Executive Summary
17) The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November 1933, immediately after the Famine.
18) During the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated with the Soviet government to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine.
19) Recently, scholarship in both the West and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union has made substantial progress in dealing with the Famine. Although official Soviet historians and spokesmen have never given a fully accurate or adequate account, significant progress has been made in recent months.

The Commission’s reasoning is as follows:

1) There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
Hundreds of eyewitness accounts were published before the Commission ever came into existence, which were confirmed by both testimony heard at the Commission’s hearings and hundreds of oral histories. They are in complete agreement on the fact that the Famine was caused by the extraction of produce from the farm population by the authorities.4 Dispatches from the Royal Italian Consulate in Kharkiv, then capital of the Ukrainian SSR, provide an exceptionally detailed description of daily life there during the period in question.5 Additional evidence supporting the Famine’s historicity is found in Soviet Ukrainian samvydav (documents published without official sanction, samizdat in Russian) as well as in officially published historical fiction and, more recently, the press.6 On Christmas Day, 1987, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, acknowledged that the “severe food supply difficulties” of 1932-1933 had included “famine in some localities.”7 Yet, although Soviet spokesmen have recently frankly admitted the existence of the Famine, attempts to distort is scope and cause continue.

2) The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.9

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4 These are analyzed in Chapter 8 in this report.
5 See appendix 2 below.
6 See Chapters 3 and 4 below.
7 Pravda Ukrainy (Communist Party of Ukraine daily newspaper), December 26,1987.
8 See chapter two below.
9 Sec chapters one and two below.