perished directly or indirectly due to lack of food. However, Duranty’s questionable behavior should not be projected upon colleagues such as William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor whose frank reporting of the famine was outstanding.

The third broad category of sources used in the famine study is the Soviet (especial¬ly Ukrainian) press of the 1930s and later scholarship. Given that no access to Soviet archives is possible for topics judged by the Soviet authorities as politically sensitive, this type of source is vital in examining the official Soviet role in the famine.

The Soviet Ukrainian press contains frank admissions of “significant food supply dif¬ficulties in some districts” as early as the July 1932 Third All-Ukrainian Party Con¬ference. At that conference, various speakers denounced unnamed “comrades” who blamed the difficulties on high grain procurement goals set by Moscow, but this view was rejected in favor of speedy procurement which would prevent loss. In early 1933 the All-Union authorities in Moscow took direct control of the Ukrainian apparatus, blaming members of its leadership for criminal negligence in procuring grain and for “national deviations” inspired by class enemies. A thorough campaign against “Uk¬rainian national deviations” led by Mykola Skrypnyk was accompanied by a thorough purge of hitherto tolerated national elites, as well as Skrypnyk’s suicide soon after a “last stand” at the June 1933 plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee. The offi¬cial response to widespread starvation in the countryside is perhaps best evidenced in a February 1933 speech by the titular leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Stanislav Kossior, who stated:

When you go to a district on grain procurement business, they start pulling out of every pocket figures and tables on a lower harvest, which are put together from start to finish by hostile elements who have entrenched themselves in the collective farms, land sections, and Machine Tractor Stations. But you don’t run into one single word about the crop that was on the root (i.e., in the field—JEM) and was pulled up, stolen, and hidden. Our comrades, including some plenipoten¬tiaries (i.e those sent out by the Central Committee to the districts—JEM), by failing to examine these false figures, which were shoved at them, in many instan¬ces have become “kulak? advocates armed with these figures. In numerous cases it has been shown that this arithmetic is “kulak” arithmetic, according to which we could never have procured even half of what we have procured so far. In the hands of the class enemies, false figures and empty talk have been a blind for grain being stolen and carried off in every direction.

This was pure fantasy, of course, and represents the creation of a myth that the “evil” peasants were hoarding grain that the “good” Bolsheviks would have to seize, a justification for what Kossior and others referred to as “the resolute struggle for grain”. Neither seed nor food requirements were exempt from seizure. Indeed, in this same speech Kossior specifically blames the diversion of produce to “so-called community food requirements” as a “serious evil” to be resolutely combatted. Put another way, state policy in Ukraine during the famine consisted in preventing the “diversion” of foodstuffs to the mouths of those who had produced it. Such a policy can only be seen as one of planned starvation.