Executive Summary

while stepping up efforts to meet it The grain procurements quota was re¬duced from 136 million poods, the figure set in May, to 97 million. Simultaneously, prominent officials of the territorial party and government were dispatched to the 31 districts most behind in their quotas to take ensure that grain seizures were intensified. 75

The “concession” of a lower quota was by now clearly bogus. It represented only what party officials thought could be seized with maximum effort As Yurko Stepovy, a former Soviet journalist, wrote:

“before dawn on the day after the arrival of Kaganovich’s mission, the newsboys shouted the horrible headlines: The Petliurist kulak saboteurs of Kuban must be finished off and The Petliurist-Cossack counterrevolutionary work in Kuban must be uprooted’.” 76

On November 4 another decree ordered intensified repression in an effort to meet the quota:

“the especially disgraceful failure of the grain procurements plan and Winter sowings in the Kuban places before the party organizations a fighting task—to smash the sabotage of the grain procurements and sowing which is organized by kulak counterrevolutionary elements; to destroy the opposition of a segment of the village communists who have become de facto leaders of the sabotage; and to liquidate the passivity and complacency toward sabotage that is incompatible with party membership.” 77

Specifically, three large Cossack settlements (stanitsas) were blacklisted, and their inhabitants were warned that “further sabotage” would compel district authorities to “raise before the government the question of their exile … to the northern districts” of the Soviet Union and the resettlement of their homes by colonists from other territories. In 11 districts all delivery of goods to state and cooperative stores was halted; in ten others the goods already in the stores were seized and sent to other districts. Individual farmers who refused to plant were threatened with seizure of all property as well as deportation to the Far North. Immediate arrest was ordered for “criminal underfulfillers” and those failing to obey decrees on proper use of livestock. The decree also called for review of recent cases under the law of August 7 on socialist property and for prosecutions of new cases to be speeded up. Local Communist Party organizations were to be purged of members who had “united with the kulak organizers of the counterrevolutionary sabotage” and become “mouthpieces for the class enemy in the party,” that is, those who had not been energetically enough in seizing food. 78 Simultaneously, Moscow ap¬pointed Shkiriatov to head the commission in charge of carrying out this purge.79

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74 Vazhneishie resheniia po sel’skomu khoziaistvu, p. 534.
75 Slomit’ sabotazh seva i khlebozagotovok, organizovanyi kulachestvom v raionakh Kubani (Smash
the Sabotage of the Grain Procurements Organized by the Kulaks in the Kuban Districts) (Rostov on
the Don, Partizdat, 1932), pp. 16-17.
76 Yurko Stepovyi, The Tragedy of Kuban,” The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: a White Book, ed
S. O. Pidhainy, et al (Toronto-Detroit, DOBRUS, 1953-1955), vol.II, p. 554.
77 Slomit’ sabotazh seva i khlebozagotovok, p. 18.
78Ibid., pp. 18-20.