And, the type of material which is gathered there is very much like the type of material you’ve heard in the course of hearings, with the exception that it’s a great deal more detailed.

I think it’s something that’s going to be very much an important part of our legacy, but given the very severe time limitations, I think we should move directly to documen¬tary research.

What we have done, basically, is to continue looking at written sources, both published and unpublished. I’vc included for your perusal some of the diplomatic dis¬patches we have from various countries concerning the famine. The British diplomatic dispatches which show that while Walter Duranty was writing in The New York Times that things were essentially all right in the Soviet Union, he went to the British Embas¬sy and told diplomats there that he thought it entirely possible that 10 million people had perished either directly or indirectly due to lack of food.

The Italian diplomatic dispatches, which I will not get into today, are extremely in¬teresting. Unfortunately, the Italian Consul seems to have been something of an anti-Semite, but despite that, he was quite an acute observer, and I commend them, once again, to your perusal.

One thing I would like to spend a couple of minutes on is what we’ve been able to find out from published Soviet workers, both the Soviet press of the period and Soviet historiography.

If I can summarize these very briefly, I think that they are important because I’d like to propose that this become a major part of the structure of our report. First of all, that the 1932 wheat crop, both in the Soviet Union and in the Ukrainian S.S.R., was smaller than average, but not so small as to create famine conditions.

In terms of it being an unfavorable agricultural year, most Soviet sources admit that 1931 was actually a much worse year than 1932. We know also that the crop was smaller in the Soviet Union in 1934 when there was no famine, simply because procurement quotas were relaxed. This means absolutely incontrovertible that the reason a famine occurred, and the reason it claimed so many lives in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and parts of the Volga Basin in 1933, was that the crop was seized by the government And, we can substantiate that from the Soviet sources.

As early as the summer of 1932, officials in Ukraine, the largely non-Ukrainian members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, were quite aware and made Moscow aware of what they referred to as food supply difficulties.

An extremely important political event on the eve of the famine was the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference held in July 1932. At that time, two of Stalin’s personal emissaries, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, were sent to Kharkiv, which was then the capital of the Ukrainian S.S.R., and they insisted that the quotas not be lowered While the various Soviet officials assigned to Ukraine did not openly ques¬tion this decision, they made it extremely clear to everyone concerned, including Stalin’s representatives, that the situation was disastrous.

For example, Mykola Skrypnyk, who is the Commissar of Education, and still pretty much the political strong man in the Ukrainian S.S.R., stated, and I quote:

“From January on, I have traveled to over 30 districts and many dozens of villages, collective farms, state farms and machine tractor stations. Now then, this is the answer I found in a number of places, the answer to the question of why these food