Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
say one word about the hardships actually suffered by the agricultural population or about the official measures contributing to them. 17
Iu. A. Moshkov, whose work on the “grain problem” in the early years of collectivization has been extensively used by such Western scholars as R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, was also not very forthcoming on this issue. While Moshkov’s monograph of the grain problem does not encompass the Famine, a paper delivered in 1961 and published in 1963 does. His view on 1932-1933 is that, while the preceding year’s drought related difficulties had been overcome in most parts of the Soviet Union:
in a number of places matters did not go so well The legalization of collective farm trade and the existence alongside the fixed state prices of substantially higher free market prices reinforced the determination of a certain part of the collective fanners and individual farmers to avoid delivering grain to the state. Particularly serious was the situation in the country’s southern grain regions (the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Lower Volga), where party organizations were weak in supervising the collective farms and grain procurements. …here there were among the collective farm members not a few former kulaks and their relations, former White Guards, who sometimes wormed their way into leadership positions and organized sabotage of the grain procurements.
In January 1933 the Joint Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee and Central Control Commission, exposed the shortcomings of work in the countryside and worked out a series of measures for politically and organizationally-economically strengthening them. 18
Clearly, the only “grain problem” of interest to Moshkov was the state’s not the peasants’.
Contrary to what one might expect, S. A. Iudachev’s 1962 monograph, The Struggle of the CPSU for the Organizational-Economic Strengthening of the Collective Farms (1933-1934), mentions less about the situation than Slyn’ko’s work. Rather, Iudachev adopted wholly the explanation of events given in the official public statements of the period. He accepted without comment the Central Committee’s criticisms of the Ukrainian, Volga Basin, and North Caucasus authorities in January 1933 for their laxity in carrying out the grain procurements. He practically quoted Stalin’s plenum speech verbatim, and credited the measures taken by the party immediately thereafter as being responsible for overcoming the shortcomings and errors exposed at that plenum. 19 The only culprits were the class enemies. According to Iudachev,
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17 V. M. Selunskaia, Bor’ba Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza za sotsialstieheskoe pereobrazovanie sel’skogo khoziaistva (okdabr’ 1917-1934 gg.): kurs lektsii, prochitannykh na istoricheskom fakul’tete MGU (The Struggle of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the Socialist Transformation of Agriculture, October 1917-1934: a Course of Lectures Delivered in the History Department of Moscow State University) (Moscow, Vyshaia shkola, 1961), p. 182.
18 Iu. A. Moshkov, “Zernovaia problema v gody kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva’* (The Grain Problem during the Collectivization of Agriculture), Istoriia Sovetskogo krestlanstva i kolkhoznogo stroitel’stvo v SSSR: materiafy nauchnoi sessii, sostoiavshcheisia 18-21 aprelia 1961 g. v Moskve (History of the Soviet Peasantry and Collective Farm Construction in the USSR, Materials of a Scholarly Session, Taking Place on April 18-21,1961 in Moscow) (Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1963), p. 269.
19 S. A. Iudachev, Bor’ba KPSS za organizatsionno-khoziaistvennoe ukreplenie kolkhozov (1933-1934 gg.) (Struggle of the CPSU for the Organizational-Economic Strengthening of the Collective Farms, 1933-1934) (Moscow, Vyshaia shkola, 1962), pp. 19-29 et passim.