Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

Not exactly a ringing condemnation of abuses or their results. Nor did he provide as many details on these errors as his Ukrainian predecessors had done.

A 1965 Russian-language article by I. E. Zelenin revealed a significant detail-how those who had already fulfilled the quota had to make up for those who had not:

The dimension of the grain deliveries in 1931-1932 was no longer set by contract, but by state plans, which were determined by sown area and the harvest’s prospects and which were often altered during the procurements campaign. In hopes of fulfilling the procurements plan the procurement organs reassigned to collective farms part of the quota for individual farms and used the so-called supplemental plans to force the farmers to give up all their surplus grain. 30

In Ukraine M. T. Kuts published a monograph on collectivization, in which he dealt with the Famine as follows:

In Ukraine in 1930 close to 34% of the total harvest was delivered (to the state), but in 1931, because of unfavorable meteorological conditions, the harvest fell substantially below the 1930 level, and, in keeping with enunciated principles, it was impossible to fulfill the grain procurements plan. At the beginning of 1932 and in the Spring, grain procurements difficulties in Ukraine attained particular acuteness, many of the republic’s collective farms did not pay the collective farmers for their labor, and sufficient food-supply, forage, contingency, and seed reserves were not created. 31

Kuts also pointed out that in 1932 the total grain harvest in the USSR was substantially below that of 1930, and the “food-supply difficulties” were aggravated by several factors. Explanatory work among the peasants was inadequate. Administrative measures (i.e., unbridled force) was overused. Quotas were assigned to districts and collective farms without regard for their capacity to meet them. Frequently altered quotas sowed disorganization and confusion. According to Kuts, the CP(b)U “did much” to overcome these problems and was helped by the loan from Moscow of seed, livestock and machinery, which helped it get through until the 1933 harvest of almost 1.2 billion poods of grain. 32

Kuts did not, of course, give the full story. Not only did the collective farmers receive no payment for their labor; what they and what farmers outside the collective farm possessed was seized. The problem was less in the failure to create reserves than in the seizure of existing reserves. Kuts also skirted the facts that the greatest hardship was in the Spring of 1933, that the CP(b)U under direct supervision in Moscow intensified the bread seizures in early 1933, and that the February 1933 loan was granted only after it became apparent that without it no crop was possible.

Nevertheless, in the 1960s there were signs of movement in treating the Famine. Even standard survey histories of Ukraine began to insert passages to cover this previously unmentionable issue. For example, the first edition of Oleksander Kasymenko’s History of the Ukrainian SSR: a Popular Outline, published

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30 I. E. Zelenin, “Kolkhozy i sel’skie khoziaistva SSSR v 1933-1935 gg.” (The USSR’s Collective Farms and Agriculture in 1933-1935), Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR), 1965, No. 5, p. 18n.

31 M. T. Kuts, Pytannia kolhospnoho budivnytstva na Ukraini, 1929-1941 rr. (Questions of Collective Farm Construction in Ukraine, 1929-1941) (L’viv, Vydavnytstvo L’vivs’koho universytetu, 1965), p. 72.

32 Ibid, pp. 73-74.