Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

NATURAL RATE OF POPULATION GROWTH IN THE UKRAINIAN SSR
19274931
(per 1000)

Year 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931

Birth Rate 40.3 38.0 35.3 32.9 30.5
Mortality Rate 17.8 16.5 17.6 17.3 16.0
Natural Growth 22.5 21.5 17.7 15.6 14.5 (36)

Nemakov replied, “In fact, the use of administrative measures (administrirovanie),
violation of the Leninist principle of voluntarism, and a system of punishments and
repressions against collective farmers continued both in 1932 and 1933. A clear
case of this is the forced socialization of cattle in the collective farms, which was widely practiced in 1932.” 37 Such open polemics on issues of collectivization,
however, would become less frequent in the next few years.

In 1967, The History of the Peasantry of the Ukrainian SSR also referred to the
difficulties of 1932-33. It cited three reasons why the rural population declined in
the 1930s: Migration from the Ukrainian countryside to the cities and to the Urals,
the exile of 60,000 kulak families outside the UkSSR and:

Finally, the lower number of the rural population is connected with the severe shortfall of edible produce in 1931, 1932, and the first half of 1933, which was caused by a poor harvest and the incorrect planning of the grain procurements campaign. 38

A couple of pages later, it added:

Therefore, in the Winter and particularly the Spring of 1933, conditions in the village were difficult, due to a number of objective and subjective causes.
On the one hand, there were the still inadequate material-technical basis of agriculture, the inhospitable climatic conditions of 1931-32, the shortage of collective farm leadership cadres which had to be prepared hastily, and obstacles created by the kulaks who were slated for extinction. On the other hand, there were also excesses in carrying out collectivization and the grain procurements, the political-education work by the party and Communist Youth League organizations was not always on an adequate level, there were defects in the organization of labor, and labor discipline in the collective farms was still weak.
For all these reasons, there was a shortfall in many parts of Ukraine, the sowing had been inadequate, and many collective farms received little bread for their labor days. Here and there, kaluk-Petliurist elements slipped into the collective farm leadership and damaged

…………………………………….

36 V. I. Naulko, Etnichnyi sklad naselennia Ukrains’koi RSR: statystyko-kartohrafichne doslidzhennia
(Ethnic Composition of the Ukrainian SSR: a Statistical-Cartographic Inquiry) (Kiev, Naukova
dumka, 1965), p. 84.

37 N. I. Nemakov, Kommunisticheskaia partiia—organizator massovogo kolkhoznogo dvizheniia
(1929-1932 gg.) (The Communist Party, the Organizer of the Mass Collective Farm Movement,
1929-1932) (Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1966), p. 20.

38 Istoriia selianstva Ukrainskoi RSR (History of the Peasantry of the Ukrainian SSR) (Kiev,
Naukova dumka, 1967), vol. II, p. 175.