

Spurred by a flood of orders and pressures, the local agencies now veered sharply from their
alleged ‘rotten liberalism’ into another batch of ’sharp measures of repression’, as our source
put it Though the physical limits of an exhausted countryside and low crops forced the
Government to lower its demands in many regions (the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus
had their quotas lowered consecutively four times), it still needed a big battle for the rest. The
Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the two Volga regions, and other grain producing areas,
according to archives quoted by a modern author, ‘dropped out of the organised influence of
Party and Government*, and the Government responded by transforming these areas into a vast
arena of an unprecedented repressive operation. Stalin, who took over personal command and
shaped these policies, called for ‘a smashing blow* to be dealt on kolkhozniki [collective
farmers—JM], because ‘whole squads of them’, as he saw it, ‘turned against the Soviet state’. A
special Central Committee meeting was held in January 1933 to endorse some of the old and to
adopt new, severe measures to keep the countryside under control

Some of the actions taken before and after this plenum can be mentioned here. An
unspecified but large number of peasants were arrested, and often, especially in the Kuban
district (Northern Caucasus), were deprived of most of their belongings and deported to the
North. Mass arrests, purges and dismissals struck many party members for having engaged in
‘defending kulaks’ and in ‘anti-state sabotage of the zagotovki*. In many places the squads of
the zagotoviteli [persons engaged in forcibly procuring grain for the state—JM] went berserk
(with an unmistakable blessing from above: Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, and other top leaders
were on the spot) and stripped the recalcitrant villages of any grain they could lay their hands
on. This included the grain the peasants had legitimately earned and been paid for their
trudodni [labor days, a complex calculation of the quantity and quality of labor a given collective
farmer had expended on the collective farm, used to calculate the members' share of what
remained of the harvest after obligations to the state and kolkhoz management were taken
out—JM]. This was an obvious sentence to death by starvation, though an unknown number of
straight shootings also probably took place.

As these events were unfolding, the grain-producing areas were by now, in the Winter and
Spring of 1932-3, in the throes of a terrible famine. The Soviet government never officially
acknowledged this fact, though the woolty formula used by the Ukrainian C[entral] C{ommittee]
(the critical food situation in many kolkhoz’) was the nearest to the mark. But publications in
the post-Stalin period, especially belles lettres, said much more, though without giving estimates
of the scope of the disaster.

Many factors contributed to the famine. The vagaries of climate and crops were not this
time the central cause. The crops in 1931 and 1932, though poor, were not catastrophic.
Collectivisation which played havoc with agricultural production was even more of a factor.
The slaughter of stock dealt a shattering blow to Soviet agriculture, and the retreat the
Government operated by allowing kolkhozniki to have a private plot and a family cow came too
late to avoid the damage. As to the surviving herds, the newly founded and hastily organised
kolkhozy did not know how to cope with them—and the haemorrhage continued for quite a
time.

But the squeeze operated on the rural economy by the zagotovki was probably the main
factor. Thirty-two per cent from the 1931 crop (and an even higher percentage from kolkhozy)
was a blood-letting. And this was the national average. In some regions—the Kiev district, for
example—no more than one-fifth of the crop was left to the kolkhozniki. Facing the dwindling