Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

significant were probably the papers by Bohdan Krawchenko and Sergei Maksudov. Krawchenko amply documented the chaos accompanying collectivization in Ukraine. Maksudov showed that even if one assumes that the 1939 Soviet census—which was taken shortly after a census was withdrawn for “diminishing the population”—were absolutely accurate and the mass resettlement of Russian peasants in Ukraine after the Famine had no effect on its population, Ukraine lost at least four and a half million people between the 1926 and 1939 Soviet censuses, an exceedingly conservative estimate.

Despite such evidence, certain scholars still wrote on the Famine without taking into account the role of state grain seizures even as one of several contributing factors. One of R. W. Davies’s most prominent students, S. G. Wheatcroft, presented a paper at the March 1985 annual conference of the British National Association of Soviet and East European Studies entitled ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1932: the Crisis in Agriculture,” which depicted the Famine merely as a crisis in agriculture. He shifted the focus from the peasantry to the state’s difficulty in rinding the desired quantity of grain to seize. Wheatcroft stated that

While not dismissing the significance of peasant volition and the lack of material incentives, or the effect of the weather, I conclude that by 1932 it was the very critical shortage of traction power, particularly in the Ukraine and the Southern Production Region [The North Caucasus, Volga Basin], that was of most significance. Given this shortage of draft power, particularly in the Southern Production Region, there were bound to be delays in carrying out the major harvesting, Winter harvesting, and Winter sowing campaigns upon which the fate of arable production was highly dependent. 112

The rather obvious fact that the state had bled the countryside dry in the Ukrainian and Cossack regions was not even worthy of mention. Such a gross misstatement of the historical problem is analogous to studying the problem of theft from the standpoint of the thief who has trouble finding enough to steal.

It was Conquest who in the following year became the first scholar to document thoroughly what he appropriately called the terror-famine. Conquest placed the famine firmly within its dual context of the forced collectivization of agriculture and the assault on Ukrainians as a nation. He was able to do this by tracing the two interwoven threads of Bolshevik policy toward non-Russians, particularly Ukrainians, and toward the peasantry from the revolution. He followed these threads through the period of concessions to both peasants and Ukrainians in the 1920s, through collectivization and dekulakization, to the assault on Ukrainian national self-assertion and the Famine. Particularly noteworty is his detailed use of

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The Famine of 1933: a Survey of the Sources;” Bohdan Krawchenko, The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933 and Collectivization in Soviet Ukraine;” M. Maksudov, “Ukraine’s Demographic Losses 1927-1938;” James E. Mace, “The Famine of 1933: a Survey of the Sources;” Marco Carynnyk, “Making the News Fit to Print: Walter Duranty, the New York Times and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933;” Andre Liebich, “Russian Mensheviks and the Famine of 1933;” Marco Carynnyk, “Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, the United States and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933;” Wsevolod Isajiw, “The Impact of the Man-Made Famine on the Structure of Ukrainian Society;” Roman Serbyn, “The Famine of 1921-1923: a Model for 1933?” Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “Conceptualizations of Genocide and Ethnocide.”

112 S. G. Wheatcroft, “The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1932: the Crisis in Agriculture,” unpublished paper presented to the Annual Conference of the National Association of Soviet and East European Studies of Great Britain, March 23-25,1985, pp. 12-13.