Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

in the distribution of natural proceeds (i.e., payment in kind—JM) local party organizations, district collective farm associations, and collective farm boards permitted the grossest violations of the party’s repeated directives. This sharply reduced the natural reserves for distribution to the collective farmers, who were engaged in production, and greatly harmed both the economy as a whole and the material interests of the collective farmer.
The result of the shortcomings and errors permitted during the grain procurements campaign and the ignoring of the principle of the material interests (of the collective farmers—JM) in Ukraine created a serious food supply situation.
All the shortcomings and errors, which took place in the Summer of 1932 in a series of localities caused peasants to leave the collective farms…42

Some hint was even provided of the virtual panic that ensued in the CP(b)U ranks in November and December 1932 as Moscow exerted increasing pressure on Ukraine to collect more grain. The book cited an interesting unpublished decree of November 1932, “On the Mobilization of Communist Workers for the Grain Procurements Campaign,” which called for the mobilization of 600 Communists, experienced in mass party work, from the industrial centers. These consisted largely of leaders of party circles, factory organizations, propagandists, and trade union figures, who were mobilized into three- or four-man brigades. Two to four brigades would then be assigned to districts considered decisive for the procurements campaign and concentrate their efforts “in villages where kulak sabotage had assumed the most acute character and where party organizations had been inadequate in their work.” Simultaneously, the Ukrainian Central Committee ordered that by December 1, 1932, village party organizations organize special brigades, consisting of members of collective farms which had already met their quotas or were close to doing so, to “help” individual fanners meet their quotas. Immediately after the January 1933 Moscow Plenum, the Ukrainian Central Committee mobilized another 1300 Communists to take over more than half of Ukraine’s rural districts. Measures such as these were credited with overcoming the “breakdown” of Ukraine’s agriculture. 43

The simultaneously published two-volume History of the National Economy of the Ukrainian SSR, 1917-1967 was on the whole less informative but did acknowledge, for example, that real wages during the First Five-Year Plan were inadequate to support workers and their families, and that the latter consequently faced “food supply difficulties.” These “difficulties,” however, were blamed on remaining capitalist elements in the countryside and nonfulfillment of pro¬curements quotas. 44 Mention was also made of the 1932 “breakdown” of Ukraine’s agriculture, manifested in the failure to meet the procurements quota, and of the various efforts to liquidate it, but not of any human costs paid in so doing. The passage is a good illustration of what might be called the traditional Soviet view of the period and how this and similarly inconvenient episodes have been handled by more orthodox historians:

The process of the total (sutsil’na) collectivization of agriculture in our country constituted a revolutionary turning point in productive relations in the village. New socialist relations of

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42 Ibid, pp. 460-461.
43 Ibid, pp. 462-463.
44 Rozvytok narodnoho hospodarstva Ukrains’koi RSR, 1917-1967 (Kiev, Naukova dumka, 1967), vol I, p. 361.