Soviet Revisionism, 1988-1991

In March 1988, Kul'chyts'kyi published a pioneering article on the Famine in the monthly Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal. Part of his conclusions also appeared in abbreviated form in the media in the newspaper Visti z Ukrainy.

Kul’chyts’kyi also points out the importance of assimilation in the “loss” of the Ukrainian population between the census of 1926 and that of 1939 (a to­tal decline of 3 million people—at that time the existence of the banned 1937 census was not known). He adds that the two peoples (Ukrainians and Rus­sians) derive from a single ancient Rus’ nationality, have similar languages and cultures, and an almost identical “psychic composition.” Because of the colonization of large swathes of territory (Slobids’ka Ukraine, the Kuban, to­day’s Kursk and Voronezh oblasts) by both national groups, a portion of the population that resided in these regions in the first decade of the 20th century was in an “ethnically transient state.” The rise in the number of Russians in the USSR as a whole between 1926 and 1939, from 77.8 to 99.6 million, can­not be attributed to a natural increase, particularly when one notes that even representatives of Central Asia, which traditionally had much higher birth­rates, could not match the increasing number of Russians.

Kul’chyts’kyi also describes how the collective farms in Ukraine were weak and badly organized, because the peasants were not convinced psychologically of the advantages of collective work over individual farming. In some in­stances peasants concealed property and destroyed their livestock before en­tering. However, the key factor, in the author’s view, was that the introduction of “socialist consciousness” could only occur under conditions of an existing kolkhoz order. In short, the peasants were in almost all cases unwilling to join collective farms unless they had no land or livestock in the first place. The situation was exacerbated by the administrative structure in Ukraine, which in contrast to other areas of the Soviet Union lacked an oblast section, so that orders were transmitted directly from the center to the rayon (district level). Though oblasts were created between February and October 1932, they were not sufficiently organized to prevent anarchy in the collective farms. The situation was made worse by the incompetence of the republic’s party organs. Ukrainian party leader Stanislav Kosior was cited as declaring that in several regions, especially on the steppe, fields remained unsown and about half of the harvest was lost at the time of threshing, and sabotage by the collective farmers was quite common.⁷ To this point, Kul’chyts’kyi’s analysis does not stray far from the official party line. However, on one issue, this historian al­ready began to forge a new path.

Because of the failure of farms in Ukraine to fulfill grain procurement quo­tas, he comments, Stalin sent Extraordinary Commissions into Kharkiv, Rostov-on-Don, and Saratov, which led to repressions and confiscation of natural and seed funds. However, such methods did not produce the desired results because the new farms lacked supplies of grain. The Commissions es­tablished quotas based on so-called biological harvests of grain. When quotas were still unfulfilled, the explanation provided was that collective farms were exploiting the anarchy in order to take grain into their own homes. This statement, Kul’chyts’kyi writes, ignored the fact that the lack of order on the farms had led directly to harvest losses. The food requisitions only made the situation worse. On 19 January 1933, the Soviet government issued a new de­cree stipulating which part of the harvest would be for the farmers’ own use and restored the concept of a flat tax. Also, in the winter of 1933, the state made an effort to help the peasants, and the Central Committee of the Com­munist Party of Ukraine (CC CPU) created a centralized fund for aid to chil­dren, but state resources were soon exhausted, and it was not possible to buy food abroad.⁸ In short, the situation in the villages was now so critical that an emergency could not be averted.

Notably in this first detailed article about the causes of the Famine, the na­tional question did not enter the discussion and the factors cited were basi­cally economic and administrative issues, affecting the delivery of grain from the villages to the towns. In a similar vein, writing in the newspaper Pravda Ukrainy (July 1989), historian V. Savel’ev, in providing an overview of the main historiographical trends of the time, highlighted the significance of forced collectivization and the arbitrary nature of the administrative com­mand system established under Stalin. He points out the difference of views between those who emphasized these factors and those—like Yurii Shcher- bak⁹—who stressed the genocidal intentions of the all-Union leadership.

Though many articles of 1989-90 had begun to criticize Soviet methods in the Stalin period, their chief focus was the inefficiencies of the administrative- command system and/or what was termed Stalin's criminal policy toward peasants. Writing in May 1990, Grigoriy Koinash, who experienced the fam­ine, declares that the situation in 1932 was much worse than that in 1921. His family lived in Krivyi Rih and was well acquainted with peasants from nearby villages. The author recalls conversations of his father with peasants about the state of agriculture. He maintains that collectivization was unpopular in all quarters and everyone sympathized with the kulaks who had been deported to Siberia. Though one kulak in the region—a “bloodsucker”—merited such treatment, the same was not true for the other victims. Koinash also recalls the drought in 1932, noting that in this summer no rain had fallen, and the earth was covered with cracks. Children had to put on footwear in order not to burn their feet. Most of the harvest was lost to fires. By the summertime, residents in some of the neighboring villages were starving, and peasants no longer appeared in the town because they had nothing to bring to the market. Instead of coming to the aid of the peasants, the government persecuted them for stealing state property. What was the main cause of the famine, which reached its height in the spring of 1933? Koinash is unequivocal: [it arose be­cause of] “the inhuman adventurist policy of the Stalinist leadership, drunk with plans for industrialization.”¹²

By 1991 there were a number of plans in Ukraine to commemorate the Famine more appropriately. In the village Yaroslavka (Ruzhyn Rayon, Zhy- tomyr Oblast) residents decided in the spring to erect a memorial plinth to famine victims and a film about the events was in progress.¹³ Serhii Dyachen­ko, a writer and scriptwriter and holder of the Shevchenko State Prize, already had a screenplay in mind for such a film, which would portray the famine through the eyes of a child.

By December 1991, however, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Famine became a critically important issue for any analysis of the Stalinist past. Ukrainian historians, further, had a broader task to compose for the first time a non-Soviet version of Ukrainian history. For earlier periods they al­ready had the 11-volume history written by Mykailo Hrushevs'kyi. But Hru­shevs'kyi had died in 1934 at the very beginning of Stalin's assault on Ukrain­ian national culture and its political elite. The Famine quickly came to sym­bolize the period of Soviet rule at its cruelest, and Ukraine's persecution at the hands of a centralized Soviet regime based in the capital of Russia. In short time the national and political dimensions of the Famine became more critical than the economic chaos and upheaval caused by the introduction of mass collectivization in 1929-32, with its composite policy of grain procurements and attacks on real and alleged kulaks. In this respect the work of the late American historian James E.

The reanalysis of the Famine as a topic of history took place at a time of dramatic changes in the Soviet Union. The political circumstances posed some problems for Ukraine's historians. Kul'chyts'kyi has remarked elsewhere that he and his colleagues were heavily reliant on Orest Subtelny's book, Ukraine: a History, for several years.¹⁷ Why was there such reliance on a scholar from the West? Subtelny points out that his colleagues in Ukraine, having witnessed the removal of the suffocating restraints of adherence to the official Soviet line, lacked both directions and guidelines. In addition, the teaching of the history of the USSR was de facto the history of Russia, with that of Ukraine limited to about 30 hours of the academic load. However, in the transitional period, prior to the issuance of new Ukrainian history text­books and with the need to come to terms with the recent history of the USSR, Ukrainian historians had to turn to Western scholars of Ukraine for guidance. The work of the latter was elevated to a new authority, ironically perhaps given the inability of these same scholars to gain access to any pri­mary source materials during most of the Soviet period. Thus it became the new practice in Ukraine to cite Western works to add credibility to any article.

Subtelny's book went through three Ukrainian editions between 1991 and 1993. However, what did Subtelny say about the Famine of 1932-33? The answer is: very little. The central point about the Famine, reports Subtelny, is that it was an event that did not have to happen. He cites the well-known quo­tation by Viktor Kravchenko in his book I Chose Freedom: “It's a struggle to the death... It took a famine to show who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay.” Subtelny continues by commenting that because of the tradition of private land ownership, Ukraini­ans tended to resist collectivization more fiercely than Russians.¹⁸ The intro­duction to an article on teaching history in schools in the Ukrainian newspa­per Den' commented that Subtelny's book cannot be considered an academic work, but should be regarded rather as “an outstanding textbook of the West­ern type.”¹⁹ It could not satiate the need for more definitive studies of the Famine of 1932-33. It was thus left to Ukrainian historians to fill the requisite gaps by new investigations into the Famine. Foremost among them has once again been Kul'chyts'kyi, but there have been numerous others, writing in both in the academic milieu and in the popular press.

Gradually, Ukrainian writers and scholars began to delve more deeply into the events of the early 1930s. Kul'chyts'kyi, now recognized as Ukraine's sen­ior scholar on the Famine, published several more articles. Here we will high­light another piece in Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal in September 1991, enti­tled “Between two wars.”²⁰ The article focuses on dekulakization, and the role of Stalin and his two main associates in the field of agriculture: Kaganovich and Molotov. He cites the loss of “hundreds of millions” of poods of grain at the time of threshing and delivery, which he claims was the result of the col­lective farmers' lack of interest in their work,²¹ but he concentrates most closely on the establishment of the grain procurement commission under Premier Vyacheslav Molotov which was given extraordinary powers. In late January, P. P. Postyshev, a secretary of the CC CPSU was also sent into Ukraine with “dictatorial powers.” Kul'chyts'kyi cites Molotov's insistence in November 1932 that a further procurement quota be placed on Ukraine that equaled in dimension the original quota for the period June-October. Reports about the lack of any grain were ignored because the focus was on the “strug­gle for grain.” Because of the failure, even under these stringent conditions, to meet the required targets, Molotov's Commission took from Ukraine all avail­able supplies down to the straw and chaff left after threshing.

In adopting such a policy, the requisition teams were guided by the decree of the Ukrainian government, accepted at the insistence of Molotov, “About measures to raise grain procurements,” of 20 November 1932, which con­tained a clause about applying “natural penalties” of meat for shortfalls in grain. The inference, says Kul'chyts'kyi, is clear. The government was creating the conditions for the complete physical destruction of the rural population, including women and children. Archival documents and newspapers testify that in all localities of Ukraine searches took place for the confiscation not only of grain, but also of sugar, potatoes, beets, and lard as a punishment for “kulak sabotage” of grain procurements.²² The “Holodomor”—Kul'chyts'kyi uses that term—was now in place, and the Soviet government refused all for­eign aid for the starving, while Stalin placed police forces on the Ukrainian border to prevent peasants from crossing into areas that had some supplies of food. In addition, as was pointed out in an August 1991 article by Yurii Shapoval, the decree of 14 December, signed by both Molotov and Stalin, not only applied measures of extraordinary severity for failure to meet grain pro­curements in Ukraine, but also demanded that regional authorities “turn at­tention to the correct implementation of Ukrainization” and the removal of so-called “Petlyurites and other bourgeois nationalists from party and Soviet organizations.”²³