Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

Raising the treatment of collectivization to the level of political principle meant that too much attention to what happened to the peasantry could be equated with political disloyalty.
In November 1969 this view was endorsed by Brezhnev himself, when he declared at the Third All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers:

In the process of collective farm construction, we were not free from known errors, but these were the errors of feeling our way, errors caused by lack of experience. The party itself uncovered these errors, spoke openly about them to the people, and corrected them. Unfortunately, to this day one can find those who love to play up the costs of this great revolutionary event. In their view of the collective farm system, the Communist Party and the Soviet people are one. (Applause). The collective farm system is our great historical achievement (Enthusiastic applause). 48

After this, references to the Famine became somewhat scarcer in Soviet works, though it took some time for even Brezhnev’s pronouncement to affect materials already in press. For example, an article by V. P. Danilov, which appeared in 1970 but had been written earlier, made clear the demographic catastrophe of the early 1930s. Danilov pointed out that during the late 1920s and the late 1930s the USSR had a natural rate of population growth over two per cent (virtually no population figures are available even to Soviet scholars for the period 1931-36) and during the 1930s official population projections had been based on the continuation of such a growth rate. But the actual number of people counted in the (suppressed) Soviet census of January 1937 was 15-16 million less than would have been expected by such a rate of annual population growth. 49 This implied that the Soviet Union had a population deficit (i.e., excess deaths and less births than would be expected) of 15-16 million before the Great Purge of the late 1930s claimed most of its victims.

There were also a few Russian writers like Mikhail Alekseev, whose parents died in 1933 in the Volga Basin, who were still able to write about the Famine outside Ukraine in the official Russian nationalist organs like Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary). 50
The third volume of the collection, History of the Collectivization of Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR appeared in 1971 and covered the years 1933 through 1937. This volume contained not a single document reflecting the hardships suffered by the villagers in 1933, only the belated distribution of the small 1932 proceeds and the sending of seed and some food for the 1933 Spring planting. 51

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48 L. I. Brezhnev, Rech’na tret’em vsesoiuznom s”ezde kolkhoznikov: 25 noiabria 1969 (Speech at the Third All -Union Congress of Collective Farmers, November 25,1969) (Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1969), p. 6.

49 V. P. Danilov, “Dinamika naseleniia SSSR za 1917-1929 gg. (Opyt arkheograficheskogo i
istochnikovedcheskogo otbora dannykh dlia rekonstruktsii demograficheskogo protsessa)” (The
USSR’s Population Dynamics in 1917-1929: an Attempt at an Archeographic and Source-Evaluation Survey of Data for Reconstructing the Demographic Process), Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1968 god (Archeographic Yearbook for 1968) (Moscow, Nauka, 1970), pp. 248-249.

50 See chapter four below.

51 Istoriia kolektyvizatsii sil’s’koho hospodarstva Ukrains’koi RSR, vol III, pp. 59-60, 81-82, 93-97,241-243,251-252