Chapter 2

the collective farm). It also forbade the distribution of any food to the peasants before complete plan fulfillment The “extreme struggle” with which the procurement campaign was carried out “further intensified” in December. The Ukrainian Central Committee ordered the establishment of special committees in every region (oblast’) to examine the reasons for the procurements collapse and authorized further legal repressions against “saboteurs,” simultaneously warning against errors and the wanton dismissal of kolhosp administrators, since in some regions as many as 15-20% of all collective farm administrators had been repressed. On December 13 a complete economic blockade, the chorna doshka, (blacklist) was imposed on 82 districts. Party organizations in several districts underwent extensive purges to strengthen procurements there. The Central Committee ordered the Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv obkoms (regional party committees) to expropriate 1500 private formers who had not fulfilled their quotas. Their property was sold, their land and buildings seized. The Central Committee sent special letters to the obkoms ordering the complete fulfillment of the procurements goal by January 1. Soon thereafter another 112 responsible workers were dismissed from the regional party and state organs. Slyn’ko then halted his narrative, stating only that the party continued to “strengthen the struggle for bread significantly,” with the result that some areas actually did fulfill their quotas. 16

One does not have to be a master of AEsopian language to learn a great deal from Slyn’ko’s work. Outwardly he focused on the great difficulties the state faced in extracting produce from the villagers and only occasionally mentioned “negative phenomena.” But his description left little to the imagination when he cited the example of a village which in early August 1931 had been left with less than four pounds of grain to support each person for an entire year, that collective farmers were often left with nothing for their labors until the state once again needed them to plant the next crop, the economic blacklisting of one sixth of all districts in Ukraine in December 1932, the wholesale arrests of collective farm officials—15-20% in some areas. He thus told us much about what led to the catastrophe of 1933, even if he had to stop short of describing the catastrophe itself.

Slyn’ko’s Ukrainian language work becomes all the more remarkable if we contrast it with works in the Russian language being published in Moscow at the same time. For example, V. M. Selunskaia, in her lecture course on The Struggle of the CPSU for the Socialist Transformation of Agriculture (October 1917-1934), stated that

The main question in the history of collective farm construction in 1932-1934 was the most acute question of the class struggle. In these years the remnants of the defeated but not yet eliminated kulak class concentrated their counterrevolutionary activities upon creating and supporting anti-state activities in the collective farms. This was concretely manifested in their attempts to spread lies among the collective farmers about the firmness of the law on firm grain obligations, confident that, the more the grain the collective farmers kept back the higher the state quotas would be…

She added that the class enemies also agitated against the Machine Tractor Stations and against the way in which advances were made to collective farmers, but did not

……………………..

16 Ibid, pp. 297-299.