Executive Summary

The Commission avoided detailed demographic research because of both the
scantiness of the material revealed in the 1939 Soviet census and the suspicious
circumstances surrounding such data. These two considerations would tend to
preclude the attainment of results likely to go significantly beyond the current level
of knowledge. Through the years various scholars have attempted to provide
mortality figures, but the 1939 Soviet census—the basis for all such calculations—is
untrustworthy. In 1937 the Soviet Union conducted a census which “after
correction” counted just under 164 million people living in the Soviet Union. This
was so far below the number anticipated that it could be explained only by millions
of premature deaths. Consequently, the officials in charge of the census were
arrested—many were shot—and the results of their work were suppressed.
Although some scholars believe that the census conducted at the beginning of 1939
was unaffected by political concerns, this particular conclusion is highly
problematic, for if the top Soviet census officials were shot for not finding enough
people in 1937, it is sensible to assume that their successors, who were not shot, did
find enough people. Given the Stalinist propensity for inflating statistics in other
realms, it is reasonable to assume that the officials in charge of the 1939 census
followed suit

Moreover, the natural rate of population growth in the Ukrainian SSR declined
from 2.25% in 1927 to 1.45% in 1931 (the last year for which figures are available),
the 1939 Soviet census showed 3.1 million (9.9%) fewer Ukrainian inhabitants of
the Soviet Union than did the previous census of 1926. 11 This leaves little doubt
that millions perished. Various scholars have given estimates ranging from three
million to over 8,000,000 Ukrainians who perished in the Famine.

3) Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage,” upon which all “difficulties” were
blamed during the Famine, are false. 12

If the term “kulak” is understood in its official Soviet meaning of a rural social
stratum recognizably better off than other villagers, no kulaks existed by 1933.
Wave after wave of the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” each one reaching
poorer and poorer peasants, had destroyed any identifiable upper socio-economic
stratum in the village. The state implicitly recognized as much by virtually halting
dekulakization by 1932. 13 The official proclamation that the kulaks had been
defeated but not yet eliminated thus can only be interpreted as an act of political
…………………………………….
10 See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 299-300. The issue was also recently discussed in the
Soviet press by Mark Tol’ts, “Sfcol’ko zhe nas togda bylo?” (How Many of Us Were There?), Ogonek
(a leading Soviet weekly), 1987, No. 51 (December 19-26), pp. 10-11

11 V. I. Naulko, Etnichnyi sklad naselennia Ukrains’koi RSR: stutysiyko-kartohrafichne doslidzkennia
(Ethnic Composition of the Ukrainian SSR: a Statistical -Cartographic Inquiry) (Kiev, Naukova
dumka, 1965), p. 84. V, L Kozlov, Natsionai’nosti SSSR: etnodemograficheskii obzor (Nationalities of
the USSR: an Ethno-Demographic Survey) (Moscow, Finansy i Statistika, 1982), p. 285.

12 See chapters two and three below.

13 N. A. Ivnitskii, Klassovaia bor’ba v derevne i likvidatsiia kulachestva kak klassa (1929-1932 gg)
(Class Struggle in the Countryside and the Liquidation of the Kulaks as a Class, 1929-1933) (Moscow,
Nauka, 1972), p. 297. N. I. Nemakov, Kommunishkheskaia partiia—organizator massovogo
kolkhoznogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party, Organizer of the Mass Collective Farm Movement)
(Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1966), pp. 239-241,