Chapter 2
POST-STALINIST SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE FAMINE

A surprising number of works published in the Soviet Union have in one way or another touched on issues intimately connected with the Famine of 1932-33. Indeed, two articles have been published dealing with these works—a survey of the Soviet historiography of collectivization in Ukraine by Janusz Radziejowski and a brief survey of Soviet Russian belletristic literature by Boris Vail. 1

Of course, all Soviet historiography is subject to the dictates of partiinost’ (party-mindedness), especially when dealing with the Soviet period. Those who control the Soviet present also control the official past, and the Soviet Clio is ever the servant of politics. When exposing Stalinist excesses was the official watchword, there were times when the “excesses” were allowed to include not only the violence committed against members of the elite, but also against broader segments of society. But this was always the exception.

Soon after the XXth CPSU Congress and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of personality,” historians began to rediscover that all had not been well in the Ukrainian countryside in 1932-1933. As early as 1957, V. V. Bondarenko wrote:

In 1932 indications of significant backwardness in the republic’s agriculture appeared. This was explained partially by the fact that in the Summer of 1932 in many parts of the steppe area unfavorable climatic conditions arose. But the main cause of the backwardness of agriculture was the inadequate leadership of the collective farms by local party and Soviet organs. As a result of the backwardness of agriculture in Ukraine in 1932, there was a substantial decrease in the grain procurements. If by December 1930, 400 million poods (l pood = 36 lbs.) had been procured, and in 1931, 380 million poods, then by December 1932 the procurements constituted only 195 million poods. 2

When, however, a new textbook, History of the Ukrainian SSR, appeared (the first since World War II) in 1958, it included a fairly lengthy discussion of the shortcomings which had led to lower agricultural productivity in the early 1930s: Lack of experience in managing large-scale collectivized agriculture, a decline in labor discipline, the low level of agricultural technology, large losses at harvest time, a large decline in the number of draught animals, and so forth. “In addition to this, in Ukraine serious distortions in carrying out the grain procurements were observed: Collective farms which were able to fulfill the procurements plan were given supplementary plans in order to make up for the shortcomings of other

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1 Janusz Radziejowski, “Collectivization in Ukraine in Light of Soviet Historiography,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, V:2(9), p. 3-17; Boris Borisovich Vail’, “Golod 1933 goda i Sovetskaia literatura” (The Famine of 1933 and Soviet literature), Obozrenie (Review), No. 4 (April 1983), pp. 35-36.

2 V. V. Bondarenko, Razvitie obshchestvennogo khoziaistva kolkhozov Ukrainy v gody dovoennykh piatiletok (The Development of the Socialized Economy of Ukraine’s Collective Farms during the Prewar Five Year Plans) (Kiev, Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Ukrainskoi SSR, 1957), p. 179.