The Advent of Famine
While the south was at the center of Moscow’s attention, the Ukrainian government in Kharkiv had to deal with the entire republic. In the late spring of 1932 the attention of the Ukrainian leadership was focused on Kyiv, V innytsia, and Kharkiv Oblasts, which encompassed the boreal and boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine.
What concerned them was the famine that engulfed the region in the first months of 1932.Famine began to claim lives in central Ukraine and in the tiny Moldavian Autonomous Republic in the winter of 1931-32, about the same time as Oleksandra Radchenko recorded her first mention of famine in her diary. In 1932, there were 13.9 excess deaths per thousand of population in Kyiv Oblast, 9.4 in the Moldavian Republic, and 7.8 in Kharkiv Oblast. Judging by available official correspondence, the areas hardest hit were in southern Kyiv Oblast, around the cities of Bila Tserkva and Uman. Stanislav Kosior singled out those regions in his April letter to Stalin. “What they now mainly expect from those regions is reports that there is nothing to eat; that they will not do any sowing,” wrote Kosior, referring to the expectations of his underlings in Kharkiv. Judging by the tone and content of the letter, Kosior found himself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he subscribed to the official line established in Moscow that there was no famine in Ukraine; on the other, he was sending clear signals that famine was already there.13
What were the causes of the 1932 famine in the southwestern parts of Kyiv Oblast? This area was known as a prime sugar-beet region and often referred to as such in official correspondence, with officials paying special attention not only to the grain harvest but also to the yield of beets and potatoes. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, in southern Kyiv Oblast, wheat—the main object of desire of the authorities in Moscow and Kharkiv—accounted for anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of the land allocated for growing grain.
Still, the wheat and grain harvest was the top official concern, as in any other part of Ukraine. Moscow regarded the entire republic as a grain-producing region and assigned plan targets to the Ukrainian SSR as a whole, not to any group of oblasts belonging to a particular ecological zone of Ukraine. Kyiv Oblast came close to fulfilling its grain-procurement quota in 1931 but did so at a prohibitive cost.In June 1932, the Ukrainian premier, Vlas Chubar, sent Stalin a letter in which he presented his understanding of the causes of famine in southern Kyiv Oblast. “The failure of legume and spring crops in those raions, above all, was not taken into account, and the insufficiency of those crops was made up with foodstuffs in order to fulfill the grain-requisition plans. Given the overall impossibility of fulfilling the grain-requisition plan, the basic reason for which was the lesser harvest in Ukraine as a whole and the colossal losses incurred during the harvest (a result of the weak economic organization of the collective farms and their utterly inadequate management from the raions and from the center), a system was put in place of confiscating all grain produced by individual farmers, including seed stocks, and almost wholesale confiscation of all produce from the collective farms.”14
What that meant in practice was described in the private diary of Dmytro Zavoloka, a party official in Kyiv Oblast. “Grain was requisitioned right up to the top,” wrote Zavoloka in May 1932.
What they found in the granaries and the houses was taken, almost to the last pound (not everywhere, of course). And the poor or middle peasant or collective farmer often had his last pood [of grain] taken away because someone said that he was hiding kulak grain. In certain places grain requisition...turned into cruel treatment of the inhabitants, bordering on usurpation. Also, very often, they dekulakized “kulaks” who were never kulaks at all. But they came up with any odd reason and sold [the farm].15
At the time Zavoloka wrote his assessment of the grainrequisition campaign and its consequences, the famine was reaping its deadly harvest in the boreal-steppe oblasts of Ukraine. According to Chubar, those most severely affected by the famine were individual non-collectivized peasants whose property was requisitioned by the state for their failure to fulfill the procurement quotas.
Next on the list were members of collective farms with large families. By March and April 1932, most villages had hundreds of people either starving or dying of hunger. In May 1932, a representative of the Kyiv Central Committee of the Communist Party picked seven villages in the Uman district at random. There were 216 registered deaths from starvation, and 686 individuals were expected to die in the next few days. In one of those villages, Horodnytsia, wrote the party official to Kosior, “up to 100 have died; the daily death toll is 8-12; people are swollen from starvation on 100 of 600 homesteads.”16The situation in neighboring Kharkiv Oblast was little better. The Ukrainian party official Hryhorii Petrovsky wrote to Stalin in June 1932, after his tour of Kharkiv Oblast, that “famine has engulfed a good part of the countryside.” He requested assistance in the amount of two million poods of grain. “It will take a month or a month and a half for new grain to appear,” wrote Petrovsky. “This means that the famine will intensify.” A month earlier, officials in Moscow and Kharkiv had received a letter whose authors claimed to represent 5,000 peasants, mostly from Kharkiv Oblast, who were trying to board trains heading out of Ukraine in order to get bread and feed their families. “We can sign this declaration with our own blood,” wrote the authors of the letter, “but we are not certain that there is any point in doing so. We inform you in all honesty that until the fruits and vegetables ripen, we are living on the refuse not needed as feed for the chickens, pigs, and dogs of Leningrad, Minsk, Homiel, and other oblasts in the vicinity of Moscow....”17
In June 1932, when party officials in Kharkiv put together a list of raions most affected by the famine, Kyiv Oblast led with ten raions, followed by two other boreal-steppe oblasts, Vinnytsia with eleven raions and Kharkiv with seven. The steppe oblast of Dnipropetrovsk had five such raions, while Odesa Oblast did not make the list.18 In the same month Chubar asked Moscow to send 1.5 million poods of grain to deal with famine in the central regions of Ukraine.
Stalin was opposed. “As I see it, Ukraine has been given more than its due,” he wrote to his right-hand man, Lazar Kaganovich. “There is no reason to give more grain and nowhere to get it from.” 19 Eventually, Ukraine got 300,000 poods of grain from the all-Union reserves—one-fifth of the requested amount. That happened only because Chubar made a strong case that without such relief, the sugar-beet harvest in Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts would be jeopardized. It worked, but only to a degree.20Why did the boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine suffer more from the famine of 1932 than the steppe areas to the south and the boreal areas to the north? If one trusts official assessments (in particular, Chubars letter to Stalin), those areas suffered as a result of a poor harvest of certain crops in 1931, official efforts to make up those losses by increasing grain-procurement quotas, and, last but not least, poor organization of labor on newly established collective farms. It should be noted that the famine was taking place in areas that usually did not lack food supplies. In an average year the stored quantity of grain and potatoes in that part of Ukraine amounted to anywhere between 500 and 750 kilograms per person. Both figures (of wheat production and storage of food supplies) were close to average for Ukraine.