Chapter 2

In reactionary historiography no little effort is made in giving battle to Soviet scholarship on the results of collectivization. Foreign “spetsy” (specialists) do not take the trouble to analyze statistical and factual data on the Ukrainian village objectively, but take as their main subjects the difficulties and errors which arose during the practical carrying out of collectivization. A significant place here is held by speculations, in particular, about the food supply difficulties which arose in a number of districts of Ukraine in 1932-1933. The real causes—lack of experience in organizing production in most of the collective farms, undermining activities of remnants of the kulaks, drought in some districts—are all dropped from their calculations. From time to time individual factors which hindered the successful construction of the collective farm system are mentioned. Thus, R. Sullivant’s monograph mentions the influence of unfavorable climatic conditions on the level of the harvest and also the undermining activities of bourgeois-nationalists on the collective farms.
However, bourgeois “Ukrainianists” do not eschew their main tendency—to allege a “man-made” character of the food supply difficulties, created by some sort of “center.” Contrary to the facts, D. Dalrymple, G. Hudson, and others state that the peasants were left without any help whatsoever. 58

Varvartsev saw the February 25, 1933 seed and fodder loan to Ukraine and the North Caucasus, some of which was belatedly used for food, as evidence that help was extended to the starving. He also claimed that remnants of the kulak class sabotaged the procurements and took over collective farms where they allegedly destroyed food:

If one talks about premeditated actions intended to leave the toilers without food supplies, then such things really happened. Those who organized and made use of these activities were the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes, primarily former kulaks, who resorted to using new methods of struggle against the socialist order by worming their way into the collective farms and in some cases even occupying key positions in them… Taking advantage of the lack of experience in supervising large scale agriculture, they resorted to provocations in questions of supply deliveries and undermined enterprises connected with supplying the rural population with produce. 59

Varvartsev also claimed that these difficulties had not encompassed the entire Ukrainian SSR, but he neglected to tell the reader which areas were unaffected.

One of Varvartsev’s main theses—one common to the genre—is the notion that Soviet studies were developed in the West after World War II as a weapon of psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. This notion was also used by B. Babii, Director of the Institute of Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. His article, The Anatomy of Anticommunism: against the Norms of International Law,” was published in the daily newspaper Radians’ka Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine) on August 11,1985, and had this to say:

The policy of American imperialism in the eighties is characterized by new attempts to distort vulgarly the values of real socialism. Representatives of the highest echelons of power in the USA actively participate in this.
In their attempts to heap calumny upon the society of real socialism, the ruling circles of the USA and their ideological-propaganda apparat have recently intensified their attacks on the economic development of our country as a whole and of our republic in particular. The

58 N. N. Varvartsev, Natsianalizm v oblich’e sovetologii (Kritika sovremennoi burzhuaznoi istoriografii Ukrainy) (Nationalism in the Guise of Sovietology: a Critique of Contemporary Bourgeois Historiography of Ukraine) (Kiev, Naukova dumka, 1984), p. 176.

59 Ibid, pp. 176-177.