supply difficulties exist, I was in a district with great food supply difficulties. In the vil¬lage of Novokrasne, Okniansy District, in Moldavia…,” (the portion of Moldavia then in the U.S.S.R, was an A.S.S.R. which was part of the Ukrainian S.S.R.), and he quotes the person there saying. This is the reason, it is because they took everything from us with a whisk broom, and because of this left’ distortion we are choked with grief.”

And then, Skrypnyk goes on to say, “This is how they explained the situation.'’

Now, Skrypnyk was the most vocal at this particular party meeting in describing the situation, but a number of other top officials assigned to Ukraine, including the First Secretary of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine, Stanislav Kossior, men¬tioned that these grain difficulties existed, and that they existed because people came in and they took the grain away.

Even though they were aware of this tragedy, the Soviet authorities in Ukraine fol¬lowed the orders sent out from Moscow, and themselves carried out the procurements policy, and which they knew would lead to catastrophe and which led to the famine.

Roman Terekhov, who was until January, 1933 the Regional Party First Secretary in Kharkiv, and a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, went to Stalin and told him about this in late 1932, and Terekhov, we’re on page 2 of the documentary report at this point, Terekhov somehow managed to survive the various purges under Stalin and lived to tell the tale in 1964.

His article in Pravda was couched in euphemisms, but he states the following: “When in 1932, in connection with a crop failure in Kharkiv Region, I had to tell Stalin about the difficult situation in the villages and ask for bread to be sent to these districts, he listened and then abruptly interrupted:

‘We have told you, comrade Terekhov, that you are a fine storyteller. You made up this story about a famine and thought you would frighten us, but it won’t work! Maybe it would be better if you stopped being a secretary of a region and of the Central Com¬mittee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and went to work in the Union of Soviet Writers writing fairy tales for idiots to read…”‘

No, if Stalin had, in fact, disbelieved the messages being sent from a variety of sour¬ces within his own regime, he had ample measures of checking out the situation inde¬pendently. In fact, as a matter of personal style, Stalin was someone who liked to keep on top of what was going on, even to the point of having tapes placed on the phones of his subordinates, and listening to them without their knowledge.

Congressman GILMAN: Gentlemen, would you hold on? I’m being called to the floor on an amendment, and I regret that I have to leave, and I thank you for your presentation, and want to assure you that we’ll continue to work along with our Com¬mission members.
Please, forgive me for the interruption.

Dr. MACE: Stalin had ample reason to know that a famine was going on in late 1932, early 1933. Through the Soviet press, we can trace his reaction to it, and this has been largely unresearched. I found no publications on this in Western or Soviet scholarly literature.

What Stalin did was to personally reject any and all appeals from the Ukrainian S.S.R, and elsewhere, and to actually put increasing pressure on the authorities in the Ukrainian S.S.R, to meet these quotas, to collect even more grain from the countryside there.