Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

Experienced collective farm managers and qualified technical cadres were in short supply. 6

The difficulty of the situation lay not in the fact that people were starving to death, but rather that the sowing, harvest, and procurement targets were not met. However, the author’s allusion to the lack of consideration paid to the material interests of the peasants and the incorrect planning of the grain procurements alerted knowledgeable readers to what was left unsaid.

How difficult the state found the situation is clear from the author’s account of bow the procurements were carried out. In 1930, which produced an all time record harvest of 1,355 million poods of grain, the procurement quota was raised twice, from an initial 440 million poods to 4723 million, then to 490 million, which produced “great confusion and also created resentment among a substantial segment of the peasantry and thereby complicated the carrying out of the grain procurement campaign.” 7 By June 1, 1931, only 447 million poods of grain had been procured in Ukraine basically because private farmers, particularly the more affluent stratum bearing the heaviest burden, fell short of their assigned tasks. For this reason, 22,000 so-called expert farms were fined, 23,000 were expropriated, and 5100 persons were taken to court. While most collective farms met or overfulfilled their quotas, the author finds cases of “petty proprietary tendencies.” These consisted in giving preference to the needs of the farmers over the needs of the state and even in some cases distributing food to collective farmers before all obligations to the state had been met. 8

In 1931 the procurement quota was raised to 510 million poods, but the harvest was only 845.4 million. The party mobilized for the struggle as never before, and within days of the harvest every village and district (raion) had its procurements commission. These were for the most part made up of party and Communist Youth League members, along with komnezam and collective farm activists. Thousands of such brigades were set up and 4500 leading party workers were sent to the villages to help local authorities meet their planned targets. As of January 10, 1932, 14,200 collective farms had overfulfilled, 4,042 had met, and 3,346 failed to fulfill their quota. Some regions and districts were in such dire straits that official protests were made. For example, on August 4, 1931, the secretary of the Teplyts’kyi district party committee wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine protesting the fact that the district’s quota had been raised by 65% over the previous year, while the harvest was substantially lower. The district’s quota amounted to between 70 and 80% of the entire grain crop, with the result that in one village only 136 poods of grain were left for distribution to 1230 collective farmers to serve as their food for an entire year. Cases of collective farms underfulfilling their quotas were widespread even in areas serviced by Machine Tractor Stations, which were usually most effective in making certain that obligations to the state were met. Those farms which fulfilled the quota were given supplementary tasks to make up for those which had failed to do so, and the

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6 I. I.. Slyn’ko, Sotsialistychna perebudova i tekhnichna rekonstruktsiia sil’s’koho hospodarstva Ukrainy (1927-1932 rr.) (The Socialist Transformation and Technical Reconstruction of Ukraine’s Agriculture) (Kiev, Vydavnytstvo AN URSR, 1961), pp. 278-279.

7 Ibid, p. 282.
8 Ibid., pp. 282-284.