Grain Requisitions

In the fall of 1932, Kharkiv and Kyiv Oblasts, which were lo­cated in Ukraine’s boreal-steppe belt, were leading among the Ukrainian regions in fulfilling their quotas for delivering grain to government depositories.

Khataevich was prepared to give to some areas and locali­ties of Ukraine while taking from others. In the same telegram he proposed that there be no further deliveries of manufactured goods to those raions of Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts that were lagging behind in the fulfillment of their quotas. Soon, the policy of blacklisting whole communities—collective farms and raions—was extended to all oblasts of Ukraine. It called for cut­ting off supplies of manufactured goods to settlements that failed to fulfill their quotas. Kyiv Oblast led in terms of blacklisted villages, while Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was in first place when it came to blacklisted collective farms. Among other things, this disparity reflected different levels of collectivization in the steppe and boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine.²⁹

The lead taken by the boreal-steppe oblasts continued in the new year. By ³ January 1933, the collective farms of Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia Oblasts were ahead of their southern neighbors in fulfilling their plans, showing results from 85 percent and high­er, with 100 percent fulfillment in Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts.³⁰ The collective farms of the steppe oblasts and the newly created Chernihiv Oblast in the Polissia region lagged behind in plan fulfillment by a margin of at least 10 percent.

There are several factors that might account for the “leader­ship” of the boreal-steppe oblasts in fulfilling plan targets. One such factor is that those oblasts benefited from major reductions to their procurement quotas. The final plan for Kyiv Oblast re­duced the quota by roughly half of the original amount of 31.2 million poods, while the original plan target itself constituted only 65 percent of the grain collected in 1931. The overall reduc­tion was a whopping 68 percent. But the reduction of quotas is only one possible explanation of the “stellar” performance of Kyiv Oblast in fulfilling its plan.

Another is the ruthless efficiency of the local party machine in requisitioning grain from the peasantry. By the first months of 1933, when the party sent its people back to the villages in the boreal-steppe areas to collect grain for sowing, there was nothing to collect. If in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which was lagging behind in the fulfillment of its procurement plan, party workers collected 40 percent of what was required, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and V innytsia Oblasts that number was between 13.4 and 20.5 percent.

For those peasants in the boreal-steppe zones who had sur­vived the requisitions of 1931 and the famine of 1932, the new req­uisition campaign brought new suffering and claimed more lives. In her diary entry for 30 September 1932, Oleksandra Radchenko recorded the story of a peasant from the village of Piatnytske in Kharkiv Oblast who was detained by the authorities. They de­manded grain, holding him captive the entire day, and released him only late at night. “They held me for grain procurement,” the peasant told Radchenko, who met him as he returned home after nightfall.

The authorities were not only going after grain. They confis­cated everything, treating all food supplies as potential “fines in kind” for unfulfilled procurement quotas. “[The] old man, who works on a rabbit farm, was ‘robbed by the authorities,’ as he re­ported,” recorded Radchenko in her entry for 20 November 1932.

That means they took all the cereal grains and fruit available. He has been dekulakized for two years and is almost indigent, just short of begging. He is 70 years old; the old woman is 65, and their crippled daughter lives in their apartment. And al­though they are destitute, everything they might have used to live on until February has been taken from them. The servant returned from leave...and cried out in despair, “What a horror this is! They are completely ruining individual farmers, taking everything away, going through trunks; cries and weeping ev­erywhere. They shout, ‘Take the children, too,’ and there are five of them in the house.”³²

The hypothesis that it was pressure from above, not just re­duced quotas that accounted for the exceptional performance of the boreal-steppe areas in meeting plan targets, finds corrobora­tion in secret-police statistics. According to GPU (Main Political Directorate) data, in the first ten months of 1932, 300 cases of peasant “terrorism,” a term used to denote violent resistance to the authorities, were registered in Kyiv Oblast, 255 in Kharkiv Oblast, and 197 in Vinnytsia Oblast. Much larger oblasts in the south had rather modest totals: 58 cases in Donetsk Oblast, 80 in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and 170 in Odesa Oblast. If one also counts the 80 cases registered on territories controlled by border guard detachments, then the numbers for Vinnytsia and Kyiv Oblasts, bordering on Poland and Romania, should be increased even further.

The Kharkiv authorities’ efforts to deal with the situation by reducing quotas and shifting the main burden to the south did not change the situation on the ground. The central government demanded grain deliveries from the region whether or not the peasants had anything to eat. By early 1933, it was Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia Oblasts, the areas most affected by the famine of 1932, that seemed most vulnerable to the new wave of fam­ine—one that threatened Ukraine as a whole on a much larger scale than that of the previous year.