Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

Pidhainy’s most interesting contribution to our story, however, is his recollection of meeting Ivan Kozlov, a prisoner in the Solovky who had actually led a peasant revolt during the Famine. Pidhainy describes him as a village scribe who

“for long years lived with illusions about the revolution until he saw the famine of 1932-1933. Then he decided to settle accounts with the Bolsheviks. Active, vigorous, and rather literate, he quickly created around himself a large underground peasant organization, which embraced several districts of Poltava and Sumy oblasts, and started an uprising on their own. The rebels seized wheat and distributed it to the starving. Kozlov was chieftain in those districts for two weeks, blocking any action by the Soviet authorities.
Of course, GPU troops put down the uprising, shot the participants, and burnt down the villages, but they caught Kozlov only a year later. Consequently, he excused himself with the lesson of Karl Marx, who taught that “it is better to die by the sword than from starvation,” and therefore he had fought for himself and his peasants, because it was all the same: This or that, but you had to die. So, better to die in battle than as a starving slave.
Perhaps the GPU liked this argument, for he was not executed but instead was given ten years and sent to Solovky.” 32

While there is much information about resistance to forced collectivization during the years immediately preceding the Famine, there is very little information about resistance in the Ukrainian SSR during the Famine. Kozlov’s revolt is the largest of which we have knowledge.
Naum Jasny’s classic 1949 study of Soviet agriculture also mentioned the Famine of 1933, which it treated strictly as a symptom of the general breakdown of Soviet agriculture in consequence of collectivization. Jasny also estimated that at least five and a half million had perished. 33

The few Western scholars who specialized in Ukraine were sometimes not much better informed than those who knew virtually nothing about the second largest Slavic nation. Writing in 1951, for example, Clarence Manning gave short shrift to the Famine, placed it a year early in 1931-32, and thought William Henry Chamberlin to be almost the only man to have reported it to the West. 34 Two years later, he belatedly got the date right and gave the Famine a bit more consideration but only in a more popular book, written without foot¬notes and obviously intended for the Ukrainian-American community. 35 Therefore, his assertion that “the famine of 1932-3 represented the use of new methods of terror as an instrument of national policy” 36 remained unsubstantiated.

Ukrainians, writing in their own language, were more serious scholars. In 1953 Dmytro Solovey, who had fled the Soviets during the War, published in Ukrainian Golgotha of Ukraine, only brief fragments of which were ever translated into English. Solovey was an indefatigable researcher, especially by the Sovietologies standards of those days. He was shocked that even after the Second World War
……………………………..

32 Ibid., pp. 41-42.
33 Naum Jasny, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1949),
p. 553.
34 Clarence Manning, Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York, Bookman Associates, 1951), pp. 92-93.
35 Idem., Ukraine under the Soviets, pp. 103-107.
36 Ibid, p. 107.