(Continued from the previous issue)
Here are, for example, the minutes of a VKP(b) Central Committee meeting dated February 8, 1933, that was kept in a “special folder” (a variety of top secret documents which were to be obligatorily returned to a higher office and were forbidden to be quoted in writing). The CC Politburo ordered supplying 300,000 poods of rye to North Caucasus and 200,000 poods to Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts each. The text was attested with a Politburo red seal and a signature, also in red, of CC Secretary General Joseph Stalin. V. Kozlov, chief of the Federal Archives Agency, wrote in the preface to this book (518 sheets of color photocopies): “Russian historians and archivists have nothing to hide. All the documents are open, and we suggest that respectable international or national state organizations should not jump to conclusions if they wish to pass political judgments on the ‘famine-genocide’ in Ukraine” (Famine in the USSR. 1930-1934 – Moscow, 2009 – p.7). No comments, so to speak. Genocide? What genocide?
Whenever an archeologist comes across a layer of earth with a smashed antique statue, he carefully picks up the fragments, marking the placement of each of them depthwise, lengthwise, and widthwise, and then reproduces its original shape by fitting one fragment to another. I found myself in the situation of this archeologist 25 years ago, when I began to research the Ukraine famine of 1932-33. Every fragment of the Kremlin boss’s carefully hidden and skillfully camouflaged criminal actions associated with the USSR famine and the Ukraine Holodomor found a proper place in the text of half a dozen monographs that reconstructed those events. Abroad, only expatriate Ukrainians know my reconstruction, unfortunately. The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies is preparing an English-language book on the Ukrainian Holodomor – it is still in the pipeline.
Whose arguments could I accept in the debate between R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, on the one hand, and Robert Conquest, on the other? I will say frankly: I accept all. I only disagree to Conquest’s argument that Stalin saw the imminent famine but did nothing to prevent it because he put Soviet interest above the necessity to feed the starving. The reality proved to be far more horrible. The Ukraine Holodomor was of a different nature. Millions of people died a martyr’s death only because Stalin wanted to remain in the chair of VKP(b) CC secretary general, which began to shake during the economic crisis.
I am ready to agree with both debating sides because the 1932-33 all-USSR famine, which also hit Ukraine in 1932, must be separated from the 1933 Holodomor in Ukraine. The all-USSR famine was caused by a conflict between the state and peasants over grain procurements. It was unexpected and, clearly, undesirable for Stalin. Like Vladimir Lenin in March 1921, he drew conclusions and radically changed the rules of the game between peasants and the state. Conversely, the Holodomor was in no way associated with grain procurements. It was the result of a punitive operation, which Conquest rightly called terror-famine. The Holodomor can be dated in two years only because the punitive operation was tried out in November-December 1932 on the “black-boarded” villages.
Many of us still identify communism with a society, where material and cultural benefits are distributed among people according to their needs. A legend about this “radiant future” was badly needed. But in reality, it is enough to look into Karl Marx’s and Frederic Engels’s Communist Manifesto to see what communism really is. They wrote: “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property” (Vol. 4).
Building communism in 1928-32, Stalin also came into the grip of an economic crisis of which the 1932-33 famine was the hardest consequence. Why did the implementation of the communist doctrine end up in an economic collapse, with famine being the first sign of it? Marx’s “scientific communism” was as utopian as all the similar teachings. The abolition of private property was to be followed by that of commodity-money relations and the market, i.e., by switching from commodity circulation to product exchange. Stalin needed to rob peasants of the private ownership of the means of production, which ensured their economic independence from the state and, at the same time, made the state economically dependent on agrarian commodity producers.
In spite of the terror, including “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” the state managed to carry out overall collectivization in the cooperative form only, i.e., to allow peasants to have a household plot. The confiscation of almost all the produce in collective farms forced peasants to refuse to work in kolkhozes, and, as a result, the bulk of the 1932 crop perished. This provoked famine in cities and villages – in cities because the state lacked resources for a centralized distribution of grain by ration cards and in villages because procurers had requisitioned all the existing grain towards repayment of the grain procurement debt.
1933. A WORK BY FEDIR HLUSHCHUK, KYIV, 1990
In January 1933 Stalin replaced the 1932-33 surplus requisition system with mandatory deliveries of grain to the state by collective and individual farms, i.e., he put the state-peasant relationship on a tax footing. This means that, after paying an in-kind tax, peasants were free to dispose of their produce as they pleased – e.g., to sell it on the market. This also meant that they were recognized as private owners (naturally, under a different term) of their produce. This eventually meant a radical change in the Marxian doctrine of communism. As is known, Marx divided communism into two phases on the basis of material benefits distribution – socialism with distribution according to one’s contribution and communism proper with distribution according to one’s need. But he did not divide communism into two phases on the basis of material benefits production. For him, the construction of socialism meant implementation of the entire triad – the abolition of private property, commodity-money relations, and the market. After canceling the surplus-requisition system and switching to mandatory deliveries of the farming produce to the state, Stalin unwittingly shifted the requirement to abolish commodity-money relations and the market to the second phase of communism, where material benefits are to be distributed according to one’s needs.
Before naming any facts, one should know the attitude of society to Stalin in the early 1930s. It was not the Stalin who raped society with the Great Famine and the Great Terror and became the leader of a superpower in the late 1940s. He was a figure the size of other topmost officials. In the fall of 1932, he received a challenge from some members of the Russian government, who began to consider the Stalinist version of the VKP(b) CC line as a danger to the Party. Responding to this challenge, Stalin said at a joint session of the Politburo and the Presidium of the VKP(b) Central Auditing Commission on November 27, 1932, that the blame for the economic crisis lay with anti-Soviet elements in collective and state farms, to which a crushing blow should be struck. The secretary general did not reveal the essence of this “blow,” but this became clear in the course of the following events. It was a Cheka operation that involved three actions: a) confiscation of all durable foodstuffs that have accumulated at rural households pending the next harvest; b) keeping the robbed peasants blocked in their villages; c) informational blockade. There were no written instructions, even in “special folders,” on the confiscation of all foodstuffs.
The Ukraine-wide Cheka operation began with Stalin sending a telegram to the republic’s top officials on January 1, 1933. The leader was urging, via them, the Ukrainian peasantry to consign “the stolen and hidden grain” to the state, although he knew that the countryside did not have enough grain to satisfy the whole state. The secretary general threatened to mete out strict punishment to those who would not consign grain. Yet the telegram was not so much a threat as a signal for mass-scale searches. Only searches could identify those who failed to meet the grain consignation demand. Disguised as routine wintertime grain procurements, the Cheka action consisted of three phases: organizational (January 1 to 5), active (January 6 to February 7), and “analgesic” (from February 8 onwards).
Why did Stalin not confine himself to mandatory consignments, which provided a way out of the deadlock in the relations with peasants, and, instead, struck his “crushing blow”? Ukraine and Kuban, which wished to reunite with Ukraine, represented a danger for him. Thanks to the information network of state security bodies, he knew that a social explosion, as big as the one that occurred in the spring of 1930, was brewing in Ukraine. Only a situation of absolute starvation could avert this danger.
