people wrote and said, particularly religious groups wrote the State Department saying “Mr. Chamberlin claims that 7-8 million people have been dying, could you tell us what the truth is?” They didn’t know, they had heard other people, including local Communists, saying nobody was dying.

And the State Department normally took the view “it is not part of the State Depart¬ment’s duties, or responsibilities to give comments on this sort of thing”.

But they did sometimes send reports, deadpan reports which did Eve the fairly true impression. It depended on who it went to in State.
Congressman GILMAN: Was there any congressional reaction at the time?
Dr. CONQUEST: Yes, there were congressmen, several congressmen, and especial¬ly, Hamilton Fish, who put it on record. It is in the Congressional Record, a perfectly true statement of what was going on.
Congressman GILMAN: Thank you.
Mr, MARCHISHIN: Thank you, Congressman Gilman.
During the previous conversation it seemed that there were three separate proces¬ses that were kind of merged together during the discussion: this was “dekulakization”, collectivization and the famine itself. And I wonder if you could sort of clarify this a little bit better for us, so we can clearly understand the distinction between these three separate processes?
Dr. CONQUEST: Yes. The first two processes were linked, “dekulakization”, the removal of 10 million of the supposedly rich—in fact, by our standards were very poor peasants, who were nevertheless either richer than their colleagues, or more influen¬tial. They were deported, partly as class-struggle dogma—you have to have a class to crush, this was pure invention. And partly, I think, more realistically, to remove the leadership of the villages, to make them more amenable to collectivization. That started at the beginning of 1930, and it went on several ways.

The collectivization was putting into the collective farms of the private plots of all of the remaining farmers and forcing them under control of directors and bureaucrats and policemen from Moscow, who ran the farms. And that is the system introduced today, the collective farm system.

In my view, once again, I think the main object seems to have been partly, of course, to get the peasant under control, but basically to make sure that he no longer had access to his own product. What happened on the collective farm is grain once cut does not belong to the peasant, isn’t in his hands even for a moment, it goes straight into the collective granaries, that is, the problem that the Communists always had, as long as the peasant controlled his own product, they were never quite sure what price he would sell it at. And they were never quite sure if he wouldn’t eat some of it himself.
Mr. MARCHISHIN: And the famine is a completely distinctive phenomenon from the collectivization, it wasn’t a direct outcome of the collectivization, they used the col¬lectivization to execute their policy, but the famine was almost exclusively in the Uk¬rainian and the Ukrainian ethnic area adjacent in Kuban and also the similar Don Cos¬sack area. And if this is correct, that it wasn’t directly related to the collectivization.
Dr. CONQUEST: That is correct. I think it is true, also, to say that it could only have been done under the collectivization circumstances, firstly, because they got the