Chapter 2

in Ukrainian by the UkSSR Academy of Sciences in 1960 for a mass audience in an edition of 100,000 copies, made no allusion to the “food supply difficulties.” But five years later, with the release of a Russian “translation,” of which 25,000 copies were published, the following paragraph was added:

The harmful effects of errors, which had been permitted during collective farm construction, manifested themselves particularly acutely in the incorrect way in which the grain procurements were carried out The grain procurements plans were frequently altered such that they were increased. The best collective farms, after fulfilling their assigned grain procurements plan, were given supplementary tasks. The Leninist principle of the collective farmers’ material interest (zainteresovannost’) in the results of his labor was ignored. All this led to the fact that in Ukraine in the Spring of 1933 acute food-supply difficulties arose. 33

Also in 1965 the second volume of the collection of documents, History of the Collectivization of Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR, appeared, covering the period through the end of 1932. Many documents cited by earlier authors were not included, but at least a few documents indicating the difficult situation in, agriculture found their way into the collection. Most notable among them are the early 1931 introduction of the plan na dvir (quotas for individual peasant families), the March 1932 Ukrainian Central Committee resolution on the 1931 grain procurements and the resolution of the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference on Agriculture. One September 1932 report from Ielyzavethrad district is particularly revealing. In this district as of September 15 only 30% of the harvest had been threshed and only 14.4% of the assigned quota had been procured. This was followed by the usual pledges to make good these shortcomings. 34

Another noteworthy piece of information was provided by the ethnodemographer V. I. Naulko, who for the first time since the early 1930s cited annual figures for births, deaths, and the natural rate of population growth in the Ukrainian SSR in 1927-31. Using figures published by the Ukrainian Central Statistical Administration immediately before the Famine, Naulko published the table on the following page.

Throughout the 1960s the issue of whether “abuses” of the peasants had continued after Stalin’s official acknowledgment of them in the Spring of 1930 remained controversial. For example, in 1966 N. I. Nemakov took to task a more conservative historian who maintained that after Stalin denounced the practice of forcing peasants into collective farms in 1930, “the further development of the collective farms movement proceeded on the basis of the Leninist principle of voluntarism” [i. e., that peasants were not forced to join collective farms — JM].35

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33 A. S. Kasimenko, Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR: populiamyi ocherk (History of the Ukrainian SSR:
a Popular Sketch) (Kiev, AN USSR, 1965), p. 331. Compare with O. S. Kasymenko, Istoriia
Ukrains’koi RSR: populiamyi narys (History of the Ukrainian SSR: a Popular Sketch) (Kiev,
AN URSR, 1960), p. 292.

34 Istoriia kolektyvizatsii sil’s s’koho hospodarstva Ukrains’koi RSR, 1917-1937 rr.: zbimyk dokumentiv i
materialiv u tr’okh tomakh (The History of the Collectivization of the Ukrainian SSR’s Agriculture,
1917-1937: a Collection of Documents and Materials in Three Volumes) (Kiev, AN URSR-Naukova
dumka, 1962,1965,1971), vol II, pp. 321-324,595-597,603-616,744-746.

35 A. S. Smirnov, “Kommunisticheskaia partiia v bor’be za osushchestvlenie leninskogo postroeniia v
SSSR (1925-1937)” (The Communist Party in the Struggle for the Realization of the Leninist Plan of
Construction, 1925-1937), Voprosy istorii KPSS (Problems of CPSU History), 1964, No. 6, p. 60.