Chapter 2
A particularly acute class struggle surrounded the grain procurements. Playing on the petty proprietary vestiges of some backward collective farms, the kulak elements attempted to avoid giving the Soviet state any bread. In order to achieve their ends, the kulaks carried out counterrevolutionary agitation against the grain procurements and in every possible way tried to pilfer bread. In only one 20-day period in December 1932 in Ukraine, for example, about 700,000 poods of bread, which had been hidden by enemies of the Soviet state were uncovered.
Soviet fiction writers are often allowed to go farther than historians. In this connection, the publication of the novel People Are not Angels by Ivan Stadniuk, one of the most orthodox of Soviet writers, first in Russian in the December 1962 issue of the Leningrad literary journal Neva and soon thereafter in Ukrainian and English translations, was a milestone. Stadniuk’s description of the Famine was stark and moving, despite the fact that it was attributed to crop failure, set in one village, and no indication was given of its larger geographical and political context. Nevertheless, few readers could fail to comprehend the meaning of its descriptive passages. Just as the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a signal to Russian historians to go farther in portraying the “excesses” of the Great Purge and the Gulag, Stadniuk’s book indicated that they could be more frank about 1933.
In Kiev, however, also in 1963, there appeared an article by N. I. Tkach on collectivization during the period immediately following the Famine. Of the Famine he wrote:
However, the agriculture of that time was negatively impacted by numerous difficulties of the early stage of collective farm construction. It was difficult to free immediately the former individual farmers from the psychology of private property and attach them to collective effort. This was used by the enemy—the kurkuls and the bourgeois-nationalist elements who, having changed their tactic of struggle, inflamed the collective farmers and individual fanners against collective farm construction, infiltrated the collective farms, and tried to undermine them from within.22
The next noteworthy scholarly work to deal with the topic was published in Moscow in 1963, Outlines of the History of the Collectivization of Agriculture in the Union Republics, edited by V. P. Danilov. The introductory article by Danilov and N. A. Ivnitskii offered a strong condemnation of Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s role in connection with what took place in 1932-1933. For the first time the extent of the mass deportations and blacklisting of Cossack settlements (stanitsas) in the largely Ukrainian Kuban area in the North Caucasus Territory was admitted:
20Ibid, p. 73.
21 Ivan Stadniuk, People Are not Angels (London, Mono Press, 1963). This work will be analyzed
more fully in chapter four.
22 N. I. Tkach, “Borot’ba partiinykh orhanizatsii Ukrainy za pidnesennia kolhospnoho vyrobnytstva v
period mizh XVII i XVIII z”izdamy VKP(b) (1934-1938 rr.)” (The Struggle of Ukraine’s Party
Organizations in Raising Collective Farm Construction in the Period between the XVIIth and XVIlIth
Party Congresses, 1934-1938), Z istorii sotsialistychnoho i komunistychnoho budivnytstva na Ukraini
(1934-1938) (From the History of Socialist and Communist Construction in Ukraine, 1934-1938)
(Kiev, AN URSR, 1963), p. 5