(Continued from previous issue)
5. IN-KIND FINES
Holodomor, death by hunger, is also a famine except that it is the worst of its kind. The famine in the USSR was caused by grain procurements, while the Holodomor — by the confiscation of all foodstuffs after the state took away all peasants’ grain. People died of hunger both before all food was confiscated and during the Holodomor. The circumstances in which they died meant nothing to them. But to us, their descendants, they do. Otherwise it is impossible to say that the government was saving the working class or itself from default by exporting grain, because default threatened the loss of property abroad. Another case is the use of famine in order to massacre people. This is what we call genocide.
In the grain-stripped villages people who did not have private plots and kitchen gardens — beggars and poor peasants — were dying of hunger. Those who had could make it to the next harvest using produce from their plots. After 1928 the food stores and shops turned into distribution centers where foods were available only to people with ration cards for foodstuffs or industrial goods. The only other sources of supply was the village bazaar or a Torgsin state-run hard-currency store (Torgsin is an acronym for torgovlia s inostrantsami, trade with foreigners). Here locals could also buy food, but only with hard currency or in return for pieces of jewelry. Therefore, collective and individual farmers’ food reserves acquired strategic importance for them. Villages without such reserves were doomed to death by hunger. Large-scale confiscation of foodstuffs automatically eliminated bazaars, while the peasants had no hard currency.
It is necessary to ascertain whether the state resorted to the confiscation of all foodstuffs before the Holodomor. So far this question has not been raised for the simple reason that no one distinguished between the all-union famine (Ukraine included) from the Holodomor. It appears that confiscation of foods was used by the government previously as a punitive measure, although not all foodstuffs were taken away. Here is what Pastushenko, secretary of the Komsomol cell in the village of Polonyste (currently in Holovanivsk raion, Kirovohrad oblast), wrote in a letter to Stalin on Feb. 10, 1932: “Now we have one setback after the next; a team of 86 men has been out searching [for grain] for three months with nothing to show for it. Day after they search one [peasant] home after the next. Since the start of the campaign they have ransacked every home sixty times over. They have taken away every pound of produce, leaving each collective farmer two poods of potatoes. The rest has been procured.”
On Oct. 22, 1932, the Politburo of the CC VKP(B) dispatched a grain procurements commission to the Ukrainian SSR headed by Viacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) of the USSR. Another one, headed by CC VKP(b) Secretary Lazar Kaganovich, was sent to the Northern Caucasus. The Kremlin organized ad hoc central emergency authorities in these regions. Their resolutions were signed by regional party functionaries.
In accordance with the instructions received from Stalin, Molotov wrote the resolutions of the republican party and government institutions and sent them to Stalin (Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini. Dokumenty i materially — 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine. Documents and Materials, Kyiv, 2007, p. 207). Approved by the Kremlin, they were published as a resolution of the CC CP(B)U of Nov. 18, and a resolution of the Radnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR of Nov. 20, under the same title: “On Measures to Enhance Grain Procurements.” Both resolutions demand confiscation of grain stolen in the course of the harvest campaign, threshing, and transportation. This sinister clause meant that the state was sanctioning searches of peasant homes to confiscate what grain was found there.
In addition to the requirement to carry out searches, these resolutions contained an equally vicious clause on in-kind fines — those who failed to meet their grain quota had to compensate the deficit with meat and potatoes. The Komsomol activist Pastushenko had complained to the party general secretary about such in-kind fines, but now Stalin was applying them and turned them into a law. They are the Holodomor’s calling card.
Our Russian colleagues say time and time again that the same happened in Russia, and the most radical-minded of them add that if it was genocide, then it affected the rural population in all grain-producing regions. Therefore, I hasten to admit that in-kind fines were applied as a means of stepping up grain procurements in the Volga region (Povolzhie), Central Grain-Producing District, and districts in the Northern Caucasus territory adjacent to the Kuban region. One should not, however, mistake terror by famine for grain procurements that could involve such methods as in-kind fines or confiscation of homesteads and exile to the northern regions of the USSR — these were applied in certain individual cases. There was no other single region, except the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban, where in-kind fines were imposed all over the countryside.
6. AIM OF THE “DEVASTATING BLOW”
In their declarations Stalin’s team of internationalists recognized the supremacy of the class only in the area of their repressive policy. Stalin could afford to declare collective responsibility on the basis of ethnic origin only during the war of extermination against Nazi Germany (slogans “Kill a German!”, deportation of ethnic Germans and the so-called small peoples [ethnic minorities] to Kazakhstan’s deserts). The ethnic component of repressions in the 1930s was carefully camouflaged. The deportation of tens of thousands of “German fascists” and “Pilsudski’s Poles” from the Ukrainian territories along the Polish border in 1934–35 was carried out as a top secret military operation. The blow dealt to the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban region in 1932–33 was disguised as a campaign against kulak sabotage, which was claimed to be causing the cities and the army to starve. The only thing on record is the censoring of statements indicative of repressions on an ethnic basis in the articles published by the free press.
In the second half of 1932, the USSR was on the verge of an economic catastrophe. Agriculture was degrading, the grain procurements campaign had been bungled, and a large-scale famine was raising its ugly head. A group of ranking party members headed by A. Smirnov declared that the “general line” of the CC VKP(B) in Stalin’s interpretation was a threat to the party and the entire country. On Nov. 27, 1932, Stalin called a joint meeting of the highest bodies of the party, whose members had already become puppets on his strings: the Politburo of the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission of the VKP(B). The general secretary raised the matter of the Smirnov-led “counterrevolutionary” group. The dissenters were punished and copies of the minutes were sent to party activists as guidelines in combating dissidence.
In 2007 the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace published the edited minutes (sent to party activists) and the original document that recorded what was actually said. By comparing these documents one can understand what message Stalin sent to the activists and what he thought was best to conceal from them.
The edited version sent to the party committees said that collective and state farms had been infiltrated by anti-Soviet elements in order to organize sabotage. “It would be foolish for the communists not to respond to the blows dealt by these individual collective farmers and collective farms with a devastating blow of their own only because the collective farms are a socialist form of management,” declared Stalin. And so the government wanted to deliver a “devastating blow” to individual collective farmers and farms, but the target turned out to be vague in all respects.
In his unedited speech Stalin was more forthcoming. He listed the regions where the emergency grain procurements commissions were operating (the Northern Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Lower Volga region) and the enemy — the White Guards and the Petliurites.
The Northern Caucasus then consisted of 11 districts. A protocol of the Politburo of the CC VKP(B), dated Nov. 1, 1932, formulated the tasks set before Kaganovich’s emergency grain procurements commission as follows:
“The whole group of comrades, jointly with the regional party committee, is hereby instructed to step up grain procurements in the Northern Caucasus, especially in the Kuban, and to unconditionally carry out the plan for the winter sowing campaign.
“The main task of the said group of comrades is to work out and take measures in the course of the sowing and grain procurement campaigns to overcome sabotage organized by counterrevolutionary kulak elements in the Kuban.”
If one analyzes the objectives set before this emergency commission by comparing a part (the Kuban) to the whole (the Northern Caucasus), the part is obviously predominant. Stalin’s envoys had to communicate with the territorial party committee, so they seemed to target the entire territory. However, the first paragraph stresses “especially in the Kuban,” while the second paragraph clearly identified the emergency commission’s field of action: the Kuban.
Addressing a meeting of the regional committee of the VKP(B) on Nov. 23, Kaganovich defined his commission’s geographical priorities in no less clear terms, although he explained them as follows: “We do not have to take the Northern Caucasus as a whole. After all, the northern part has fulfilled the sowing plan and supplied more grain. The emphasis must be on the Kuban.” Indeed, other [administrative] districts did a better job of meeting their grain procurement quotas. Kaganovich, however, did not say what considerations the Kremlin had in mind when these quotas were set for different regions.
It is safe to assume that the especially high grain procurement quotas for Ukraine and the “devastating blow” aimed at the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban were explained by Stalin’s desire to nip in the bud any opportunity of reunification of the two Ukrainian regions or Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union.
On the face of it the USSR was a federation of union republics, each having the constitutional right to secede from the federation. However, in a totalitarian country with maximum centralization of political power this development seemed unthinkable. It is also true, however, that in the early 1930s Stalin’s rule was shaken by the economic and political crisis caused by the forced rate of industrialization and reckless agrarian policy. With the country in a grave crisis, the central government’s ability to keep the situation in the peripheral regions under control was sharply reduced. In these circumstances constitutional declarations could become a reality (as they did decades later, in 1989–91).
The foregoing discussion helps understand Stalin’s motives. However, my goal is not to study the motives, because it is hardly possible to find documentary evidence to prove them, but to reconstruct the malfeasance that triggered the Holodomor. Such reconstruction appears to be possible.
