Chapter 2

Those in the Soviet Union who want to write about the past truthfully have won significant victories, but there have also been setbacks. In his speech of November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev stated that under Stalin “many thousands of people inside and outside the party were subjected to wholesale repressive measures.” 70 Recognizing the victimization of thousands means only the limited recognition of arrests carried out among the elite. It ignores the violence done to society as a whole in events like the Famine of 1932-1933, which claimed the lives of millions.

Yet, Western scholarship has made it increasingly difficult for Soviet spokesmen simply to deny the historicity of the Ukrainian Famine. In December 1987, the weekly Ogonek published an article by Mark Tol’ts on the suppressed Soviet census of 1937, “How Many of Us Were There at That Time?” In it, the Famine was attributed to a “very substantial harvest failure” in the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga, which “was little better … in Ukraine (sic)” causing “sharply lowered” Soviet population growth. He continued:

The famine above all encompassed that part of the population of the country which normally fed it The first victims were children. In the countryside whole families died out. It is commonly known that in order to fulfill the plan in those difficult conditions in many places during the procurement campaign all the grain was taken without exception. This encompassed even that grain which had been earmarked for forage or had been distributed (to the collective farmers—JM) as advances for their labor days. Then measures were adopted to correct these ” excesses,n but they had already succeeded in creating their uncorrectable lesson.
For a long time there was the formula of “difficulties of the period of industrialization and collectivization” as if this were incapable of being deciphered. But now the time has come to say what was hidden. Otherwise the tragic events which preceded the 1937 census will remain undeciphered.
How were conditions of life in those years? They were above all characterized by the strictest norms and limitations on the consumption of necessities. From 1929 bread and sugar rationing became widespread in cities and was also extended to other forms of produce as well as to industrial goods. This of course was connected with the decrease in agricultural production during collectivization. Simultaneously, procurements of agricultural produce increased. This was necessitated not only by the rapid growth of the urban population, but also by the necessity of finding resources for rapid industrialization. And in order to provide the national economy with necessary technology, it was necessary to resort to purchasing from abroad. In 1931 Soviet purchases represented one-third of the entire world’s export of machinery and equipment, and in the following year they constituted approximately half of the world’s exports. But what could we sell in return? Not much except grain. And under these conditions of tremendous tension came the bad harvest of 1932.
The true scale of this disaster has apparently remained unknown to us to the present day. Namely the agricultural statistics “got the reputation” of being obvious falsifications. It is known that the data on grain production in 1933 as a result of methodological manipulations were exaggerated. How much so is evident from the following example. At the XVIIth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, I. V. Stalin reported the 1933 grain production as 89.8 million tons. Now the Committee of Government Statistics sets it at 68.4 million. And for earlier years the figures are even now published as before. And, judging by them, there was no harvest failure throughout the country in 1932 whatsoever. But did the practice of exaggerating statistics just happen overnight? In a recently published jubilee statistical yearbook the old figures appeared once again. For 1932, 69.9 million tons, which is 0.4 million tons more than the harvest of 1931. On the contrary, the Government Statistical Committee gives a 1934 figure 2.3 million tons lower than 1932. But from January 1, 1935, bread rationing was discontinued. It is probably time to solve this riddle.

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70 Washington Post, November 23, 1987, p. A26. Emphasis added.