Executive Summary

poods 63 of grain to Ukraine and another 15,300,000 poods to the North Caucasus Territory, specifically to the Kuban. According to the resolution, the reason for the loan was unfavorable weather, which had led to harvest losses in the steppe regions. Part of
the grain loaned was consumed as food, given out in the fields as an incentive for working on the Spring sowing. 64 It was this loan which made possible any crop at all in 1933.
Yet, the pressure on the countryside was not eased until after the 1933 harvest As late as June 1, the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee announced a reduction of the customary 15% advance distributed to the collective farmers immediately after threshing, to 10%. 65

The Famine ended as a result of the exceptionally good harvest of 1933 and because this time the state allowed the distribution of grain to the collective farmers. An order was given on September 27 to distribute 10-15% of the amount of grain threshed regardless of whether the given collective farm had met its grain deliveries quota. 66

13) Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: To intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR. 67

On December 14, 1932, the All-Union Central Committee and Sovnarkom adopted an unpublished—indeed, never published—decision. Its existence is known only because in his speech before the November 1933 plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Postyshev revealed that this “historic decision” had ordered the Ukrainian Central Committee and Soviet government:

“To turn serious attention to the proper implementation of Ukrainization, to cease carrying it out mechanistically, to disperse Petliurists and other bourgeois nationalist elements from the Party and Soviet organizations, to select painstakingly and educate Ukrainian Bolshevik cadres, and to safeguard the Party’s systematic leadership and control over the way Ukrainization is carried out.” 68

Postyshev’s order was carried out through the elimination of the nationally self-assertive wing of the Communist Party of Ukraine, led by Education Commissar Mykola Skrypnyk, and through the suppression of Ukrainian national self-assertion, labeled “bourgeois-nationalist deviation.” The weeks following Postyshev’s arrival saw an extensive purge of Ukrainian cultural life. 69

…………………

63 1 pood = 36 lbs.
64 Visti VUTsVK February 26,1933.
65 Visti VUTsVK, June 1,1933.
66Istoriia kolektyvizatsii sil’s’koho hospodarstva Ukrains’koi RSR: zbimyk dokumentiv i materially u
tr’okh tomakh (History of the Collectivization of Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR: a Collection of
Documents and Materials in Three Volumes) (Kiev, AN Ukrains’koi RSR, 1961-1972) III ,pp 81-82
93-97.

67 See chapter three below.
68 Pravda, December 6,1933.
69 See Kostiuk, op. cit, pp. 58-59.