Executive Summary
procurements plan.” 40 Thereafter, the Soviet Ukrainian government increased pressure on the peasantry.
On November 20, the Ukrainian Soviet government ordered the verification of all bread resources on the collective farms and the immediate seizure of “stolen” bread. Collective farm board members were made responsible for the misappropriation of foodstuffs subject to the aforementioned law of August 7, 1932 on the inviolability of socialist property. 41
On December 6, an initial six villages were placed on the “black board” (chorna doshka) 42 and subjected to an economic blockade. 43 On December 13, this measure was extended to 82 districts in the Ukrainian SSR, and the Ukrainian Central Committee ordered the Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regional authorities to expropriate immediately the property of 1500 individual peasants who had not met their quotas. 44
On December 10, the Ukrainian SSR State Secretariat declared that
“The basic reason for the torpid course of the grain procurements lay in the fact that regional, district, and village organs of power have not mobilized social organizations, not organized Soviet society, and thus not assured that a decisive blow be struck against the sabotage of the grain procurements by the kulaks and their agents, the remnants of the Petliurists and Makhnovists.”
The decree ordered district executive committees and village Soviets:
1) To verify immediately with documentary data every collective farm’s level of fulfillment of the grain procurements plan; to verify the existence of bread resources in collective farms which lag behind in the grain procurements, turning particular attention to the existence of hidden grain, especially in straw, chaff, sediments, and so forth; to organize immediately the return of illegally distributed bread and include it in the grain procurements; to organize the confiscation of bread stolen in the collective farms, above all from idlers and loafers who have bread without working.
2) To force the tight-fisted to surrender immediately their granaries of bread and apply them to their quotas; to demand from individual peasants the closest daily fulfillment of the grain procurements plan; to apply immediately and resolutely the measures outlined in the UkSSR decree of November 20,1932, to those individual peasants who maliciously undermine the grain procurements.
The decree also called for speeding up the threshing under the strict supervision of the state, purging collective farms and their officials of so-called “kulak
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40 M. Khataievych, “Zavdannia bil’shovykiv Ukrainy v borot’bi za khlib, za orhanizatsiino-
hospodarVke zmitsnennia kolhospiv i za pidnesennia sil s’koho hospodarstva” (The Task of Ukraine’s
Bolsheviks in the Struggle for Bread, for the Organizational and Economic Consolidation of the
Collective Farms, and for Raising Agriculture), Bil’shovyk Ukrainy, 1932, No. 21-22, p. 3.
41 Visti VUTsVK, November 21,1932.
42 The “black board” and “rcd board” were initially placed in factories to list respectively, in public,
the names of shirkers and exemplary workers.
43 Visti VUTsVK, December 8,1932.
44 Slyn’ko, Sotsiaiistychna perebudova i tekrmichna rekonstruktsiia sil’skoho hospodarstva Ukrainy
(1927-1932 rr.) (The Socialist Transformation and Technical Reconstruction of Ukraine’s Agriculture
1927-1932) (Kiev, AN URSR, 1961), p. 298.