Chapter 1

papers but in the medical journals, and officially it was reported as ‘Form No. 2′.” 17 After surveying the living conditions of health workers, improved financing for the public health system, scientific progress, and other achievements, Gantt wrote in his conclusion:

“Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 two severe famines and epidemics, taking an enormous toll of lives, have come and gone, the first m 1919-21 (sic., 1921-1923-JM), the second in 1932-3. Though comparable to each other in size and extent, the first was characterized by chaos, the second by order; the first was more prevalent among the intelligentsia and in the cities, the latter among the peasants.. Russia has lived through one of the hardest periods of its whole history.” 18

Gantt also reiterated the same points in his History of Russian Medicine, published the succeeding year. Later, in private correspondence with Dana Dalrymple, Gantt confirmed that he “got the maximal figure of fifteen million” dead in the Famine privately from Soviet officials. 20

Meanwhile, Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union also wrote about the Famine, which at the time it happened had been extensively covered both in the daily press of Polish-ruled Western Ukraine and in emigration. One of the first important attempts to analyze the Famine was Mykola Kovalevsky’s Ukrainian-language survey of Soviet rule in Ukraine, Ukraine under the Red Yoke, published in Warsaw and L’viv in 1936. Kovalevsky noted that in January 1933 Pavel Postyshev had been made Second Secretary and de facto dictator both to pacify Ukrainian national opposition and to requisition more grain, which was done on the pretext of collecting seed grain for the Spring sowing. He also showed that the grain seizures had a clearly political character, evidenced by frequent press denunciations of Communist Party personnel for allegedly harboring “kulak and Petliurist” elements, frequent blacklisting of villages, and various punishments meted out to “saboteurs” of the procurements. 21 Unfortunately, such works in Ukrainian remained virtually unknown to those unacquainted with the language.

Boris Souvarine’s classic biography of Stalin appeared in English in 1939. Souvarine cited several estimates of the numbers of Famine victims which had appeared in press accounts, including those privately passed on from Soviet officials: Five million according to the French Courrier socialiste, 6,000,000 according to the estimate given American Jewish socialist Harry Lang by a high

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17 Ibid.
18
Idem., “A Medical Review of Soviet Russia,” The British Medical Journal, July 18, 1934. pp. 130-131.
19 Idem., Russian Medicine. Clio Medico.’ a Series of Primers on the History of Medicine, vol. XX
(New York, Harper and Brothers, 1937), pp. 149-162.
20 W. Horsley Gantt to Dana Dalrymple, March 6,1964; published as appendix to Jaroslaw Sawka,
“American Psychiatrist: Fifteen Million Died in Thirties’ Famine,” Ukrainian Quarterly, XXXVIILl
Spring 1982, p. 65.
21 Mykola Kovalevs’kyi, Ukraina pid chervonym iarmom: dokumenty ifakty (Ukraine under the Red
Yoke: Documents and Facts) (Warsaw-Uviv, “Skhid,” 1937), pp. 128-131.