Chapter 1
Ukrainian eyewitness accounts published in the West in the 1950s and hitherto virtually untapped by Sovietologists. He demonstrated their veracity by comparing them with fictionalized Soviet accounts from the Khrushchev era. Conquest showed that in 1932 and 1933 an artificially created famine made the Ukrainian SSR, the contiguous and largely Ukrainian North Caucasus Territory to its east, and the largely German and Tatar regions of the Volga Basin,
like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their family or neighbors. At the same time (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.113
Especially appalling was the fate of children during the famine. “A whole generation of rural children, in the USSR as a whole but especially in the Ukraine, was destroyed or maimed.”114 Conquest calculated the mortality due to the Famine of 1932-1933 at 7,000,000-5,000,000 in Ukraine, 1,000,000 in the North Caucasus Territory, and another million elsewhere. Conquest summarized his findings as follows:
1. the cause of the famine was the setting of highly excessive grain requisition targets by Stalin and his associates.
2. Ukrainian party leaders made it clear at the start to Stalin and his associates that these targets were highly excessive.
3. the targets were nevertheless enforced until starvation began.
4. Ukrainian leaders pointed this out to Stalin and his associates and the truth was also made known to him and them by others.
5. the requisitions nevertheless continued.
Such are the major points. We may add as subsidiary evidence:
6. bread rations, even though low ones, were established in the cities, but no such minimum food allowance was made available in the villages.
7. grain was available in store in the famine area, but was not released to the peasants in their extremity.
8. orders were given, and enforced as far as possible, to prevent peasants entering the towns, and to expel them when they did.
9. orders were given, and enforced, to prevent food, legally obtained, being brought over the republican borders from Russia to the Ukraine.
10. the fact of famine, and a particularly frightful famine at that, is fully established by witnesses…
When it comes to motive, the special measures against the Ukraine and the Kuban were specifically linked with, and were contemporaneous with, a public campaign against their nationalism. In these, and the other areas affected, the apparent concern in the agrarian sphere proper was to break the spirit of the most recalcitrant regions of peasant resentment at collectivization. And when it came to the Party itself the result, and presumable intention, was to eliminate those elements insufficiently disciplined in the suppression of bourgeois’ humanitarian feelings.
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113 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 3.
114 Ibid,p.283. 115 Ibid, p. 306,