Procurement Quotas

The famine in the boreal-steppe area of Ukraine in the spring of 1932 could not but impair the capacity of collective farms and in­dividual peasants to carry out sowing for the next harvest.

“There are almost no male collective farmers,” wrote M. Dem­chenko, secretary of the Kyiv Oblast party committee, about his visit to a village. “People say that they have gone to get food, heading for Belarus and Leningrad Oblast.” Dmytro Zavolo- ka recorded the same situation in his diary. “It’s clear that after grain requisitions on that scale and such methods of work, the consequences have taken their toll,” he wrote in May 1932. “Large numbers of peasants, including a good part of those on collective farms, have been left without grain. People have begun to flee en masse from their villages wherever their legs will carry them. Entire families are making their way to the farthest reaches of the republic just to avoid staying in their own villages. They avoid work, abandon the land, kill the livestock, and let the farms go to waste.”²¹

There was little sowing in the regions most affected by the famine of 1932. By early May, only 18 percent of the planned sowing had been carried out in the Uman region of Kyiv Oblast. In early June Zavoloka recorded the results of sowing in Kyiv Oblast as a whole: only 51 percent of the fields had been sown, and potatoes had been planted only on 56.7 percent of the land allocated for them. “The right time has passed,” wrote Zavoloka. “Sowing after 10 June is hopeless for growing and even more so for harvesting. This means that in Kyiv Oblast alone, almost two million hectares, perhaps more, have been left unsown.” Zavoloka also wrote that with people going hungry, so were the animals.

The Kharkiv authorities tried to deal with the situation by sending their plenipotentiaries, emergency food supplies, and seed stocks to the raions and villages that had been hardest hit. They also tried to reduce the sowing plan assigned to Ukraine by the Moscow authorities. They failed on all counts. The plenipo­tentiaries could do little without food supplies, available assis­tance proved insufficient, and Moscow would not reduce the plan targets. On 5 May, the Soviet deputy premier, Valerian Kuibyshev, demanded that Premier Vlas Chubar of the Ukrainian SSR fulfill the centrally imposed plan and ensure the sowing of 11.331 million hectares instead of the 10.64 million hectares proposed by the Ukrainian authorities. While seed stocks for Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts were at the top of the agenda in Kharkiv, Moscow was concerned with sowing in the south. On 29 May, Stalin person­ally intervened in the process of delivering seed stocks to Odesa Oblast. “Take steps to ensure that the corn dispatched from Ros­tov is used as directed. We await your reply,” read Stalin’s telegram to Kosior and Chubar.²³

The failure of the sowing campaign in Kyiv and other oblasts located in the boreal-steppe region forced the Kharkiv author­ities to ask Moscow to reduce the grain-procurement plan for the summer and autumn of 1932. They argued that 2.2 million hectares of land had been left unsown and that winter crops had perished on 0.8 million hectares. Moscow wanted Ukraine to deliver 356 million poods of grain that year. This constituted ap­proximately 81 percent of the plan target assigned the previous year and 90 percent of the grain actually collected in 1931.

Stalin’s aides, Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who visited Kharkiv in July, refused any further reductions. In the same month the party authorities in Moscow imposed a fur­ther increase of 4-5 percent to the plan at the raion level in order to make up for potential losses caused by planning errors. It was up to the authorities in Kharkiv to distribute grain-procurement quotas among the Ukrainian regions. They decided to shield the areas most affected by the famine of 1932 and shift the burden of the plan more to the south.²⁵

The major beneficiaries of the new scheme were Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts, as well as the small Moldavian Autonomous Republic in the south. Moldavia, which had been hit as hard as Kyiv Oblast by the famine of the previous year, had its quota re­duced to 46 percent of the grain turned over to the state in 1932. In Kyiv Oblast the new quota constituted 65 percent and, in Kharkiv Oblast, 74 percent of the grain delivered the previous year. The major loser was Odesa Oblast, whose quota was increased, prob­ably because of good prospects for the new harvest, by 34 percent over that of 1931. In Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, and Donetsk Oblasts the reductions amounted to anywhere between 5 and 12 percent, in keeping with the average for Ukraine as a whole. Given the shift of grain-procurement quotas toward the south, the Kharkiv authorities had to change their original plans for collective farms and individual peasants by increasing targets for the former and decreasing them for the latter. Southern Ukraine was much more collectivized than the boreal-steppe region, and the increase in procurement quotas for the south meant that col­lective farms would have to deliver more grain.²⁶

The Ukrainian government kept lobbying for reduced quotas for the areas affected by the famine of 1932 throughout the sum­mer.

However, there were limits to how long the Kharkiv author­ities could keep Kyiv Oblast at the top of their concerns. In Oc­tober 1932, when, in the face of the failure to meet quota targets, Molotov and then Stalin were forced to reduce the procurement plan for Ukraine by another 70 million poods (close to 20 percent of the original plan), Kharkiv Oblast was the first in line, asking for a reduction of its quota by 26.9 million poods (37 percent of the original plan). Kyiv Oblast asked for a cut of 5.7 million poods (18 percent), and Vinnytsia Oblast requested a reduction of 3.5 million poods (9 percent). It appeared that Kyiv Oblast was still very much in trouble, while Kharkiv Oblast had become a new leading disaster area. Thie major difference from August was that the southern oblasts began to ask for substantial reductions as well. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast wanted its quota cut by 16.4 million poods (19 percent), and Odesa Oblast by 14 million poods (16.6 percent).

There can be little doubt that the Kharkiv authorities were doing their best to reduce the procurement burden of the regions most affected by the famine of 1932, all of them in the boreal- steppe region of Ukraine. Through their efforts, they eventually succeeded in reducing the plan quotas—a measure that most af­fected the central oblasts of Ukraine. It soon turned out, however, that the regions affected by the famine of 1932 needed relief and reduced quotas of grain production.²⁸