Beyond Ecology

The dividing line between the boreal and steppe areas of Ukraine played an important role in defining the Moscow authorities’ ap­proach to planning their agricultural policies in Ukraine.

The map of losses by raion in 1933 leaves no doubt that while the sources we consulted give no indication that the line between the boreal and boreal-steppe areas mattered in the formulation of government policy, it clearly affected the inhabitants’ chances of survival. Here we are dealing with a situation in which envi­ronment could have a direct impact, without the intermediacy of the political factor. One possible explanation of that fact could be the inhabitants’ ability to feed and maintain domestic animals in wooded areas at the time of the famine, as well as their ability to survive on forest products that could not be confiscated by the authorities. Further research is needed to test these hypotheses.

The boreal-steppe divide also does not suffice to explain the lower death rate in V innytsia Oblast as compared with Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts, which lay within the boundaries of the same ecological zone. The raion data indicates that some raions of Vinnytsia Oblast suffered the same level of excess deaths as the boreal-steppe raions of Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts, but all those raions were in the central and eastern parts of the oblast.

An answer to this puzzle has been suggested by recent re­search on the history of Soviet border areas, which indicates that Moscow paid special attention to border regions, supplying them with larger quantities of consumer products than other regions of the Soviet Union. Back in 1930, entire villages in border areas had attempted to cross the Soviet-Polish border and find refuge from the horror of collectivization in neighboring Poland. Fur­ther research into government policies and strategies of survival in the border regions of Ukraine would be required, but there is little doubt that the death rate in those areas was lower than in the central and eastern parts of V innytsia Oblast—a factor that influenced the overall death rate in the oblast during the famine.⁴²

Last but not least, the boreal-steppe divide does not explain differences in the death rate between the three steppe oblasts: Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Odesa. Donetsk Oblast suffered least, Odesa Oblast most. The high level of industrialization of Donetsk Oblast as compared with Odesa Oblast can partly ex­plain this phenomenon: starving peasants could find employment and survive in major industrial centers that had centralized food supplies. Nor should one discount the Moscow authorities’ differ­ential treatment of individual oblasts with regard to famine relief.

This factor becomes especially apparent if one compares Dni­propetrovsk and Odesa Oblasts, the two main grain-producing areas of Ukraine. Throughout the spring of 1933 Dnipropetrovsk Oblast emerged as the main recipient of Moscow’s assistance in the south, obtaining one million poods in February. Odesa Oblast received 0.8 million poods of grain. Between mid-March and mid-July the excess death factor in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was significantly lower than in Odesa Oblast. In mid-May, for example, it reached 33 points, while that of Odesa Oblast stood at 60.

In explaining the differences in the amount of aid received from the center, it is hard to overlook the role played by individual party officials in the history of the famine. Mendel Khataevich, who was appointed first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk party committee in January 1933, maintained his position as secretary of the Central Committee in Kharkiv and had direct access not only to Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar but also to Stalin’s right-hand man in Moscow, Lazar Kaganovich. The personali­ties of oblast and raion party leaders mattered during the Great Famine, and in the spring and summer of 1933 the position taken by a senior party official and his ability to reduce plan targets and receive government assistance could make the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of starving people in the Ukrainian countryside.

There were limits, however, to what local officials could do independently of the Moscow and Kyiv authorities. Wheatcroft has suggested recently that Kyiv Oblast’s higher death rate can be attributed to the actions of local officials, who imposed additional quotas on the peasantry in order to feed the cities of the oblast, which, unlike the industrial centers in the east and south of the republic, received few or no shipments from the central deposito­ries. Thus far, this hypothesis has not been substantiated by docu­mentary evidence with regard to special policies adopted by Kyiv officials. It also does not take into account that not all areas of Kyiv Oblast suffered equally, and many raions of Kharkiv Oblast suffered as much as the most affected areas of Kyiv Oblast.⁴⁴

Let us now turn to the factors that apparently did not matter in the history of the Great Famine. A comparison of the maps of excess death rates with those of Ukraine’s ethnic composi­tion suggests that, while place of residence, defined in terms of ecological zones and border versus central location, influenced chances of survival, ethnicity did not.

Finally, one should address the impact on death rates of the official policy of denying supplies to villages and agricultural en­terprises that failed to fulfill their grain-procurement quotas, oth­erwise known as blacklisted communities. Even though clusters of blacklisted villages can be found on the map within or close to areas with the highest rates of excess deaths, current data do not allow one to conclude or even suggest that blacklisting actually led to higher death rates. There can be a number of explanations for this phenomenon; lack of comprehensive data is one of them. The authorities’ inability to enforce blacklisting of communities located near those that were not blacklisted—a “problem” ad­dressed in official reports for December 1932—may be another.⁴⁶

⅛ **

While GIS mapping of the Great Famine is only in its initial stages, and this essay is one of the first attempts to interpret the new data and the maps on which it has been plotted, we can already formulate some preliminary conclusions. Given the early stage of research, most of the conclusions are hypothetical and should be regarded more as an agenda for research than as the definitive word on the subject.

The geography of losses suffered by the population of Ukraine in the course of the Great Famine of 1932-33 sets it apart from the earlier famines of the 1920s, which occurred in the southern parts of the republic. During the Great Famine the death rate was highest in central Ukraine.

An explanation for the distinct geography of the Great Famine should be sought in the different treatment of Ukraine’s regions, first by the Soviet government in Moscow, and then by the Ukrainian leadership in Kharkiv. While Stalin and the mem­bers of his inner circle treated Ukraine as an entity with regard to grain procurement, they also distinguished the main grain­producing areas in the steppe zone of southern Ukraine from the boreal zones of central and northern Ukraine, which grew less grain or none at all.

The steppe regions of Ukraine were more highly collectiv­ized and supplied with tractors and other agricultural machinery on a priority basis. They were also the first to receive famine relief assistance and were the main beneficiaries of resettlement policy after the famine. The boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine, which included Kyiv, Kharkiv, and V innytsia Oblasts, had a lower level of collectivization and mechanization of agriculture.

The central government’s policy of forcing peasants to join collective farms by imposing higher procurement quotas on non-collectivized peasantry further disadvantaged the central and northern areas of Ukraine, which had a lower level of collectivized households than the steppe regions in the south.

The famine began in the winter and early spring of 1932 in central Ukraine, particularly in the beet-producing areas of Kyiv Oblast, where, according to one version of events, local officials, forced by the central and republican governments to fulfill unreal­istically high procurement quotas, took more grain than specified in plan quotas in order to make up for losses in the harvests of produce other than grain.

--* The famine of 1933 hit hardest those areas that had never fully recovered from the famine of the previous year. The fam­ine of 1932, which affected Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Kharkiv Oblasts, weakened and demoralized the peasants, who were unable or unwilling to stay on the collective farms or conduct the sowing campaign on their own. This resulted in the poor harvest of 1932 and the new and much more severe famine of 1933.

During the height of the famine in 1933, the central gov­ernment in Moscow and the republican authorities in Kharkiv adopted different approaches to relief efforts. The Kharkiv gov­ernment’s priority was to provide support for the boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine hardest hit by famine, while Moscow’s efforts were focused on the main grain-producing areas in the south.

Given that Moscow had more resources and overall control over the distribution of aid and grain loans, the central govern­ment’s focus on the main grain-producing regions of Ukraine led to the neglect of the needs of the starving population in boreal- steppe areas. The central government was prepared to lower quo­tas for boreal-steppe areas on a number of occasions, but it was reluctant to provide those regions of Ukraine with food assistance, given their low standing in the pecking order of grain-producing regions.

The severity of the famine in the rural areas of Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts translated into an exceptionally high death rate among the urban population of those oblasts. Most of the urban dwellers who died in 1932-33 lived in small towns that had no cen­tralized food supply and suffered the same fate as the countryside.

While Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts were hardest hit by the Great Famine, the losses in other parts of Ukraine were also in the millions, totaling 3.9 million deaths according to the latest es­timates. This death toll set the Holodomor apart from the earlier famines not only in terms of geography but also in the absolute number of victims.