Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

was low. Collective farm administrations arbitrarily disposed of resources needed to pay the collective fanners for their labor days. 12 District organs, Machine Tractor Stations, and banks often illegally disposed of collective farm monies and other resources, spending them without the knowledge or consent of the members. Lower compensation caused much resentment among collective farmers. The Central Committee recommended only that “backward” collective farms take “outstanding” ones as their models. Another decree ordered local party and state organs to respect the principle of safeguarding the material interests of the peasantry, to complete the distribution of harvest proceeds to the collective fanners even before the end of the Spring sowing campaign. The decree forbade arbitrary disposal of collective farm resources from above and the dissolution of collective farm boards by administrative flat. 13

Slyn’ko described substantial aid sent to the Ukrainian countryside during the 1932 Spring sowing campaign. Sixty thousand tons of corn were sent to the Moldavian ASSR (then part of the UkSSR), 60,000 tons to the Dnipropetrovsk region, 150,000 to Odessa, 120,000 to Kharkiv, and 210,000 tons to Kiev region. In May the sugar beet producing region received 800,000 poods of corn and millet, 75 boxcars of fish, and 36,000 poods of baked bread. According to a May 14 letter of the Central Committee to all district committees, 8.5 million poods had been distributed to the population for consumption and sowing. Thanks to this aid, the Spring sowing campaign came close to meeting its goal. “Great difficulties,” he wrote, were “overcome.” 14

Slyn’ko was not completely forthcoming in detailing what took place at the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference in July 1932. He quoted Kossior on how past difficulties had been overcome, how the 1932 quota of 356 million poods of grain was 18.1% lower than the previous year, and the then obligatory denunciations of “distortions.” In terms of the human suffering that accompanied the harvest and its aftermath, Slyn’ko wrote only that “in 1932 a situation arose such that the grain procurements were carried out with greater difficulties than in any preceding year.” Because of poor labor organization, “the principle of the material interests of the peasants was violated.” Pilfering was widespread, leading to the promulgation of the August 7,1932 law on safeguarding socialist property.

The plan was not met As of October 5, only 1,403 of Ukraine’s 23,270 collective farms had met their annual quota. By November 7, the plan was only 55% fulfilled. The “most decisive measures” were adopted. The party mobilized all its resources to help carry out the procurements and combat “sabotage.” 15

On November 1 the Soviet Ukrainian authorities ordered that those who “sabotage” the procurements be handed over to the courts. A November 20 decree banned bread sale in collectives which had not fulfilled the plan and forbade the establishment of any natural reserves (i.e., the retention of a portion of the crop by

……………………….

12 Trudodni, abstract units of account based on the notion that more complex tasks were convertible to “simple labor time,” such that a day’s unskilled labor on the collective farm might be worth 1/2 a labor day, while a day worked by a tractor driver might earn him two labor days.

13 Ibid., pp. 291-292.
14 Ibid, p. 293.
15 Ibid, pp. 294-297.