Executive Summary

On November 12, territorial party chief Boris Sheboldaev gave an extremely tough speech, in which he again raised the issue of exiling whole stanitsas from the Kuban. 80 The entire population of the Kuban stanitsas of Poltavs’ka, Medvidivs’ka, and others were exiled to the North. 81 From a Western account we learn that a total of 13 stanitsas were exiled. 82 This was clearly a major operation; Poltavs’ka, which was ordered exiled on December 17, had a population of 27,000 and a Ukrainian pedagogical institute, while Umans’ka had 30,000 inhabitants. 83 An eyewitness recalled, “Farm implements and personal belongings which people had prepared to take along with them were taken away when they were loaded into trains. Departures were usually conducted with public shootings and bloodshed.” 84

Meanwhile, “massive repressions were carried out against Party, soviet, and collective farm officials, as well as against rank and file collective farmers” in the Kuban. Fifteen additional stanitsas were put on the “blacklist.” In them the delivery of goods was stopped; collective farm trade was forbidden; credit and tax payments were immediately called due. About 45% of all party members were purged. 85 Three hundred and fifty-eight of the area’s 716 party secretaries on collective farms and stanitsas—a majority—were purged, and a number of these organizations was disbanded. 86

As in Ukraine, higher authorities threatened subordinates with severe punishment. In order to make their point, territorial authorities reopened the Kotov affair under the November 4 decree. Kotov, who had headed a stanitsa party committee in the Kuban and had secretly advanced the local Cossack farmers more food than the amount prescribed by law, was expelled from the party and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in October 1932. When the case was reopened, however, 15 additional members of the party committee were purged, while Kotov was executed as a counterrevolutionary. Nobuo Shimotomai noted, “Such behavior on the part of local officials was so popular and prevalent that only such harsh measures (as executing local officials) could prevent them.” 87 Kotov became a symbol of the “enemy with a party card in his pocket,” the main target of the 1933 All-Union purge.

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79Ibid., p.21 80 Ibid, pp. 8-9.
81 V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, “Leninskii kooperativnyi plan i ego osushchestvlenie v SSSR”
(The Leninist Cooperative Plan and Its Realization in the USSR), Ocherki istorii kollektivizatsii
sel’skogo khoziaistva v Soiuznykh respublikakh, p. 55.
82 Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. I, p. 441.
83 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 277. The pedagogical institute is mentioned in Black Deeds
IIp. 555.
84 Black Deeds, I, p. 441 .
85 V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, “Leninskii kooperativnyi plan…,” p. 55.
86 Shimotomai, “A Note on the Kuban Affair,* p. 47.
87 Ibid., p. 48.