gave the collectivized peasant a proportion of the product for his own consumption only after all state needs had been satisfied Those who took any product for themsel¬ves except as allotted to them were defined as enemies of the people, subject to sen¬tences of from ten years to death.

The collective farm system, still the Soviet Union’s agricultural mainstay, was an economic disaster. Even in the 1950s, the new mechanized farms were admitted to be producing less than the pre-World War I muzhik with his wooden plough… A schematic idea had failed—at enormous human and other cost.

Dekulakization and collectivization were virtually complete by mid-1932. It was now that Moscow launched the third and most lethal of its assaults-the terror-famine against the peasants of the Ukraine and some neighboring areas, in particular the lar¬gely Ukrainian Kuban.

Academician Sakharov refers to Stalin’s “Ukrainophobia”. But it was not an irration¬al Ukrainophobia. In the free elections of November 1917 the Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly for the national parties: the Bolsheviks got only 10% of the vote, and that mainly in russified industrial centers. Over the next few years, independent Uk¬rainian governments rose and fell. Twice Bolshevik governments were established by Russian troops, but only on the third attempt was the country finally subdued. The first two efforts had made virtually no concession to nationalism. The view of Lenin and his subordinates was that Ukrainian was merely a peasant dialect. It was only after bitter experience that it was seen that the Ukraine could not be mastered without some recognition of its national feeling.

Just as the peasants were temporarily placated by the New Economic Policy, so was the Ukrainian nation. Over the next eight or nine years, Ukrainian culture was al¬lowed to flourish, and high officials and supporters of the former independent Uk¬rainian Government were given posts. But there were always Moscow complaints and apprehensions about the fissiparous tendencies thus encouraged. And, starting in 1929, came a violent mass purge first of non-Communist, then of Communist cultural and political figures.

Over the years following about 200 of the 240 published authors in the Ukraine were shot or died in camps, together with a wide swathe of all other intellectuals, from agronomists to language specialists. The leading national-minded Communist, Skryp¬nyk, committed suicide in 1933, and was posthumously charged with such crimes as at¬tempting to introduce a hard “G” into Ukrainian orthography in order to aid “nationalist wreckers”.

But in Stalin’s view “the national problem is in essence a peasant problem”. The decapitation of Ukrainian culture was now accompanied by a blow at its body, the peasant bulk of the nation. The peasantry of the Ukraine and contiguous areas had also been the foremost in resisting collectivization. They were thus as it were, a double target. Stalin’s Secret Police Chief in the Ukraine, Balitsky, spoke of a “double blow” at the nationalists and the kulaks.

The Ukrainian countryside had already, in 1931-32, suffered grain requisitions which left it on the point of famine. In July 1932 Stalin issued the decisive decree: 6.6