Executive Summary

Stalin’s January 1933 intervention in Ukraine was also paralleled in the North Caucasus, As a result of the various repressive measures taken in late 1932, the revised procurements quota for the North Caucasus was actually fulfilled, albeit at tremendous human cost. 88

On January 23, 1933, the day before Stalin appointed Postyshev to take the reins in the Ukrainian capital of Kharkiv, a special Committee on the Conduct of the Sowing in the North Caucasus was appointed, and territorial party secretary Sheboldaev was named chairman. This special committee was given absolute power over all extant territorial authorities and represented a complete takeover of power by a body whose decisions were to be obeyed without question or appeal to higher authorities. It was responsible only to Moscow. 89

The consequences of the policies carried out by Stalin’s immediate subordinates in the Kuban stanitsas in 1933 were identical to those pursued in Ukraine as were eyewitness accounts, with two exceptions: The exile of entire Kuban stanitsas and the closing down there of all Ukrainian schools and institutions. The latter policy was enunciated in a December 15, 1932 circular telegram from the All-Union Central Committee, which decreed the immediate Russification of all Ukrainian institutions in the USSR outside the Ukrainian SSR. 91

Although starvation was also reported in the Don Cossack regions and the Crimea, the most direct interventions, of which the Commission is aware, occurred in ethnically Ukrainian areas. That the intervention of November 1932 specifically cited only the largely Ukrainian Kuban and not the Don, indicates a consciously anti-Ukrainian aspect of Stalin’s policies during the famine.

15) Attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available. 92

The starving were left to their fate, and all traffic between Ukraine and areas immediately to the North was closely controlled. Famine victims were not allowed to travel to Russia where food was available, though some managed to do so by stealth. Legally purchased food was confiscated at the Russo-Ukrainian border. 93

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88 Ibid,p.49.
89 Pravda, January 24, 1933.
90 Black Deeds, vol II, pp, 545,554.; M. Verbyts’kyi (pseudonym), ed., Naibil’shyi zlochyn Kremlia:
svidchennia pro stvorenyi soviets’koiu Moskvoiu shtuchnyi holod v Ukraini 1932-33 r. (The Kremlin’s
Greatest Crime: Testimonies on the Man-Made Famine Created by Soviet Moscow in Ukraine in
1932-33) (London, DOBRUS, 1951), p. 78.
91 Semen Pidhainy, Ukrais’ka inteligentsiia na Solovkakh (The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the
Solovky) (n.p., Prometei, 1947), p. 22.
92 See chapter one below.

93 The British Embassy in Moscow heard of this policy, which is confirmed by a number of
eyewitness accounts. See, for example, Marco Carynnyk, “The Dogs that Did not Bark,” The Idler
January 1985, p. 15; Leonid Plyushch, History’s Carnival: a Dissident’s Autobiography (New York and
London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 41; I. M(ajstren)ko, “Do 25-richchia holodu 1933 »
(On the 25th Anniversary of the Famine of 1933), Vpered: ukrains’kyi robitnychyi chasopys
(Munich-based monthly of the left wing of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Partv) 1958
no. 7, pp. 1-2 (the author had been the editor of the Odessa state newspaper and during the famine
was a Soviet Ukrainian professor of journalism); M. Verbyts’kyi, ed, Naibil’shyi zlochyn Kremlia
pp. 89-90.