Executive Summary

cynicism, designed to justify repression against the peasantry as a whole.14 This is even more evident in Stalin’s infamous thesis of the intensification of the class struggle as the building of socialism progressed.15

Stalin also falsely alleged widespread sabotage of the state’s procurements campaign, i.e., that large amounts of grain were being diverted to private channels or hoarded by peasant speculators. Were grain being diverted to the private market in any substantial quantities, it would have been more readily available for private purchase than in other years. Yet, the reverse was true. Had the peasants hoarded much grain, they would surely have eaten some of it, thereby preventing the mass starvation which, in fact, occurred.

Subsequent Soviet historiography maintains the myth of “peasant sabotage” merely by repeating the charges made at the time in order to justify continued efforts to seize grain. Soviet authorities under Stalin deliberately inflated harvest figures as proof that non-existent grain was being hoarded. They suppressed accurate figures and replaced them with spurious calculations based on the “biological yield,” i.e., replacing the actual amount of a given crop harvested with an arbitrary estimate of what was ostensibly in the field.16

4) The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.17
Shcherbytsky clings to the customary explanation that a drought in 1932 strongly contributed to the Famine, but Soviet historical meteorologists have never found such a drought There were droughts in 1931 and in 1934 but not in 1932. 18 In February 1932 Molotov officially acknowledged that the 1931 drought in the Volga Basin, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan had damaged the grain crop. 19 No such acknowledgement was made in connection with any drought that may have affected Ukraine in 1932. The closest allusion to a drought was Stalin’s statement in January 1933:

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14 The January 1933 Communist Party Joint Plenum and the Soviet government both officially adopted this formulation. I. E. Zelenin, “Kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR v 1931-1932 gg. (k itogam sploshnoi kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva)” (Collective Farm Construction in the USSR in 1931-1932: Concerning the Results of the Crash Collectivization of Agriculture), Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR), 1960, No. 6, p. 32.
15 This latter idea, which became an idee fixe of Stalinism, can be traced back to the initial wave of forced collectivization. See, for example, Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, Norton, 1977), p. 25.
16 In December 1932 the actual measuring grain crops was proscribed, and a special government
commission was set up to determine the “biological yield,” which was the unmeasurable crop standing
in the field. I. E. Zelenin, “Kolkhozy i sel’skoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1933-1935 gg.” (Collective Farms
and Agricultiure in the USSR in 1933-1935), Istoriia SSSR, 1965, No. 5, p. 13. This meant
institutionalizing the systematic overestimating of grain crops and was in 1958 denounced by
Khrushchev as being fundamentally dishonest. Adam Ulam, Stalin: the Man and His Era (New York.
Viking, 1974), p. 356.
17 See chapter three below.
18 A. I. Rudenko, ed., Zasukhi v SSSR’ ikh proiskhozhdenie, povtoriaemost’ i vliianie na urozhai
(Droughts in the USSR: Their Causes, Recurrence, and Influence on the Harvest) (Leningrad.
Gidrometeorologicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1958), p. 168.
19 Pravda (All-Union Communist Party daily newspaper), February 6,1932.