Chapter 2

from the harvest had been distributed on only 22.7% of Ukraine’s collective farms (meaning 773% of the collective farms gave the peasants nothing for their labor from harvest time almost up to the Spring sowing, if then). 25

Perhaps the apex of official revelations about the Famine came in 1964 when Pravda published an article co-authored by Roman Terekhov, who had served as Postyshev’s predecessor as Secretary of the Kharkiv Obkom in the early 1930s. Near the end of an otherwise uninspired article commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Xlllth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, Terekhov inserted an extremely revealing episode, ostensibly as an example of the difference between Stalin and Lenin:

Here is only one small episode. When in 1932, in connection with the poor harvest in Kharkiv region, it was necessary to tell Stalin about the grave situation in the villages and ask for bread to be sent to the districts, he listened and then sharply interrupted, “We are told that you, Comrade Terekhov, are a fine orator. It also seems that you’re a fine storyteller. You spin this yarn about famine thinking that you’ll intimidate us, but it won’t work! Maybe it would be better if you stopped being a Secretary of an obkom and of the CPU and went to work in the Writers’ Union where you would write fairy tales for idiots to read…”26

The mid-sixties constituted the high point of Soviet historiography about the Famine, euphemistically called the “difficulties'’ of 1932-33. Even then the majority of Soviet historians took the politically safe route of mentioning “distortions” and “abuses” only in connection with the initial wave of collectivization, which had, after all, been denounced by Stalin himself in his March 10, 1930 “Dizziness from Success” speech. 27 With the fall of Khrushchev, it gradually became less fashionable to write about the “excesses” committed by the man who had led the CPSU for a quarter of a century.

In 1965 S. P. Trapeznikov, the leading officially sanctioned conservative Russian Soviet historian of collectivization, still wrote that “serious errors were permitted” in 1932 in “the dearly erroneous line which was revived in the carrying out of grain procurements.” 28 He went on to give at least a brief mention of the fact that the zeal accompanying the crop seizures in 1932 had created problems:

In many collective farms all the food supplies and even domestic stocks of grain were taken and the distribution of proceeds among the collective farmers was not carried out As a result labor discipline began to decline…29

…………………………………..

25 Ibid, pp. 200-202. Quotation from p. 201.

26 K. Kuznetsov and R. Terekhov, “Vazhnaia vekha v zhizni leninskoi partii: k 40-letiiiu XIII s”ezda
RKP(b)” (An Important Landmark in the life of the Leninist Party: Concerning the 40th Anniversary
of the Xlllth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (bolshevik)), Pravda, May 26,1964, p. 3.

27 L V. Stalin, “Golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov” (Dizziness from Success), Sochineniia (Moscow
Gospolitizdat, 1946-1951), XII, pp. 191-199.

28 S. P. Trapeznikov, Istoricheskii opyt KPSS v osushchestvlenii leninskogo kooperotivmogo plana (The
Historical Experience of the CPSU in the Realization of the Leninist Cooperative Plan) (Moscow
Mys’l, 1965),p.398.

29 Ibid, p. 400.