Executive Summary

Terekhov’s co-authored account was couched in all the officially required euphemisms such as “harvest failure” and “grave situation.” Had Stalin in fact disbelieved Terekhov, he certainly had ample means of independent verification at his disposal, such as the secret police. Thus, Stalin’s professed disbelief of what Terekhov told him rings hollow. Stalin’s failure to listen to Terekhov’s appeal for relief, made by a man who was personally involved in the fatal procurements policy, indicates the degree to which Stalin was determined not to acknowledge or act to ameliorate what his policies had wrought

12) In January 1933, Stalin used the “laxity” of the Ukrainian authorities in Sevang grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life. 51

At the beginning of 1933, Ukraine had fulfilled only 74.5% of its grain quota. None of Ukraine’s regions had met their grain procurements quotas. 52 The Central Committee in Moscow censured the Communist Party of Ukraine for its failure to meet the targets set for state grain procurements and “strengthened” the Ukrainian apparatus by appointing Pavel Postyshev its Second Secretary and de facto ruler. Several other top officials were simultaneously replaced, and Stalin gained virtually direct control through his hand-picked representatives. A special Central Committee “instruction” of January 24,1933, gave Stalin control of two of the three CP(b)U Central Committee secretaries and four of Ukraine’s seven obkoms. 53

Postyshev practically remolded the Ukrainian party and state apparatuses in his image. By October 15, 1933, in those regions where the ongoing 1933 purge had been completed, 27,500 of the CP(b)U’s 120,000 members and candidates so far “verified” had been purged as “hostile class, vacillating, dissolute elements.” At the same time, 237 district (raion) Party committee secretaries, 249 district executive committee chairmen, and 158 district control commission chairmen were replaced. In addition 3,000 “leading workers” had been sent to man the new Political Sections of Ukraine’s Machine Tractor Stations, and 10,000 people had been sent to the collective farms, 3,000 of them for permanent work as farm chairmen or heads of primary party organizations. 54 This meant that nearly half of Ukraine’s district Party secretaries, over half its district government heads, and a third of district control commission heads were replaced. About six political section workers were sent to each district Another 10,000 “experienced Bolsheviks’* were sent to the collective farms. Hryhory Kostiuk rightly described the total picture as “a wholesale occupation of key posts in the country by the staff of Stalin’s satrap.” 55

Postyshev ruled out the possibility of seed grain being sent and ordered the immediate seizure of grain remaining in the countryside.

See chapter three below.
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52 Visti VUTsVK, January4, 1933.
53″Postanova TsK VKP(b) z 24 sichnia 1933 r. ta zavdannia biPshovykiv Ukrainy” (The January 24, 1933 Decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Task of Ukraine’s Bolsheviks), Bil’shovyk Ukrainy, 1933, No. 3, p. 3.
54 Pravda, November 24,1933.
55 Hryhory Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: a Study in the Decade of Mass Terror (1929-1939)
(London, Atlantic Books, 1960), p. 28.