Executive Summary

8) In the Fall of 1932, Stalin used the resulting “procurements crisis” in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further. 34

Throughout the preceding decade, the Ukrainian SSR had enjoyed greater relative autonomy than any other Soviet republic. Ukrainian communists openly called for Ukraine to further distance itself from Moscow in the realms of politics, culture, and economics. 35 In many ways this was merely a reflection of Ukraine’s size and importance to the Soviet Union. Of 69 million non-Russians in the Soviet Union in 1926, 31 million were Ukrainians, and Ukrainians outnumbered the next largest non-Russian nation by over 6.5 to one. 36

In 1931, the Ukrainian SSR had 31.4 million inhabitants, while all the other non-Russian republics together had only 18.7 million inhabitants. 37 In both industry and agriculture, Ukraine was also the most economically productive part of the Soviet Union. Obviously, keeping such a large and powerful republic in line was no easy task for the Kremlin.

Ukrainian self-assertion was largely a function of Soviet nationality policy. Nationality policy (what to do about the USSR’s non-Russian nations) reflected policy toward the countryside, and the “national question” was seen, as Stalin himself put it, as “essentially a problem of the peasantry. 38 Thus, crushing the Ukrainian peasantry made it possible for Stalin to curtail Ukrainian national self-assertion.

On October 12, 1932, the CP(b)U apparatus was “strengthened” by the transfer of Mendel’ Khataevich from the Middle Volga obkom (regional party committee), where he had won a reputation for his brutality in combatting “kulak sabotage,” to the post of second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. Simultaneously, the first deputy head of the All-Union OGPU, Ivan Akulov, was made head of the Donbas obkom. The Ukrainian Central Committee ordered the immediate mobilization of the aktyv (the “active” element upon which the party relied to carry out its policies) “to liquidate the shameful breakdown in grain procurements,'’ “to defeat utterly right opportunist (that is, pro-peasant) attitudes,” and to fulfill the plan. 39

In two identical speeches of November 2 and 3, Khataevich emphasized the problem, “At the present moment the task that is most important for the Ukrainian Party organization in all its work is the fulfillment of the grain

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34 See chapter three below.
35 James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in
Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, 1983).
36 Kozlov, Natsional’nosti SSSR, p. 285.
37 Robotnicheskaia gazeta (a Soviet newspaper), October 1, 1931, as quoted in a dispatch of
December 1, 1931, from the US Embassy in Warsaw to the Secretary of State, 860C.917/11; Records
of the Department of State; National Archives; Washington, D.C.
38 I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Works) (Moscow, Gosizdat, 1946-52), VII, p. 72. This was true as early
as 1919. See, Frantisek Silnicky, Natsional’naia politika KPSS v period s 1917 po 1922 god (CPSU
Nationality Policy from 1917 through 1922) (Munich, Suchasnist’, 1978), pp. 196-199.
39 Visti VUTsVK, October 15,1932.