ZGram - 7/25/2002 - "More on the Russian Famine" - Part I

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 25, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I am doing a three-part ZGram in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 that 
happened when my parents were in their early twenties and studying in 
Odessa, the Ukraine.  Therefore, I know this story well from many 
personal accounts.

The following three essays were taken from the exceppent Ukrainian 
website, UKAR, at www.ukar.org  My readers would be well advised to 
visit and get a feel for the early thirties in that part of the world 
- and the horror that came with Bolshewism - financed by Jewish 
banking oligarchs in New York and carried out by mostly Jewish 
revolutionaries.

The first two Parts deal with the actual famine.  The third part 
deals with how it was shamefully reported in America by a Jewish 
Communist, Walter Durante, who wrote for the New York Times

This is Part I

[START]

Collectivization and the famine

BY BOHDAN KRAWCHENKO

UKRAINE FAMINE 1933
Special Edition issued by the
Ukrainian Canadian Committee
Edmonton Branch
October 14, 1983

In 1932 and 1933 millions of people in Ukraine died of hunger.  
Unlike most famines, the one in Ukraine was not caused by some 
natural calamity or crop failure, but was man-made.

The 1920s - "Golden Era"

     The peasantry - about 80 per cent of Ukraine's population - had 
fought pitched battles against landlords during the 1917 revolution 
to realize its age-old dream of owning land.

     When in 1918-19 the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine and made their 
first bid to collectivize peasant land, the Ukrainian peasants 
resisted so fiercely that Lenin ordered "severe punishment" for any 
Bolshevik who preached collectivization.  During the 1920s, peasants 
organized voluntary cooperatives and agriculture thrived.

     In this period the Ukrainian people forced the Bolsheviks to 
change their nationality policy.  The Ukrainian language displaced 
Russian in education, state administration and the mass media.

     Ukrainians were recruited into the party and government.  Within 
the Communist Party of Ukraine there developed a powerful Ukrainian 
wing which demanded an end to Russian domination in economic and 
political life.

     Stalin's policies in 1929 brought the "golden era" to an end

Collectivization

     In 1928 Stalin suddenly announced accelerated industrialization 
in the form of the first five-year plan.  The plan was hastily put 
together and, as a result, billions of rubles were wasted.

     By 1930 it became clear that Stalin's government was running out 
of funds.  Rather than rethink economic strategies, Stalin ordered 
more grain to be squeezed out of the peasantry.

     The quickest method of accomplishing this, according to Stalin, 
was to establish collective farms by expropriating all peasant land, 
grain reserves and livestock without compensation.  Also, collective 
farms would have to turn over all their produce to the state.

     Interestingly enough, when the Nazis occupied Ukraine, they did 
not abolish collective farms: they appreciated this finely tuned 
instrument for the exploitation of the peasantry.

     In Ukraine, collectivization had another aim: to "destroy the 
social basis of Ukrainian nationalism - individual peasant 
agriculture," according to the Soviet newspaper Proletarska Pravda, 
(22.1.1930).

     It was in 1930 as well that Stalin ordered the first of a series 
of purges of Ukrainian cultural and political figures - all part and 
parcel of a program to roll back the achievements of the national 
revival of the 1920s.

The campaign against kulaks

     An essential component of forced collectivization, according to 
Stalin, was the "elimination of kulaks as a class."

     The word kulak conjures up an image of a wealthy, grasping 
peasant.  The reality had little in common with the myth.

     In the 1920s there were laws banning the sale and purchase of 
land and of its rent.  Land was distributed on the basis of the size 
of the peasant family.  Some peasant households did, of course, own 
more land than others.  But these households also had larger families 
to support.

     Compare the richest kulak in Ukraine with an industrial worker.  
In the mid-1920s the average annual income per working peasant in the 
richest peasant farm in Ukraine (comprising about 30 acres) was 200 
rubles.  The average worker, by contrast, made 521 rubles a year and 
received many social-security benefits which were not available to 
the peasantry.

     When the campaign against kulaks began, the Soviet regime was at 
a loss for a definition of the term and produced an arbitrary set of 
criteria.  For example, a household owning a motor of any kind was 
classified as belonging to the kulak category.

     Neither were kulaks those who hired labor.  As the Russian 
demographer M. Maksudov has shown, the majority of those employing 
labor in the countryside were invalids of the First World War and the 
revolution, widows and families with few children.

     The campaign against kulaks, therefore, had little to do with 
economic considerations.  "Dekulakization" was intended to rid the 
countryside of peasants (irrespective of their material standing) who 
were most likely to organize and lead resistance to forced 
collectivization.

     According to official Soviet surveys, Ukraine had 71,500 kulak 
households in 1929.  But according to official Soviet sources, 
between 1930 and 1932, 200,000 kulak households or one million people 
were "eliminated."  The plan for the destruction of kulaks was 
overfulfilled by almost 200 per cent.

The deportations

     Those who resisted collectivization were either executed or sent 
to prison camps and their families were deported to Siberia or the 
Russian Arctic circle.  Peasant activists were deported with their 
families to the northern regions of Russian.

     Here is what some eyewitnesses wrote about their experiences: 
"Barefooted and poorly clad peasants were jammed into railroad cars 
and transported to the regions of Murmansk and the like.  Peasants 
were unloaded into snow about two metres deep.  The frost stood at 75 
degrees below zero.  Without even an axe or a saw we began building 
huts from tree branches.  In two weeks all the children, the sick and 
the elderly had frozen to death."

     The death rate among Ukrainian peasants deported to the 
Sverdlovsk region in Russia was typical: only 2,300 of the original 
group of 4,800 survived the winter.

     The suffering during the deportations was terrible enough, yet 
it pales in comparison with what happened during the famine of 
1932-33.

Grain requisition campaigns

     By the spring of 1930 peasant resistance to collectivization had 
reached such proportions that Stalin panicked and ordered a temporary 
retreat.  In an article entitled "Dizzy with Success," he admitted 
that excesses had occurred and falsely pinned the entire blame on 
local officials.  Moreover, he reassured the peasants that membership 
in collective farms henceforth would be "voluntary."

     In the spring of 1930 there occurred a mass exodus of peasants 
from collective farms.  Thinking that Stalin's regime had learned its 
lesson, peasants worked with a will and brought in an excellent 
harvest - 23.1 million (metric) tons of grain.

     But in the autumn of 1930 Stalin again changed course.  He 
ordered the drive for collectivization to be resumed and the maximum 
amount of grain to be taken out of Ukraine.  A third of the harvest, 
or 7.7 million tons of grain, was taken by the state.

     The renewed collectivization drive produced chaos in 
agricultural production.  The peasantry was given no incentive to 
produce.  By the end of 1930, for example, 78 per cent of collective 
farms in Ukraine had failed to pay peasants for the days that they 
had worked.  Ironically, peasants' payment in Ukraine (in kilos of 
food produce) was half what it was in Russia.  Reassured by his 
success of 1930, Stalin ordered the 1931 quota for grain delivery to 
the state to be set at the same level - 7.7 million tons.

     The 1931 harvest, however - 18.3 million tons of grain - was 20 
per cent smaller than in 1930.  Almost 30 per cent of the harvest was 
lost because of the breakdown of the transportation system.

     Intent on exporting grain to finance industrialization, Stalin 
ordered that it be requisitioned whatever the cost to the peasantry.

     By the early spring of 1932, 7 million tons had been taken.  The 
amount was so great that the republic was short of seed grain by 45 
per cent.

     Ukrainian officials knew that if the rate of grain 
requisitioning continued, famine would break out.  They argued with 
Moscow for a major downward revision of Ukraine's agricultural 
obligations for 1932.

     M. Skrypnyk, Commissar of Education, in July 1932 recounted how, 
while touring the Ukrainian countryside, he had heard from peasants 
that "we had everything taken away from us but the broom."  V. 
Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, insisted that neither the 
peasants nor his administration were at fault for the agricultural 
crisis, but that it was due to the unrealistic plans of Moscow.

     Stalin did lower the amount of grain to be requisitioned in 1932 
to 6.2 million tons, but this was still far above the capacities of 
the Ukraine in view of that year's poor harvest - 14.6 tons.

     Neither did Stalin relax the collectivization drive and, as a 
result, agriculture was plagued by chaos.  Millions of tons of grain 
were lost.

Tightening the noose

     Moscow sent a special mission, accompanied by troops, to oversee 
the 1932 grain requisition.

     Collective farms stopped distributing food to peasants.  For 
example, according to official statistics, only five per cent of 
collective farms in Dnipropetrovsk province handed out food produce 
for days worked in 1932.

     To prevent peasants from feeding themselves by taking collective 
farm produce, a law was passed in August 1932 stipulating the death 
penalty, and under exceptional circumstances, a ten-year sentence in 
labor camps for "theft of socialist property."  Thus, it was reported 
in the Soviet press (Visti, 10.11.1932) that the Dnipropetrovsk court 
had sentenced a group of hungry peasants to the firing squad for the 
theft of a sack of wheat.

     An obligatory delivery system was established for each 
collective farm.  The harvest was organized in the form of a military 
operation, with soldiers guarding grain from the peasants.  Officials 
and peasants who did not fulfill their quotas were treated in 
accordance with the infamous August 1932 decree.

     On 17 December 1932 regulations were tightened even further.  A 
complete economic blockade was ordered of villages that did not 
fulfil their obligations to the state: all trade, all shipments of 
food and consumer goods, whatever their source, were prohibited.

     Officials, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, "had gone over the country 
like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they shot 
and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they have 
reduced some of the most fertile land in the whole world to a 
melancholy desert."

Could have been avoided

     The famine finally subsided in 1934, when the 1933 harvest was 
brought in.  This was because, in the spring of 1933, Moscow "lent" 
Ukraine seed grain.  Moscow also reduced the quantity of grain to be 
delivered to the state to five million tons, about one-quarter of the 
1933 harvest.

     Soviet officials today deny that the famine took place, although 
they do admit that there were problems due to drought.

     If that was the case, then Ukraine should have suffered a famine 
in 1934, not in 1932-33.  The 1934 harvest was the worst in many 
years - 12.3 million tons.

     But there was no famine in 1934 because Stalin reduced the 
amount of grain from existing stocks to feed the population.  He 
could have done this in 1932-33, but he did not.  Instead, he 
deliberately exported 1.7 million tons of grain to the West to pay 
for industrial equipment.

     The offers of international relief organizations to assist the 
starving in Ukraine were rejected by the Soviet government on the 
grounds that there was no famine, hence no need to aid its victims.

     The borders of Ukraine were closely patrolled and starving 
Ukrainian peasants were not allowed to cross into Russia in search of 
bread.

The toll

     How many millions perished?

     Harry Lang, editor of the left-wing Jewish daily Forward, 
published in New York, visited Ukraine in 1933 and was told by a 
high-ranking state official that six million people had perished from 
the famine.

     Other estimates range from 6.5 to 8.5 million.  We will never 
know the exact number.

     We do know that according to the 1926 Soviet population census 
there were 31.2 million Ukrainians in the U.S.S.R.  According to the 
1939 Soviet census this number had dropped by 3.1 million to 28.1 
million.  (There was no emigration from the Soviet Ukraine in this 
period.)  Over a 13-year period, according to Soviet statistics, the 
number of Ukrainians had diminished by 11 per cent.  The population 
of the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, increased by 16 per cent and the 
number of Russians by 28 per cent.

A national tragedy

     When the Ukrainian peasantry was under attack in 1932-33, 
Ukrainian political and cultural leaders sprang to their defense.  
Ewald Ammende, a German eyewitness who analysed this question, wrote 
in 1936: "The widest circle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had 
entered the struggle: teachers, students, Soviet officials, all 
thought it was their duty to protest against a further sucking dry of 
their country....  The Soviet regime was faced by a united people, a 
solid front, including everyone from the highest Soviet officials 
down to the poorest peasants."

     Ukrainian cultural and political leaders paid a heavy price for 
refusing to become unwilling agents in the extermination of their own 
people.

     In 1933, at the height of the famine, a massive purge was 
ordered in Ukraine.  As P. Postyshev, Stalin's henchman in Ukraine, 
pointed out, "almost all people removed were arrested and put before 
the firing squad."

     The purge continued virtually uninterrupted until 1938, claiming 
the lives of 80 per cent of Ukraine's creative intelligentsia.  
Thousands of priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were killed, as 
were that church's 35 bishops.

     The desire to stamp out a Ukrainian national consciousness was 
so extreme that, according to the famous Russian composer, Dmitrii 
Shostakovich, several hundred blind bandurysty - itinerant folk 
singers - were executed.

     Hundreds of thousands of party members were shot.  The purge was 
so thorough that by 1938 not a single secretary of the Council of the 
People's Commissars in Ukraine (the cabinet), not even a single 
deputy of Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Soviet, was left.

     The purges were intended to deal a devastating blow to the 
existence of Ukrainians as a nation.  At the 20th Party Congress in 
1956 Khrushchev said Stalin had even considered deporting all 
Ukrainians to Siberia, but "there were too many of them and there was 
no place to which to deport them."

     With the famine and the purges, Stalin had come as close to 
destroying a nation as his unrestrained power would permit.

[END]