Chapter 1

mass constituency in the countryside. The co-opting of the left wing of Ukrainian revolutionary socialism by the Soviets led to the expression of Ukrainian aspirations by those whom their fellow Ukrainians viewed as traitors to the national cause—the Ukrainian communists. Meanwhile, the concessions made to the Ukrainians in the 1920s tended to legitimize a measure of Ukrainian identity and self-assertion within the party. This led to the evolution of a relatively autonomous Soviet Ukraine which promoted the cultural and social development of the Ukrainian nation within the Soviet framework. Such a course, however, was seen as a threat to the unity of the Soviet Union and to Russian hegemony in Ukraine. The central Soviet authorities in Moscow gained the opportunity to alter radically its nationality policy in Ukraine with the forced collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization, in turn, alienated the peasant constituency of Ukrainian nationalism to the point that no national concessions could ever hope to reconcile them to Soviet rule. The collectivization of agriculture required breaking the peasantry throughout the Soviet Union, and in Ukraine this meant breaking the basic constituency of Ukrainian nationalism. As collectivization progressed, so did crop seizures. In 1932 warnings of impending disaster by Ukrainian authorities were ignored by Moscow, and, once famine began to rage, Moscow took measures deliberately calculated to maximize the resultant loss of life. It is clear that from December 1932 the Famine was connected with a campaign against Ukrainian “bourgeois-nationalism” that practically destroyed Ukrainian elites, while the geography of the Famine shows that it was deliberately focused upon territories containing peoples that Stalin found particularly troublesome at a time of transition in nationality policy. 109

In the same year that Mace’s book was published, Sergei Maksudov (pseudonym) published a study tracing the geography of the Famine by examining the age structure of the rural female population in 1959. Since famine causes lower birthrates and higher infant mortality, famine also influences the age structure of those areas where it occurs. This can best be seen by examining the least geographically mobile section of the population—rural women. The Soviet census of 1959 was the first since 1926 to give rural-urban and male-female population breakdowns by age and region. This census, however, only gave age data in five-year age groups, so it can only reveal evidence of low fertility and high infant mortality for the years 1929-33. An abnormally low number of rural females born in 1929-1933 resided in 1959 in Ukraine, the North Caucasus Territory, Kazakhstan, some parts of the Volga Basin, and parts of Western Siberia. These then, are the areas of the Soviet Union which suffered most during the forced collectivization of agriculture and subsequent famine. 110

In 1983 the world’s first international scholarly conference on the Ukrainian Famine was held in Montreal. Selected papers from this conference later appeared in book form. 111 Almost every contributor broke some new ground, but most

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109 James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, 1983), passim.

110 S. Maksudov, “Geografiia goloda 1933 goda” (Geography of the Famine of 1933), SSSR:
vnutrenia protivorechie (USSR: Internal Contradictions), No. 7,1983, pp. 5-17.

111 Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, eds., Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933 (Edmonton,
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986). It contained the following: James E. Mace,