Executive Summary

The final showdown between Postyshev and Skrypnyk came at the June plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee. Postyshev accused Skrypnyk of being responsible for national deviations which had contributed to the procurements breakdown, thereby identifying every manifestation of Ukrainian national cultural self-assertion as one of the “machinations” of the class enemy. 70

Skrypnyk’s erstwhile comrades then competed in compiling vicious denunciations of every manifestation of Ukrainian national distinctiveness permitted during Skrypnyk’s tenure at the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education. Even Skrypnyk’s suicide in July failed to terminate the contest. 71

Postyshev blamed “class enemies,” especially those within the Party, for the “difficulties.” He followed Stalin’s example in ignoring the human suffering and massive loss of life caused by the Famine. He blamed the failure of the CP(b)U to seize enough agricultural produce on an impermissible lack of vigilance for the maneuvers of the so-called class enemies, and linked Skrypnyk’s “national deviation” to the machinations of these class enemies. The supplanting of the hitherto dominant Skrypnyk wing by a new leadership sent directly from Moscow further underscores that the crucial policy initiatives came from Moscow and were imposed on Ukrainian authorities.

14) While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin’s interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are paralleled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus. 72

In the Norm Caucasus the 1932 grain procurements campaign fell below target just as it did in Ukraine. Yet, top party officials in these areas seem to have been more willing to go along with Moscow’s policies than those in Ukraine. At least, the North Caucasus authorities seem not to have resisted the quotas as actively as did their counterparts in Ukraine in mid-1932. And, since the territorial authorities were more directly answerable to Moscow than their counterparts in the Ukrainian SSR, some repressions started even earlier. Entire districts were blacklisted as early as October, two months before such steps were taken in Ukraine. 73

Central authorities intervened in the Kuban shortly after their October 1932 intervention in Ukraine. A top level commission from Moscow, consisting of Kaganovich, Supply Commissar Mikoian, Deputy Defense Commissar and the Red Army’s Chief Politruk Gamarnik, Procurements Committee Vice-Chairman Chernov, Sovkhoz Commissar Iurkin, OGPU Vice-Chairman Iagoda, Shkiriatov of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, and Communist Youth League head Kosarev, arrived in the North Caucasus on November 2 specifically to deal with the procurements “breakdown” in the Kuban. Meeting with the North Caucasus Territorial Committee, they immediately decided to reduce the quotas,

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70 Visti VUTsVK June 22,1933.
71 See James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National
Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (Harvard, Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 296-300.
72 See chapter five below.
73 Nobuo Shimotomai, “A Note on the Kuban Affair: the Crisis of Kolkhoz Agriculture in the North
Caucasus,” Acta Slavic a Iaponica, I (1983), p. 44.