Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

the Kuban where, on his orders and with his personal participation, massive repressions were carried out against party, state, and collective farm workers as well as against rank and file collective farmers. Fifteen Kuban stanitsas were put on the “blacklist.” In them the delivery of goods was stopped; collective farm trade was forbidden; credit and tax payments were immediately called due. The entire population of a number of Kuban stanitsas (Poltavskaia, Medvedovskaia, and some others) were exiled to the Northern regions. All Kuban party organizations were purged, resulting in the expulsion of around 45% of the membership. Mass repressions in the Kuban were among Kaganovich’s worst crimes.
Similar methods of work were carried out not only in the Kuban but also in other regions of the country—in Ukraine and the Don Region. Stalin not only knew of this but even approved of these methods and essentially encouraged lawlessness in dealing with the peasants. 23

Those left to deal with the situation in Ukraine were more timid than Danilov or Slyn’ko on some subjects and went farther on others. I. F. Hanzha, Slyn’ko, and P. V. Shostak, contributed “The Ukrainian Village on the Paths to Socialism.” The article noted that there had been “great difficulties” brought about by a number of factors in 1932-1933. Collectivized agriculture was still disorganized. The Leninist principle of the material interest of the collective farmers in socialized production” was often ignored. Experience in large-scale collectivized agriculture was inadequate. The draft animals were in poor shape. The campaigns to bring in the harvest were carried out in a disorganized manner, and there were large declines in the amount of grain actually harvested. The authors also maintained that kulaks had destroyed machinery and livestock, falsified accounts, and sold off collective farm property. Yet, in addition to all this, “great errors and excesses were permitted in the carrying out of a number of politico-economic campaigns and especially that of the grain procurements.” 24

A number of regions and districts, they added, had taken “the route of naked administrative measures and mass repressions.” The description of the July 1932 Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference was more frank than Slyn’ko’s earlier one, and it was now admitted that prominent party leaders had stated that in some districts even the seed had been seized from the collective farms. Also mentioned was the Drabove affair of June 1932, in which a whole district leadership was dismissed and publicly tried for crimes against the local population. The authors stated for the first time that 25-30% of the leading cadre personnel on the district level throughout Ukraine were removed. Again, in line with Khrushchev’s policies in the early 1960s, Stalin, Kaganovich, and Molotov were blamed as the leading culprits, which made a great deal of sense in view of the fact that the latter two did visit Ukraine repeatedly in 1931-33. Molotov in particular had visited the Novomoskovs’kyi and Ielyzavethrad districts in 1932 and dismissed the entire leadership of both. The authors added understatedly, “Extreme difficulties and breakdowns in Ukraine’s agriculture lasted even into the middle of 1933.” Little was left to the imagination when they stated that as of February 1, 1933, proceeds from the harvest had been distributed on only 22.7% of Ukraine’s collective farms

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23 V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, “Leninskii kooperativnyi plan i ego osushchestvlenie v SSSR” (The Leninist Cooperative Plan and Its Realization in the USSR) Ocherki istorii kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva v Soiuznykh respublikakh (Sketches in the History of the Collectivization of Agriculture in the Union Republics), ed. V. P. Danilov (Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1962), pp. 54-55.

24. I.F. Ganzha, I. I. Slyn’ko, P. V. Shostak, “Ukrainskoe selo na puti k sotsializmu” (The Ukrainian Village on the Road to Socialism), Ocherki istorii kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva v Soiuznykh respublikakh, ed. Danilov, p. 199.