SNYDER, CHAPTER ONE - APPENDIX
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We have examined and critiqued every fact-claim of an anti-Stalin or anti-Soviet tendency in Bloodlands. Those that are not studied and critiqued in the main chapters are covered in the Appendices. In addition, the full texts of some of the longer documents that are referred to in the body of each chapter are contained in the Appendices. This too improves the readability of the main text while still making additional important documentation available to scholars or whoever wants it.
Each such section or "unit" in the Appendices is comprised of the following elements:
A quotation from Bloodlands where the Soviet Union or a pro-Soviet force is accused of some "crime," misdeed, etc. These quotations contain some assertion or "fact-claim."
The text of the footnotes, which constitute the evidence or "proof" of Snyder's fact-claims;
Our study and analysis of the evidence in the footnotes;
Our conclusion as to whether Snyder's fact-claims have been verified or - as almost always is the case - proven to be fraudulent.
Whenever possible we have provided each unit with a title in boldface. These titles are intended only for shorthand reference. They do not fully reflect the contents of the paragraph of Snyder's text that is analyzed in the unit below.
Unlike the main body of the book these Appendices do not constitute a flowing narrative. Some readers will content themselves to studying our critique of Snyder's principle allegations, which is contained in other chapters. Others will want to go further and study our critique of some or all of the anti-Soviet allegations Snyder makes in the book but that are not examined in the texts of the chapters themselves.
The Starving Children
Snyder (22-23) gives some anecdotal accounts of famine-stricken children. A number might be true but are not recorded in any of the sources Snyder cites.
Starving peasants begged along the breadlines, asking for crumbs. In one town, a fifteen-year-old girl begged her way to the front of the line, only to be beaten to death by the shopkeeper. The housewives making the queues had to watch as peasant women starved to death on the side-walks. A girl walking to and from school each day say the dying in the morning and the dead in the afternoon. One young communist called the peasant children he saw "living skeletons." A party member in industrial Stalino was distressed by the corpses of the starved he found at his back door. Couples strolling in parks could not miss the signs forbidding the digging of graves. Doctors and nurses were forbidden from treating (or feeding) the starving who reached their hospitals. The city police seized famished urchins from city streets to get them out of sight. In Soviet Ukrainian cities policemen apprehended several hundred children a day; one day in early 1933, the Kharkiv police had a quota of two thousand to fill. About twenty thousand children awaited death in the barracks of Kharkiv at any given time. The children pleaded with police to be allowed, at least, to starve in the open air: "Let me die in peace, I don't want to die in the death barracks." (22-23)
Sources:
"Quotations: Falk, Sowjetische Städte, 299, see also 297-301";
Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 157, 160.
"On the schoolgirl and the hospitals, see Davies, Years, 160, 220. See also Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 171, 184."
Snyder's claim in this paragraph that "about twenty thousand children awaited death in the barracks of Kharkiv at any given time" is not documented by any of the sources Snyder cites.
Falk, Sowjetische Städte, 299 contains a quotation, in German translation, from the report of a Komsomol activist to the Khar'kov city Soviet on July 4, 1933, describing peasant children coming into Khar'kov: "Wenn man auf die Kinder schaut, sieht man lebendige Skelette..." (When one looks at the children one sees living skeletons...").
Kuśnierz, 157: The quotation "Let me die in peace, I don't want to die in the death barracks" is here. Snyder states that it was the "about twenty thousand children" "in the barracks of Kharkiv" who made this "plea." This is false. According to Kuśnierz, Snyder's source, it was the homeless children in the streets who said this to policemen. What's more, the source of this is the Italian consul in Kharkov - in other words, a fascist, hardly a reliable source.
Kuśnierz, 156 (not 157), citing a Ukrainian nationalist source, says that 27,454 homeless children were "rounded up" in the whole Kharkov oblast' by May 28, 1933. It does not say that all, or indeed any, of these children were in "the barracks of Kharkiv" or "awaiting death," as Snyder claims. Evidence cited below shows that children were given special priority for emergency food supplies, and that the Soviet Politburo - "Stalin" - issued some of these orders.
Kuśnierz notes (p. 156, n. 277) that "according to other data" 6378 children had been taken from the streets of Khar'kov by the end of May, 1933. This figure is contained in Kuśnierz's source, Document 233 of Голод 1932-1933 рокiв. This document appears to reflect attempts by the Khar'kov city authorities to aid homeless children. Snyder has fabricated the claim that the purpose was "to get them [the homeless children] out of sight." It is not in his source.
Kuśnierz, 160: "The schoolgirl" story is here, not in Davies, Years. Kuśnierz quotes it in Polish translation from the collection published by the U.S. Congress in 1990, "Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, p. 1588." (Page 1588 is in volume 3 of this work.) Kuśnierz errs in copying her name, calling her "Olga Lodyga." In reality she identified herself as Ol'ga Odlyga, née Antonova. In the Ukrainian-language interview Odlyga refuses to testify that she saw policemen arresting starving people, despite leading questions by the Ukrainian-speaking interviewer.
Davies, Years, 160, 220, despite Snyder's claim, has nothing at all about "the schoolgirl and the hospitals."
However, on pages 221 ff. Davies and Wheatcroft outline Soviet efforts to help Ukrainian children:
Considerable efforts were made to supply grain to hungry children, irrespective of their parents' roles in society. The Vinnitsa decision of April 29, insisting that most grain should be distributed to those who were active in agriculture, also allocated grain specifically to crèches and children's institutes in the badly-hit districts. On May 20, the USSR Politburo [In Moscow, led by Stalin - GF] issued a grain loan to the Crimea specifically for children in need and aged invalids...
Snyder fails to inform his readers about these and similar efforts documents in Davies and Wheatcroft. This work is one of the most important studies of the 1932-33 famine (along with those by Mark Tauger) and firmly concludes that it was not "deliberate" in any way.
A similar resolution of February 22, 1933, by the Kiev Oblast' buro of the Ukrainian Communist Party to provide food relief to all those struck by famine, is reproduced in translation in the 1997 Library of Congress volume Revelations from the Russian Archives, ed. Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, as document 187 on pp. 417-418.
These works refute Snyder's entire hypothesis of a "deliberate famine." For if the Stalin regime wanted to deliberately starve Ukrainians, why would it take special measures to feed hungry children and aged invalids?
Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 171, 184: Page 171 relates the "fifteen year-old girl beaten to death by the shopkeeper" story. Snyder distorts the story by omitting the detail that the "storekeeper" was "communist," although the original version and Kuromiya, Snyder's source, include it. Why? Could it be because this detail - making the shopkeeper a "communist" - makes the whole story seem phony, sound like anticommunists "going overboard"?
But there is a more serious problem with this story. It is taken from The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, Volume 1, page 284. Its source is an unidentified person using the name "Mariupilsky" - the story is set in the town of Mariupil'. This book was published in the mid-1950s by Ukrainian émigrés in Canada who had collaborated with the Nazis and written hair-raising antisemitic propaganda to recruit other Ukrainians to the pro-Nazi forces. At least one identifiable Ukrainian fascist recounts a story in it.(1)
There's no reason to accept any of them as true. Eyewitness stories are notoriously unreliable as history under any circumstances. A volume of self-serving, largely anonymous stories by Nazi collaborators such as this one is even more unreliable as history. Moreover, the volume claims that there was plenty of food in Russian areas outside the Ukraine, an absurd statement that even fervent anticommunists do not make today.
This collection became known beyond the circles of Nazi collaborators only because Robert Conquest cited it many times in his 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow. Conquest was paid by the Ukrainian Nationalists to write this book. The work is never cited except by extreme anticommunists, such as Kuromiya. Moreover, Conquest has repudiated his original accusation that the famine is deliberate, as we discuss below.
Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 184, does not document anything at all in Snyder's paragraph.
Conclusion: Many of Snyder's claims in this paragraph are not in the sources he cites:
the "city housewives making the queues";
the "party member in Stalino";
the allegation that doctors and nurses were forbidden to treat the starving;
the quota that the Khar'kiv police supposedly had;
the story of the "about 20,000 children" in the "death barracks";
- none are documented. But even if they were true none of these stories would be evidence for Snyder's insistence that the famine was either caused by collectivization or constituted the "deliberate starvation of Ukrainians."
Snyder "Begs the Question" of the Famine (Assumes What He Needs To Prove)
Snyder:
The mass starvation of 1933 was the result of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, implemented between 1928 and 1932. In those years, Stalin had taken control of the heights of the communist party, forced through a policy of industrialization and collectivization, and emerged as the frightful father of a beaten population. He had transformed the market into the plan, farmers into slaves, and the wastes of Siberia and Kazakhstan into a chain of concentration camps. His policies had killed tens of thousands by execution, hundreds of thousands by exhaustion, and put millions at risk of starvation.... (24-25. Emphasis added)
n. 8. For a sophisticated guide to the meanings of the Plan, see Harrison, Soviet Planning, 1-5.
Snyder cites no evidence whatsoever to support this paragraph of invective. We have dealt, or are dealing, with the falsehoods in boldface. In reality, like all previous famines in Russian and Ukrainian history this famine too had environmental, not human, causes.
Harrison, Soviet Planning, 1-5, is a very brief introduction to what Harrison sees as the tensions between balance and "voluntarism" within Soviet economic planning in the early 1930s, concluding that "there was a sense in which they [these two tendencies] needed each other." It contains nothing - no evidence, or even reference - to Snyder's claims of "frightful father," "beaten population," peasants as "slaves," or "concentration camps." It does not even support Snyder's claim that collectivization caused the famine.
The Lie of "Slave Labor"
One hallmark of anticommunist bias and falsification is to call Soviet collective farmers or labor camp prisoners "slaves." The penal systems of the United States today, and many other countries, employ the labor of prisoners. This is never called "slave labor." The proper term used for prisoners' labor in all capitalist countries is "penal labor." Peasants on collective farms (kolkhozes) and Soviet farms (sovkhozes) had nothing in common with the institution of "slavery," any more than they did with serfdom. Neither did prisoners in the Soviet GULAG.
A writer who uses that term is making no attempt to be accurate and so is likely to be untruthful about other matters too. But the basic point to note here is that Snyder "assumes that which is to be proven." Instead of citing evidence that the Five-Year Plan and collectivization resulted in the famine, Snyder simply states it as a fact.
We have already shown that Mark Tauger, and Davies and Wheatcroft have established that the famine was not caused by collectivization but by environmental factors, like virtually all the numerous famines that preceded it. Quotations from these authors are in the main body of Chapter One of this book.
Was the Threat of Mass Starvation "Clear" to Stalin by June 1932?
Snyder:
The threat of mass starvation was utterly clear to Soviet Ukrainian authorities, and it became so to Stalin. ...That same day, 18 June 1932, Stalin himself admitted, privately, that there was "famine" in Soviet Ukraine. The previous day the Ukrainian party leadership had requested food aid. He did not grant it. His response was that all grain in Soviet Ukraine must be collected as planned. He and Kaganovich agreed that "it is imperative to export without fail immediately. (34-5)
n. 34 - On the reports of death by starvation, see Kuśnierz, 104-105. On Stalin, see Davies, Kaganovich Correspondence, 138. On the request for food aid, see Lih, Letters to Molotov, 230. On Kaganovich (23 June 1932), see Hunczak, Famine, 121.
Nothing in any of the sources cited by Snyder here gives any evidence that "the threat of mass starvation" "became clear to Stalin." On the contrary: these sources show that in mid-1932 the Soviet leadership was far from recognizing that a devastating famine was to come.
Kuśnierz, 104-105 contains several reports about starvation. These reports contain nothing about and are therefore irrelevant to charges of "man-made famine" and "deliberate starvation."
Davies, Kaganovich Correspondence, 138: In this letter of Stalin's of June 18 1932 (p. 179 of the Russian edition) Stalin explains to Kaganovich his conclusion that the starvation that does exist in the Ukraine is the result of improper accounting by the grain-collection teams, who instead of accounting for differences have been taking the same from everyone:
В результате этого механически-уравниловского отношения к делу получилась вопиющая несообразность, в силу которой на Украине, несмотря на неплохой урожай, ряд урожайных районов оказался в состоянии разорения и голода, а на Урале обком лишил себя возможности оказать помощь неурожайным районам за счет урожайных районов области.(2)
Translated:
The mechanical equalizing approach to the matter has resulted in glaring absurdities, so that a number of fertile districts in the Ukraine, despite a fairly good harvest, have found themselves in a state of impoverishment and famine, while the regional party committee in the Urals has deprived itself of the capacity to use the districts with good crops in the region to assist regions with bad harvests.
Five days later, on June 23, 1932, Kaganovich wrote to Stalin that, in his opinion, the quantity of grain for the 3rd quarter of 1932 must be "somewhat" reduced. Snyder does not mention this.
10 июля 1932 г. ПБ решило сократить намеченную цифру экспорта хлеба в III квартале и окончательно установить ее 16 июля (Там же. Оп. 162. Д. 13. Л. 11). На заседании ПБ 16 июля экспорт хлеба в III квартале был установлен в размере 31,5 млн пудов (включая бобовые), 20 млн пудов для варранта и 10 млн пудов переходящих остатков, всего - 61,5 млн пудов (Там же. Л. 30). 20 октября 1932 г. ПБ приняло решение сократить экспорт из урожая 1932 г. с 165 до 150 млн пудов (Там же. Л. 133).(3)
Translated:
On July 10 1932 the PB [Politburo] decided to lower the indicated amount of grain for export in the 3rd quarter and to establish it firmly on July 16....At the PB session of July 16 the export of grain for the 3rd quarter was set at 31.5 million poods (excluding legumes), 20 million poods as a guarantee [i.e. in reserve] and 10 million poods carried over, in total: 61.5 million poods. On October 20 1932 the PB adopted a decision to reduce the export from the 1932 harvest from 165 to 150 million tons.
Lih, "Letters to Molotov," is a translation from the Russian original, which we reproduce and discuss below.
3. Forced collectivization resulted in widespread famine.
Before proceeding we should note that this sentence, "Forced collectivization resulted in widespread famine," is an addition by the editors, who assume this rather than trying to prove it. As we have shown, neither Davies and Wheatcroft nor Tauger think this is true.
Lih's text continues:
On 17 June 1932, the Ukrainian Politburo sent Kaganovich and Molotov the following telegram:
On the instructions of our Central Committee, Chubar' has initiated a request to grant food assistance to Ukraine for districts experiencing a state of emergency. We urgently request additional means for processing sugar beets, and also supplemental aid: in addition to the 220,000, and other 600,000 pounds of bread.
In Stalin's view, Ukrainian crop failures were caused by enemy resistance and by poor leadership of Ukrainian officials. On 21 June 1932, the Central Committee sent a telegram, signed by Stalin and Molotov, to the Ukrainian Central Committee and Council of Commissars, proposing to ensure the collection of grain "at all costs." The telegram stated:
No manner of deviation - regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries - can be permitted from the plan established for your region for collecting grain from collective and private farms or for delivering grain to state farms.
On 23 June 1932, in response to S. V. Kosior's telegram requesting aid, the Politburo passed the following resolution: "To restrict ourselves to the decisions already adopted by the Central Committee and not to approve the shipment of additional grain into Ukrains." (All quotations are from The 1932-1933 Ukrainian Famine in the Eyes of Historians and in the Language of Documents [In Ukrainian. Kiev, 1990], 183, 186, 187, 190.
The original document reads as follows:
В результате насильственной коллективизации в ряде районов страны, в том числе на Украине, насался голод. Руководители Украины обращались в Москву за продовольственной помощью. Так, 17 июня 1932 г. Политбюро ЦК КП(Б)У приняло решение послать в ЦК ВКП(Б) Кагановичу и Молотову следующую телеграмму:
«Чубарь по поручению ЦК КП(Б)У возбудил ходатайство [об] отпуске Украине продовольственной помощи находящимся [в] тяжелом положении районам. Настоятельно просим сверх отпущенных для обработки свеклы, а также дополнительной продовольственной помощи 220 тысяч еще 600 тысяч пудов [хлеба].»
По мнению Сталина провалы в сельском хозяйстве на в Украине объяснялись сопротивлением врагов и плохим руководством правительства/республики. 21 июня 1932 г. в ЦК КП(Б)У и Совнарком Украины была направлена телеграма ЦК ВКП(Б) и СНК СССР за подписью Молотова н Сталина. В ней предлагалось обеспечить зернопоставки «во что бы то ни стало». В телеграмме говорилось:
«Никакие уклонения от выполнения установленного для вашего края ... плана по зернопоставке колхозами и единоличными хозяйствами и по сдаче зерна совхозам не должны быть допущены ни под каким видом как в отношении количеств, так и сроков сдачи зерна».
23 июня 1932 г. ПБ в ответ на телеграмму С.В. Косиора о помощи приняло следующее постановление:
«Ограничиться уже принятыми решениями ЦК и дополнительного завоза хлеба на Украину не производить» («Голод 1932-1933 годов на Украине: глазами историков, языком документов» (на украинском языке) Киев 1990 С. 183, 186, 187, 190)(4)
The primary documents cited here are all in various editions of the book Snyder cites.
The June 23, 1932 telegram refusing "to approve the shipment of additional grain to Ukraine" is genuine. But note the word "additional." It implies that grain was already promised to the Ukraine.
This is indeed the case. The Ukrainian Politburo telegram of June 17, 1932 quoted in the Stalin-Molotov volume was preceded the previous day by the following decree of the Politburo of the All-Union Party - that is, by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, et al.:
№ 144 Постанова Полiтбюро ЦК ВКП(Б) про продовольчу допомогу УСРР
16 червня 1932 р.
а) Отпустить Украине 2000 тонн овса на продовольственные нужды из неиспользованной семссуды;
б) отпустить Украине 100 тыс. пудов кукурузы на продовольственные нужды из отпущенной на посев для Одесской области, но неиспользованной по назначению;
в) отпустить 70 тыс. пудов хлеба для свекловичных совхозов УССР на продовольственные нужды;
г) отпустить 230 тыс. пудов хлеба для колхозов свекловичных районов УССР на продовольственные нужды;
д) обязать т. Чубаря лично проследить за использованием отпущенного хлеба для свекловичных совхозов и колхозов строго по назначению;
е) отпустить 25 тыс. пудов хлеба для свекловичных совхозов ЦЧО на продовольственные нужды в связи с уборкой урожая, обязав т. Варейкиса лично проследить за использованием отпущенного хлеба строго по назначению;
ж) настоящим решением считать продовольственную помощь свекловичным совхозам и колхозам исчерпанной.
(5)
Translated:
No. 144. Decree of Politburo of the CC VCP(b) [= Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the formal name for the Party until October 1952] concerning foodstuff aid to the Ukrainian SSR of June 16, 1932 [the title is in Ukrainian; the text in Russian]:
a) To release to the Ukraine 2000 tons of oats for food needs from the unused seed reserves;
b) to release to the Ukraine 100,000 poods of corn for food of that released for sowing for the Odessa oblast' but not used for that purpose;
c) to release 70,000 poods of grain for collective farms in the sugar-beet regions of the Ukrainian SSR for food needs;
d) to release 230,000 poods of grain for collective farms in the sugar-beet regions of the Ukrainian SSR for food needs;
e) to require com. Chubar' to personally verify the fulfillment of the released grain for the sugar-beet Soviet and collective farms, that it be used strictly for this purpose;
f) to release 25,000 poods of grain for the sugar-beet Soviet farms of the Central Black Earth Region for food needs in connection with the gathering of the harvest, first requiring com. Vareikis to personally verify that the grain released is used for the assigned purpose;
g) by the present decision to consider the question of food aid to sugar-beet producing Soviet and collective farms closed.
So it is true that Stalin rejected the June 17 request of the Ukrainian Party's Politburo for more food aid. But what Snyder, as well as the editors of the Stalin-Molotov correspondence, did not disclose to their readers is that one day earlier, on June 16, Stalin et al. had ordered a very large quantity of food grains to the Ukraine.
It is crucial to Snyder's thesis to claim or imply that the Soviet government did not send food aid to the Ukraine. "Deliberate starvation of Ukraine", the "Holodomor", is incompatible with serious attempts by the Soviet state to alleviate the famine. But that is what happened.
Here is a passage from a 1991 article by Mark Tauger:
The harvest decline also decreased the regime's reserves of grain for export. This drop in reserves began with the drought-reduced 1931 harvest and subsequent procurements, which brought famine to the Volga region, Siberia, and other areas. Soviet leaders were forced to return procured grain to those areas in 1932. The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtail grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; the declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported during the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of 1 kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. How Soviet leaders calculated the relative costs of lower exports and lower domestic food supplies remains uncertain, but available evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul'chyts'kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food. Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933. It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934 and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
The low 1932 harvest meant that the regime did not have sufficient grain for urban and rural food supplies, seed, and exports. The authorities curtailed all of these, but ultimately rural food supplies had last priority. The harsh 1932-1933 procurements only displaced the famine from urban areas, which would have suffered a similar scale of mortality without the grain the procurements provided (though, as noted above, urban mortality rates also rose in 1933). The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead to the conclusion that even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.(6)
For our present purposes Tauger's heavily-documented account shows that:
1. The Soviet Politburo did provide a great deal of aid, both in seed grain and in food, to the Ukraine.
2. Stopping all exports would have seriously harmed, perhaps destroyed, Soviet foreign credit and either seriously delayed industrialization or caused it to fail altogether. In a footnote Tauger provides evidence from British archives that Soviet failure to meet its export obligations would have brought disaster: a refusal of future credits, seizure of Soviet assets abroad, and so, probably, the failure of the industrialization program.
But it was industrialization that, together with collectivization, broke the thousand-year cycle of famines in Russia. Industrialization was essential to prevent further famines, as well as to industrialization of other areas of the economy and the modernization of the military.
3. Tauger concludes that "even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine." Davies and Wheatcroft outline the deepening crisis after the Spring of 1932, along with the extensive aid in both seed grain and food granted by the authorities to the affected areas, including to the Ukraine. They document how hunger weakened the farmers and led to late sowing and poor weeding, which further lessened the harvest. Armed with more accurate weather information they "conclude that the weather in 1932 was much more unfavourable than we had previously realized." (119) The state made advances to collective farmers in order to bring in the harvest (124-5). As we noted in the last chapter, the best research on the environmental causes of the famine is by Tauger.
The Soviet authorities greatly overestimated the crop that would be harvested in late 1932. But so did foreign experts, as Davies and Wheatcroft show (127). Hunger limited the strength of the harvest workers (128). Plant diseases were a serious problem. According to Davies and Wheatcroft:
During the harvest of 1932, the poor weather, the lack of autumn and spring ploughing, the shortage and poor quality of the seed, the poor cultivation of the crop and the delay in harvesting all combined to increase the incidence of fungal disease. Reports in the Narkomzem [=People's Commissariat for Agriculture] archives complain that traditional campaigns to disinfect the fields, the storehouses and the sacks for the harvested grain, were all carried out extremely badly in Ukraine. Cairns [the British expert whose overestimation of the 1932 harvest they cited earlier] found that in the North Caucasus 'the winter wheat was extremely weedy and looked as though it was badly rusted', and 'all the spring wheat I saw was simply rotten with rust'. (131)
Conclusion: In June 1932 the authorities were still looking forward to a good harvest. A few pages earlier, Davies and Wheatcroft quote the opinion of one of the foreign experts:
Andrew Cairns, the Scottish grain specialist, travelled extensively in the major grain regions in May and July [1932], reporting very bad conditions, and dismissed the official estimate that the yield would be 7.8 tsentners as 'absurdly too high'. He nevertheless concluded in a cable: 'do not like to generalise about comparative size this and last years harvest tentatively of opinion this years appreciably larger stop.' (127)
Snyder conceals these facts from his readers. The result of his doing so is to suggest that the famine could have been averted through different policies but that Stalin and the Politburo refused to do so. This is false.
Snyder conceals the fact that Stalin et al. shipped large quantities of food grains to the Ukraine in June 1932. This fact alone is fatal to his "deliberate starvation" thesis: one does not ship food to those whom one wishes to starve.
"Stalin's First Commandment": Another Snyder Fabrication
Snyder:
Understanding this religiosity, party activists propagated what they called Stalin's First Commandment: the collective farm supplies first the state, and only then the people. As the peasants would have known, the First Commandment in its biblical form reads: "Thou shalt have no other God before me." (29)
Sources (n. 20, p. 464):
"For the Stalinist "First Commandment," see Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 170.
"See also Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 70."
Here Snyder seems to be trying to deliberately deceive his readers. For why was "the state" collecting produce from collective farms? Naturally, for the non-agricultural areas and for export. The workers in the cities and towns could not grow their own food. Contracts for export had been made a year earlier. In mid-1932 the fact that there was going to be a widespread famine was of course not known to anyone.
Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 170:
Pierwsze przykazanie"
Były kleryk Józef Stalin używał niekiedy wyrażeń zapożyczonych z Biblii. Dzięki aparatowi propagandowemu największy rozgłjs zdobyło wyrażenie "pierwsze przykazanie." Było ono adresowane do chłopów i chodziło w nim o to, że kołchoz powinien najpierw rozliczyć się z państwem, a dopiero potem pozostałe plony podzielić na podstawie roboczodni między pracowników. Deficyt chleba na wsi został spowodowany, jak już wiemy, przez dostawy obowiązkowe dla państwa.
Translated:
"The First Commandment"
The former seminarian Joseph Stalin sometimes uses phrases borrowed from the Bible. Thanks to the propaganda apparatus the expression "the First Commandment" gained great circulation. It was addressed to the peasants, and it meant that the collective farm should first settle with the state, and then divide the remaining crop on the basis of man-days among employees. The deficit of bread in the country was caused, as we have seen, by the supply required for the state.
Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 70: This is a phony citation. There is nothing in Kuśnierz's book about the "First Commandment" or the OGPU using religious language. On the contrary, Kuśnierz records the recollection that some kulaks dressed up as devils and informed superstitious peasants that entering the collective farm was a "pact with the devil" and that the OGPU arrested three of them and sentenced them to prison.
Conclusion: Snyder is untruthful here. Judging from the very sources he cites, the term "The First Commandment" was invented by Kul'chyts'kyy as a section heading. Kul'chyts'kyy does claim that somebody - either the Party propagandists or the peasants - called the grain collection plan by this name, but he cites no evidence that anybody used this term, much less that it was well known.
Snyder claims "that Stalin's own policy of collectivization could cause mass starvation was also clear." (35) His evidence (n. 35 p. 465):
Cameron, "Hungry Steppe," chap. 2;
Pianciola, "Collectivization Famine," 103-112;
Mark, "Hungersnot," 119.
Chapter 2 of Cameron, "Hungry Steppe," a 2010 Yale Ph.D. dissertation, contains nothing that supports Snyder's claim that collectivization "could cause mass starvation," much less that this was "clear".
Pianciola, "The Collectivization Famine in Kazakhstan," was published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 25 (2001). It contains no evidence that collectivization "could cause mass starvation," much less of deliberate starvation.
Mark, "Hungersnot" does not appear in Snyder's bibliography. The following article is almost certainly the one meant: Rudolf A. Mark, Gerhard Simon, "Die Hungersnot in der Ukraine und anderen Regionen der UdSSR 1932 und 1933", Osteuropa 54 (2004), S. 5-12. This article is a long series of undocumented assertions reflecting the Ukrainian Nationalist viewpoint that Snyder also echoes. It contains no evidence to support its assertion, which is also Snyder's, that the famine was caused by collectivization, much less that this was predictable from the outset, as Snyder claims.
Davies & Wheatcroft discuss the Kazakhstan famine (322-326 and 408-9). This basic work is also cited by Cameron and Pianciola. They conclude that there was a "population deficit" by 1939 of "some 1.2 million." This is an estimate based on a projection of what the Kazakh population of Kazakhstan would have been if (a) its natural increase of 1926 had continued through to January 1939 - that is, if there had been no famines in 1928 and 1932-33; and (b) all Kazakhs had remained in Kazakhstan during this entire period. Davies and Wheatcroft cite evidence that large numbers of Kazakhs migrated to other regions in Kazakhstan, and to other regions and republics in search of a livelihood or simply seeking food, while others emigrated to China. (409) For these reasons we cannot know precisely how many Kazakhs died of famine - i.e. the surplus of deaths during the famine years.
None of these sources establish that collectivization was the "cause" of "mass starvation." Snyder is guilty of the logical fallacy of "begging the question" - asserting that which ought to be proven.
More False Citations; Stalins "Personal Politics"; "Starving Peasants on Tour"
Stalin, a master of personal politics, presented the Ukrainian famine in personal terms. His first impulse, and his lasting tendency, was the see the starvation of Ukrainian peasants as a betrayal by members of the Ukrainian communist party. He could not allow the possibility that his own policy of collectivization was to blame; the problem must be in the implementation, in the local leaders, anywhere but in the concept itself. As he pushed forward with his transformation in the first half of 1932 ... (35)
This paragraph is really Snyder's own imagination. Snyder declares that he has determined what Stalin "intended"; what Stalin's "first impulse" was; what Stalin "could not allow"; what "problems" he "saw." How can he possibly know these things? Therefore it is both nonsense, and a deception.
This passage concerns "the first half of 1932." As the discussion above has pointed out, the famine had not yet made itself clear in early 1932. At that time Stalin wrote that he believed the incipient hunger was the result of mismanagement.
Starving Ukrainian peasants, he complained, were leaving their home republic and demoralizing other Soviet citizens by their "whining." (35)
Sources (n. 36 p. 465):
"Quotation: Davies, Kaganovich Correspondence, 138."
("On Stalin's predisposition to personalized politics"), Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 180; Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 152.
Travelling Peasants Were "Whining" - Just Not Starving
There are few factual statements that we can check, such as the statement about "whining." Davies, Kaganovich Correspondence, 138: The relevant part of Stalin's letter to Kaganovich of June 18, 1932 reads thus:
Результатл этих ошибок сказываются теперь на посевом деле, особенно на Украине, причем несколько десятков тысяч украинских колхозников все еще разъезжают по всей европейской части СССР и разлагают нам колхозы своими жалобами и нытьем. (179)
Translated:
The results of these mistakes can now be seen in the matter of sowing, especially in the Ukraine, in that several tens of thousands of Ukrainian collective farmers are still travelling all around the European part of the USSR and are degrading the collective farms for us by their complaints and whining.
So Snyder is correct that Stalin accused the kolkhozniks of "whining." But these peasants could not possibly have been starving, as Snyder claims, and he cites no evidence that they were. Train travel costs money, which starving people would spend on food, not travel. Likewise, moneyless starving people would not have the strength to travel "all over the European part of the USSR." They would need food to have the energy to travel anywhere.
If these farmers were not starving what were they doing? Most likely they were traveling to trade: either taking grain from the Ukraine to trade for other things - the harvest was bad in European Russia too - or taking money, or other goods, to trade for grain.
In normal times this activity was not immoral or illegal. But during a famine the price of food increases greatly. The Soviet government's efforts to distribute food according to need, rather than according to who had the money to buy it at inflated prices, stood in complete contradiction to permitting speculators to travel around buying and selling grain.
A capitalist approach to the famine would mean that, as usual, the well-off would eat and the poor would starve. The Bolsheviks needed to stop any trade in grain because that would destroy all attempts to ration grain, reserving grain only for those who could pay for it with money or goods.
Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 180 - This is a phony citation. There is nothing on this page about any "predisposition to personal politics," whatever that might mean, on Stalin's part. Stalin is not even mentioned on this page, or on the pages before and after it, 179 or 181.
Incidentally, this is a Polish translation of a Ukrainian-language book. What is the point of using it as a secondary source? It is very hard to find. Snyder cites Ukrainian-language works elsewhere, so why not here? Moreover, how could it contain any information about Stalin's "predispositions" that isn't available elsewhere? It is absurd to do what Snyder does - to write about Soviet history from Polish, Ukrainian, German, and English books and articles while failing to use Russian works.
From this and other indications in Bloodlands it appears that Snyder can read Polish well enough. Perhaps he reads Ukrainian too. Perhaps Snyder cannot read Russian, at least not well - or why wouldn't he use Russian primary and secondary sources for Soviet history, instead of Polish and even Ukrainian translations? Or perhaps Snyder has nationalist Polish and Ukrainian historians helping him, but not Russian scholars?
Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 152, is another phony citation. There is nothing about Stalin's supposed "predisposition to personalized politics" here. In fact Stalin's name does not occur on p. 152 of Kuśnierz's book. Stalin is briefly mentioned on page 148 (a report was sent to Stalin), and not again until page 174.
Did Molotov and Kaganovich Explain Starvation as "Laziness"?
Snyder claims that in July 1932 Molotov and Kaganovich
told Ukrainian comrades that talk of starvation was just an excuse for laziness on the part of peasants who did not wish to work and activists who did not wish to discipline them and requisition grain. (37)
His evidence (n. 40 p. 465): "... On talk of starvation as an excuse for laziness, see Šapoval, "Lügen" 136."
This is another phony citation. Šapoval, "Lügen" says nothing of the kind anywhere in this article, let alone on this specific page. The only statement even close is this:
Im Kreml war man davon überzeugt, daß der Getreidebeschaffungsplan realistisch sei und daß die Führer der Ukraine sich mit ihren Bitten lediglich das Leben erleichtern wollen.
Translated:
In the Kremlin they were convinced that the plan for grain collection was realistic and the leaders of the Ukraine just wanted to make their lives easier by their requests.
Shapoval's note to this passage is not a reference to any evidence. Rather it is to yet another secondary source: an entire article by Shapoval himself: "III Konferentsia KP(b)U: Prolog tragedii goloda," in a hard-to-find collection of articles coedited by Shapoval and Vasil'ev in Kiev in 2001. I obtained the book (written party in Russian and partly in Ukrainian) and have studied the article. Evidently Snyder did not. Had he done so he would have - or, at any rate, should have - footnoted it instead of "Lügen..."
In any case, nothing in this article either corresponds to Snyder's claim of "talk of starvation as an excuse for laziness." As he has done many times in this book Snyder has falsely "documented" this fact-claim too with citations which do not, in fact, document it.
Were "Women Routinely Raped, Robbed of Food"?
Snyder asserts:
Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations - and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated. This was the triumph of Stalin's law and Stalin's state. (39-40)
Source (n. 48 p. 465): "...On the party activists' abuses, see Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 144-145, 118-119; and Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 170-171."
Kuśnierz, 144-145: the relevant sentences are as follows:
Dochodziłj też do gwałtów na kobietach. Członkowie komisji ds. Chlebozagotowok we wsi Wesianyki (rejon koziatyński) po libacji alkoholowej w domu chłopa zgwałcili po kolei jego córkę, a później jeden z nich przez pół godziny trzymał nagą dziewczynę na mrozie.
Translated:
There were also examples of rapes of women. Members of the Committee on grain collection in Wesianyki village (koziatyńsky rayon) after alcoholic libations in a peasant's house in turn raped his daughter, and later one of them for about half an hour held the naked girl in the cold.
Kuśnierz mentions this example at page 145. This was a crime, and Kuśnierz cites an archival document. It would be useful to know what kind of document this is. It might be a record of a Party report or even of a prosecution of the offender.
Rape - which is undoubtedly among the most deplorable forms of victimization - occurs in a variety of settings and conditions and is not unique to those discussed in the present narrative. No doubt that the alleged intoxication of male authorities might exacerbate these conditions as well. As such, the question of whether these crime was punished is an important one. Source criticism is fundamental part of the historical method, but Kuśnierz makes no attempt to describe, much less to analyze, this archival source.
On page 117-118 (not 118-119) Kuśnierz writes:
Podczas chlebozagotowok w 1932 r. we wsi Surśko-Mychajliwka w obwodzie niepropietrowskim sekretarz ośrodka komsomolskiego Kotenko gwałcił kobiety oraz brał udział w biciu chłopów.
Translated:
During grain collection in 1932 in the village of Surśko-Mychajliwka, Dnepropetrovsk district, the Komsomol secretary Kotenko raped women and took part in the beating of peasants.
Kuśnierz's source is an article in Ukrainian by V.I. Prilutskii, "Molod' u suspil'no-politychnomu zhitti USRR (1928-1933 rr)" - "Youth in the socio-political life of the USSR (1928-1933) - in the "Ukrainian Historical Journal" (Украïнський Историчний Журнал) for 2002. The source cited by Prilutskii is a report by the Odessa district committee of the Komsomol to Andreev, head of the Ukrainian Komsomol.
The citation is as follows:
Так, в с. Сурсько-Михайлiвському Солонянського р-ну Днiпропетровськоï обл. секретар комсомольського осередку Котенко брав участь у гвалтуваннi дiвчат, побиттi селян, за що був засуджений "аж" на 3 роки. (p. 73)
Translated:
Thus, in the village of Surskaya-Mikhailovskoye, Solonyans'kyy raion, Dniproretrovsk oblast', secretary of the Komsomol cell Kotenko participated in raping women, and beating peasants, for which he was sentenced to "up to" 3 years.
The Odessa district party committee was reporting a crime committed by a Komsomol member for which the guilty man was tried, convicted, and sentenced to "up to" three years. Neither Kuśnierz nor Snyder mentions this fact. (It would be important to have the document from which Prilutskii is quoting, evidently a trial transcript or sentence, but he does not provide it.)
Conclusion: There is no evidence that rape was "routine," as Snyder claims. Moreover, neither of these examples - the only two examples given in the works he cites - concern " women living along," the "pretext of grain confiscations," of "food taken from them after" the rape, etc.
"Stalin's New Malice"
Snyder:
The next day Stalin approached the problem of the famine with a new degree of malice. ...Two politburo telegrams sent out on 8 November 1932 reflected the mood: individual and collective farmers in Soviet Ukraine who failed to meet requisition targets were to be denied access to products from the rest of the economy. A special troika was created in Ukraine to hasten the sentencing and execution of party activists and peasants who, supposedly, were responsible for sabotage. Some 1,623 kolkhoz officials were arrested that month. Deportations within Ukraine were resumed: 30,400 more people were gone by the end of the year. The activists told the peasants: "Open up, or we'll knock down the door. We'll take what you have, and you'll die in a camp." (40)
Sources:
Quotation: Kovalenko, Holod, 44.
The two politburo telegrams: Marochkko, Holodomor, 152; and Davies, Years, 174.
The 1,623 arrested kolkhoz officials: Davies, Years, 174.
For 30,400 resumed deportations, Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 59.
Kovalenko, Holod, 44: The quotation is actually on p. 45. It is the recollection of a child of a kulak family; a 1927 photo of the family is also on p. 45. The original:
Через певний час бригада появлалась бiля нашоï хати. Рвали дверi, тарабанили в шибки так, що ось-ось повилiтають. Я й досi не забуду погроз: «Вiдчини, бо виб'ємо дверi. Заберемо - i зогинеш в тюрмi.»
Translated:
After a certain time the team appeared near our house. They tore down the door, and drummed on the windowpanes so that they were about to shatter. I still have not forgotten their threat: "Open up or we'll knock down the door. We will take away [what we want] - and you will die in jail.
Snyder claims that "the activists told the peasants" in a general sense. But this is false: the account in questions is a single incident.
Moreover, "the activists" had good reason to threaten this peasant. In another part of this same account not quoted by Snyder the author describes how his family did in fact hide wheat, potatoes, and other beets in two holes, in case one was found. The authorities had the obligation to collect any food over and above a minimal amount for the peasant family's own survival, in order to distribute it to others who were starving to death. In fact the peasants were obliged to do this, hence the threat of prison.
Petro Danilovich Gumeniuk, the person whose account this is, born in 1923, would have been 8 or 9 at this time (no year is given). He went on to become a doctor of economics and professor at the Ternopil' Institute of Finance and Economics. His membership in a prosperous peasant family did not prevent him from having a fine career in the USSR. And his family did not starve.
Davies, Years 174 states:
On November 8, Stalin and Molotov insisted in a telegram to Kosior that 'from today the dispatch of goods for the villages of all regions of Ukraine shall cease until kolkhozy and individual peasants begin honestly and conscientiously to fulfill their duty to the working class and the Red Army for the delivery of grain.'
Davies indeed does report on the special commission of three, or "troika," "to simplify further the procedure for confirming death sentences in Ukraine." This is another of the few accurate claims Snyder makes in this book (another is Stalin's remark about "whining" kolkhozniks, above).
The 1,623 kolkhoz officials, plus others arrested for "counterrevolutionary offenses," are also mentioned in a document of December 9. Davies, but not Snyder, informs us that "over 2,000 of those arrested were allegedly former supporters of Petlyura or Makhno" - that is, former anti-Soviet rebels.
It appears that none of these documents have been published in any of the great collections of documents concerning the famine. Snyder has certainly not seen them.
Marochko, Holodomor, 152: First telegram. Marochko says that this is from Stalin to Khataevich:
Вiдповiдаючи на його "шифровку про завезення товарiв на Украïну," Сталiн пiдкреслив, що ЦК ВКП(Б) обговорює питання про "заборону" завезення товарiв для украïнського села на темрiн, поки Украïна не розпочне чесно та акуратно виконувати зменшений план хлiбозаготiвель.
Translated:
Responding to his "coded message about the delivery of goods to Ukraine," Stalin said that the CPSU(b) was discussing the issue of "banning" delivery of goods to the Ukrainian village until the Ukraine frankly and accurately fulfills the reduced grain procurement plan.
It would be good to have the text of this telegram, but Marochko does not give it. Even his "quotations" from it are in Ukrainian, not Russian.
Second telegram. Marochko says this is from Molotov and Stalin to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine:
Повiдомлено, що з 8 листопада "призупиняється вiдвантаження товарiв для сiл всiх областей Украïни," допоки колгоспи та "iндивiдуальнi селяни" не розпочнуть "чесно i добросовiсно виконувати свiй обов'язок перед робiтничим класом i Червоною Армiєю" в справi хлiбозаготiвель.
Translated:
It is reported that on November 8 "shipment is suspended of goods to villages in all regions of Ukraine" as long as kolkhozes and "individual farmers" do not start to "honestly and faithfully perform their duty towards the working class and the Red Army" in the case of grain procurement.
Marochko does not identify the actual text of this telegram either. Both these telegrams would certainly have been in Russian.
"On the 30,400 resumed deportations, see Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 59." Here is the relevant text in Kuśnierz's book:
Rozkułaczanie i deportacje miały również miejsce w okresie późniejszym. 29 marca 1932 r. Biuro Polityczne Komitetu Centralnego KP(b)U w tajnym postanowieniu uchwaliło wywózkę 5 tysięcy rodzin kułackich z Polesia na lewy brzeg Dniepru, w celu wykorzystania ich do pracy w kamieniołomach. Dla zesłanych utworzono tam stałe osiedla kulackie. W okresie pomiędzy 28 listopada a 25 grudnia 1932 r. wysłano na północ ZSRR ponad 30 400 osób.
Translated:
Dekulakization and deportation also took place at a later date. On 29 March 1932 the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U by secret deportation order approved the deportation of 5,000 kulak families from Polesie to the left bank of the Dnieper, in order to use them to work in the quarries. For the exiles there have been established permanent kulak settlements there. In the period between 28 November and 25 December 1932 r. more than 30,400 persons were exiled to the north of the USSR.
Kuśnierz's footnotes are to archival documents which we cannot obtain and check. However, the authoritative 2005 volume Salinskie deportatsii 1928-1953. Dokumenty(7) records no such deportations during any period of 1932, much less the last 6 months. (790)
Conclusion: Marochko does not quote the original text of Stalin's two telegrams as Snyder's reference suggests. Therefore Snyder has not seen the texts either.
According to what Marochko does cite, it appears that if collective farms and individual farmers were to "begin honestly and conscientiously to fulfill their duty," they would not be denied "products from the rest of the economy." The telegram quoted by Davies and by Marochko does not state that a farm or peasant had to completely fulfill their grain delivery quota, only that they had to make an "honest and conscientious" attempt.
It is difficult to find any fault with this regulation, much less to discern in it any "degree of malice" at all. If farms and peasants had money to buy, or agricultural produce to exchange for, manufactured products then they were obligated to do their best to "pay their taxes" - for that's what grain deliveries were.
Nothing in the paragraph supports Snyder's hypothesis of a "deliberate famine."
Did Stalin Call the Famine a "Fairy Tale"?
Snyder says that at the end of 1932 Stalin came to believe that the famine was "a fairy tale", "a slanderous rumor spread by enemies." (41)
His source (n. 52 p. 465): Šapoval, "Lügen," 159; and Davies, Years, 199. The quotation is from Pravda, May 26, 1964.
Davies, but not Shapoval or Snyder, states:
It is not clear whether this statement comes from the archives, from memoirs, or from hearsay.
Either Terekhov, the man who supposedly made this statement, claimed Stalin said this to him or Stalin really did say this to him. Or the whole matter is a fabrication. This is quite possible, as Khrushchev and his men were fabricating - deliberately falsifying and lying - a great deal about Stalin and the Stalin years. We already know, and Snyder has acknowledged, that Stalin knew there was a famine in the Ukraine and elsewhere. Therefore it seems unlikely that Stalin would have used the term "fairy-tale about hunger" ("takuiu skazku o golode").
According to the Pravda article R.Ia. Terekhov, the Khar'kov First Secretary, told this story orally, evidently in 1964. Russian famine scholar Viktor Kondrashin states that Stalin said or wrote these words to Terekhov on February 22, 1933.(8) However, according to a newspaper source "Terekhov R.A." was removed from the post of First Secretary of the Khar'kov Oblast' and city committees on January 29, 1933. (9)Viktor Danilov states that this exchange with Stalin took place "at the end of 1932" (в конце 1932 r.) and Terekhov was removed from office "by decree of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of January 24, 1933" ("Postanovleniem TsK K VKP(b) ot 24 ianvaria 1933 g.")(10)
None of this tells us whether Stalin actually said these words to Terekhov or why. But it seems clear that either the story is untrue, a rumor - which would account for the disagreement about when it happened - or it was a minor flare-up on Stalin's part. Terekhov was moved from Party to government and production work, where he remained until his retirement in 1956.(11) Roman Ia. Terekhov attended the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961 during which Khrushchev made his most ferocious - and utterly mendacious - attack on Stalin but apparently did not speak at the Congress.(12)
Perhaps Shapoval took this story from the 1974 Russian language edition (New York: Knopf) of Roi Medvedev's book Let History Judge (In Russian: K sudu istorii), where it occurs on page 213. Medvedev's book is the source of many rumors about Soviet history that have been passed on as "fact."
As to the rest of the quotation, Snyder again "begs the question" by "assuming that which should be proven": namely, that collectivization caused the famine. Amazingly enough, though Snyder's whole thesis of "Soviet mass murder" is largely predicated upon this statement, he never tries to prove it or provides any evidence at all that it is so. As we have already shown, it cannot be proven, because it is false. Famines had occurred every 2-4 years in Russia and Ukraine for at least a millennium.
Nor does Snyder give any evidence at all for his claim that:
Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress. (40-41)
But even in this Pravda version Stalin does not refer to "enemies," as Snyder claims. Therefore this is pure fabrication on Snyder's part, unless it is an oblique reference to one of the accusations Khrushchev made against Stalin in his famous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. The present author has fully exposed Khrushchev's falsehoods in this speech in an earlier book.(13)
Did Stalin Believe that "Starvation Was Resistance"?
Snyder makes the following claim:
Resistance to his policies in Soviet Ukraine, Stalin argued, was of a special sort, perhaps not visible to the imperceptive observer. Opposition was no longer open, for the enemies of socialism were now "quiet" and even "holy." The "kulaks of today," he said, were gentle people, kind, almost saintly."
His sources (n. 53 p. 465):
Quotations: Ukraina, 124.
"See also" Vasiliev, "Tsina," 60; Kuromiya, Stalin, 110.
Here we have three citations - to Kuśnierz, Vasiliev, and Kuromiya. But in reality they all refer to the very same document! Moreover, it is a document that has been available in English for 60 years and can be easily found on the Internet today.
Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 124 quotes from the well-known speech of Stalin's of January 1, 1933. This speech was published in 1950 in volume 13 of Stalin's Collected Works and has been available in English, to say nothing of Russian, for more than 60 years. Is on the internet in Russian and English. The fact that Snyder quotes this document from a Polish-language book once again suggests either that Snyder does not read even the most basic texts in Russian, or that he is not interested in helping his readers find the sources.
In this speech Stalin was ironic in calling the "kulaks of today" "gentle, kind, almost saintly." The context shows this:
People look for the class enemy outside the collective farms; they look for persons with ferocious visages, with enormous teeth and thick necks, and with sawn-off shotguns in their hands. They look for kulaks like those depicted on our posters. But such kulaks have long ceased to exist on the surface. The present-day kulaks and kulak agents, the present-day anti-Soviet elements in the countryside are in the main "quiet," "smooth-spoken," almost "saintly" people. There is no need to look for them far from the collective farms; they are inside the collective farms, occupying posts as store-keepers, managers, accountants, secretaries, etc. They will never say, "Down with the collective farms!" They are "in favour" of collective farms. But inside the collective farms they carry on sabotage and wrecking work that certainly does the collective farms no good. They will never say, "Down with grain procurements!" They are "in favour" of grain procurements. They "only" resort to demagogy and demand that the collective farm should reserve a fund for the needs of livestock-raising three times as large as that actually required; that the collective farm should set aside an insurance fund three times as large as that actually required; that the collective farm should provide from six to ten pounds of bread per working member per day for public catering, etc. Of course, after such "funds" have been formed and such grants for public catering made, after such rascally demagogy, the economic strength of the collective farms is bound to be undermined, and there is little left for grain procurements.
Vasiliev, "Tsina," 60: Vasiliev summarizes this same speech on pp. 59-61 - but in Ukrainian! It adds nothing by way of commentary.
Kuromiya, Stalin, 110: This is simply two quotations from Stalin's January 1933 report to the joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee. This speech is the fuller version of the talk "Work in the Countryside" quoted above. It is identical to the first citation in this note.
Snyder's citation of a document in a Polish and a Ukrainian source of a document readily available in English as well as in the original Russian can have no purpose except to "impress" his readers with this show of "scholarship." Readers of Bloodlands will have no idea that he is doing this. They will think that Kuśnierz and Vasiliev actually have something to add. Nor is there any need here for the Kuromiya citation, when the primary source is available on the Internet.
"Starvation Was Resistance": Another Snyder Fabrication
There is no evidence whatever for the following statements made by Snyder here, who merely relies on the same footnote 53 as discussed above:
People who appeared to be innocent were to be seen as guilty. A peasant slowly dying of hunger was, despite appearances, a saboteur working for the capitalist powers in their campaign to discredit the Soviet Union. Starvation was resistance, and resistance was a sign that the victory of socialism was just around the corner. These were not merely Stalin's musings in Moscow; this was the ideological line enforced by Molotov and Kaganovich as they traveled through regions of mass death in late 1932. (41)
Snyder has simply invented all this. Few readers of Bloodlands will realize that it is a pure fabrication of Snyder's own - and that, no doubt, is why Snyder inserted it.
Snyder:
Forced to interpret distended bellies as political opposition, they [Stalin's "comrades in the Soviet Ukraine"] produced the utterly tortured conclusion that the saboteurs hated socialism so much that they intentionally let their families die. Thus the wracked bodies of sons and daughters and fathers and mothers were nothing more than a façade behind which foes plotted the destruction of socialism. (41)
Sources (n. 54, p. 466): "On the family interpretation (Stanislaw Kosior), see Davies, Years, 206."
Snyder's statement is false - a fabrication. Kosior said nothing about "hatred of socialism" or any "tortured conclusions."
Davies, quoted below at the reference Snyder gives, accurately summarizes Kosior's statement. We would add that Kosior gave only two examples, and only the first was of a farmer who let his children go hungry while keeping grain. Kosior does not give the age of the farmer's children, whom he cast out. For all we know, they could have been adults.
Davies, Years, 206:
"And on February 9, Kosior circulated a report to the Ukrainian Politburo listing cases where, he claimed, 'malicious withholders of grain have brought their families to real hunger (the children swell up)', even though they possessed several tsentners of grain.
n. 281 - "TsDAGOU, 1/101/1282,2, published in Golod 1932-1933 (1990) 375-6.
In Davies, Years, Bibliography, p. 526, the full title of this book is given thus: "Golod 1932-1933 rokiv na Ukraini: ochima istorikiv, movoyu dokumentiv" (Kiev, 1990). The text in the original Ukrainian, from this source, is as follows:
№ 161
ДОВIДКА IНФОРМАЦIЙНОГО СЕКТОРА ОРГIНСТРУКТОРСЬКОГО ВIДДIЛУ ЦК КП(б)У
ПРО ВИПАДКИ УДАВАНОГО ГОЛОДУВАННЯ З МЕТОЮ НЕЗДАЧI ХЛIВА
У ХАРКIВСЬКIЙ ОБЛАСТI*
9 лютого 1933 р.
Некоторые РПК сообщают, что в борьбе против хлебозаготовок злостные несдатчики хлеба доводят свою семью до действительного голода (дети пухнут).
Бригадировский РПК (Харьковская область) пишет 1 февраля: в Васильевском сельсовете, контрактант III группы Яковец Влас, имея 4,45 га посева, контрактации 27,8 ц не сдал ни одного килограмма хлеба, но покинул детей, которые сейчас нищенствуют.
Бригада по хлебозаготовкам обнаружила у него закопанный хлеб в ямах: 5 ц, 2,35 ц, 5,23 ц и 6,42 ц.
Подобное же сообщает и Якимовский РПК. Колхозник Клименко из артели им. Молотова кричал: "Я голодный и мои дети пухнут." После проверки у него выявлено 2,5 ц хлеба, хотя на трудодни он получил только 90 кг.
Заведующий информационным сектором Оргинструкторского отдела ЦК КП(б)У
Стасюк
Па IIП при ЦК Компартiï Украïни. Ф. 1. Оп. 101. Спр. 1282. Арк. 2.
* Ця довiдка за дорученням С. В. Косiора була направлена для ознайомлення всiм членам та кандидатам у члени Полiтбюро ЦК КП(б)У.(14)
(РПК = Районные общества потребительской кооперации, или РайПотребКооперация.)
Translated:
Some of the RPK reported that in the fight against grain procurements malicious withholders of grain bring their families to real hunger (the children swell up).
Brigadirovsky RPK (Khar'kov region) writes on February 1: in the Vasil'evskii village hall, the contractor of group III Yakovets Vlas, with 4.45 hectares of crops, contracting 27.8 tsentners, did not give a single pound of bread, but cast his children out, and they now live by begging.
The team for grain procurement found at his place, buried in pits: 5 ts[entners], 2.35 ts[entners], 5.23 ts[entners] and 6.42 ts[entners].
The Iakimovski RPK gives a similar report. Collective farmer Klimenko of the Molotov artel' shouted: "I'm hungry and my children are swelling up." After verification 2.5 tsentners of grain were found at his place, although he had received only 90 kg. in workday pay.
(RPK = Regional Society of Consumer Cooperatives)
Conclusion: Snyder's fabrications here are as follows:
There is no evidence that Stalin was "forced to interpret distended bellies as political opposition."
There is nothing here about "intentionally let[ting] their families die."
There is nothing about "the wracked bodies of sons and daughters and fathers and mothers were nothing more than a façade behind which foes plotted the destruction of socialism."
Yet these are the statements for which Snyder cites the Davies passage evidence. Davies cites Kosior, whose actual statement we have reproduced above. It could hardly be clearer that Snyder has invented all this.
Should Stalin Have Predicted The Future?
Snyder:
Yet Stalin might have saved millions of lives without drawing any outside attention to the Soviet Union. He could have suspended food exports for a few months, released grain reserves (three million tons), or just given peasants access to local grain storage areas. Such simple measures, pursued as late as November 1932, could have kept the death toll to the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. Stalin pursued none of them. (41-2; emphasis added)
His sources (n. 55 p. 466): "For similar judgments, see, for example"
Jahn, Holodomor, 25;
Davies, Tauger, and Wheatcroft, "Grain Stocks," 657;
Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 237;
Graziosi, "New Interpretation," 12.
Jahn, Holodomor, 25 cites no evidence for any of the claims on this page. One might object that Snyder simply claims he makes "similar judgments." But "judgments" are of no validity without evidence. Like Snyder himself, Jahn has none. Jahn's article is in the ideologically anticommunist journal Osteuropa; it is a statement of is anticommunist beliefs, not a scholarly study of the famine or of anything else.
Jahn also claims that there was no natural famine caused by environmental reasons, or even from insufficient food production, but solely from deliberate "Nahrungsentzugs" - "withdrawal of foodstuffs." Jahn even doubts whether the government was aware of the starvation! None of the specialists on the famine like Davies and Wheatcroft or Tauger conclude anything like this.
Davies, Tauger, and Wheatcroft, "Grain Stocks," 657: In Snyder's list of references the only specialists on the famine with any claim to objectivity are Davies, Tauger, and Wheatcroft.(15) Here is what they have to say:
We therefore conclude:
1. All planners' stocks - the two secret grain reserves, Nepfond and Mobfond or Gosfond, together with "transitional stocks" held by grain organizations - amounted on 1 July 1933 to less than 2 million tons (1.997 million tons, according to the highest official figure). Persistent efforts of Stalin and the Politburo to establish firm and inviolable grain reserves (in addition to "transitional stocks") amounting to 2 or 3 million tons or more were almost completely unsuccessful. In both January-June 1932 and January-June 1933 the Politburo had to allow "untouchable" grain stocks set aside at the beginning of each year to be used to meet food and fodder crises. On 1 July 1933 the total amount of grain set aside in reserve grain stocks (fondy) amounted not to 4.53 million tons as Conquest claimed but only 1.141 million. It is not surprising that after several years during which the Politburo had failed to establish inviolable grain stock, Kuibyshev in early 1933 recommended a "flexible approach" to Nepfond and Mobfond, denied that they were separate reserves and even claimed that the flexible use of the two fondy had enabled uninterrupted grain supply in spring and summer 1932. (Emphasis added)
In the quotation above Snyder claims, without any reference, that the USSR held three million tons of grain in reserve "as late as November 1932."
But here Davies and Wheatcroft claim that (a) the grain reserves were likely less than two million tons; (b) that in the first half of 1932 and again in the first half of 1933 "the Politburo had to allow 'untouchable' grain stocks set aside at the beginning of each year to be used to meet food and fodder crises." That is, the Politburo did, in fact, release grain reserves to alleviate the famine.
Davies and Wheatcroft continue:
2. We do not know the amount of grain which was held by grain-consuming organizations, notably the Red Army, but we suspect that these "consumers' stocks" would not change the picture substantially.
3. These findings do not, of course, free Stalin from responsibility for the famine. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess the extent to which it would have been possible for Stalin to use part of the grain stocks available in spring 1933 to feed starving peasants. The state was a monopoly supplier of grain to urban areas and the army; if the reserves of this monopoly supply system - which amounted to four-six weeks' supply - were to have been drained, mass starvation, epidemics and unrest in the towns could have resulted. Nevertheless, it seems certain that, if Stalin had risked lower levels of these reserves in spring and summer 1933, hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of lives could have been saved. In the slightly longer term, if he had been open about the famine, some international help would certainly have alleviated the disaster. And if he had been more far-sighted, the agricultural crisis of 1932-1933 could have been avoided altogether. But Stalin was not hoarding immense grain reserves in these years. On the contrary, he had failed to reach the levels which he had been imperatively demanding since 1929. (Emphasis added.)
Snyder claimed that Stalin "could have kept the death toll to the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions." Davies, Tauger, and Wheatcroft surmise that "hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of lives could have been saved" - but only by risking "mass starvation, epidemics and unrest in the towns."
Mark Tauger, as we have seen, goes further:
The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead to the conclusion that even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. (Emphasis added, GF)
However, both Snyder and Davies et al. tacitly assume that the Soviet leadership - "Stalin" - could have known in advance that the famine would end in 1933 with a good harvest. Of course neither the Soviet leadership nor anyone could possibly know this. For all they or anyone knew, the famine would continue unabated during 1933. Since they could not know when the famine would end the Soviet state retained grain stocks.
Moreover, no government in the world would have deprived its army of foodstuffs. That was especially the case with the USSR, which was surrounded by hostile states. Nor would any government have deprived the cities of food reserves and risked "mass starvation, epidemics and unrest." A central aspect of the plan to end the cycle of starvation, collectivization, depended upon production of labor-saving farm machinery such as tractors and harvesters. These were produced in the cities.
The USSR had received large-scale international aid during the Volga famine of 1921-22 that followed the incredibly destructiveness of the First World War and Civil War, the typhus epidemic, and very poor weather conditions. But there is no reason to think that significant international aid would have been forthcoming in the same way in 1933, the depths of the Great Depression. Davies, Tauger and Wheatcroft do not give any evidence for this assertion.
Kulczycki, Hołodomor, 237:
W 1932 roku na rynki zagraniczne wysłano 107,9 miliona pudów zboża. W bilansie ziarna spożywczego i paszowego, sporządzonym przez Ukrzernocentr, na wyżywienie jednej osoby na wsi przewidziano 16 pudów rocznie. Oznacza to, że dzięki zbożu wywiezionemu w 1932 roku mozna było uratować od śmierci wszystkich zmarłych z głodu w Związku Radzieckim w 1933 roku.
Translated:
In 1932 there were sent to foreign markets 107.9 million poods of grain. According to the balance of food and feed grains, prepared by Ukrzernocentr [Ukraine Grain Center], to feed one person in the village were required 16 poods per year. This means that the grain exported in 1932 could have saved from death all who died of starvation in the Soviet Union in 1933.
Here Kul'chyts'kyy too absurdly suggests that if only Stalin had known a year in advance that there would be a great famine in 1933, he ought not to have exported any grain in 1932!
Graziosi, "New Interpretation" has no "page 12." On p. 108, the twelfth page in the article, we do read "similar judgments," in that Graziosi asserts that the famine was deliberate. But, like Snyder, Graziosi fails to cite any evidence that this was the case. The simple assertion of Graziosi, or of anyone, is not evidence.
"Begging the Question" Again: Assertions Without Evidence
Snyder:
This final collection was murder, even if those who executed it very often believed that they were doing the right thing. As one activist remembered, that spring he "saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes." Yet he "saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide." He had faith: "As before, I believed because I wanted to believe." Other activists, no doubt, were less faithful and more fearful. Every level of the Ukrainian party had been purged in the previous year; in January 1933, Stalin sent in his own men to control its heights. Those communists who no longer expressed their faith formed a "wall of silence" that doomed those it surrounded. They had learned that to resist was to be purged, and to be purged was to share the fate of those whose deaths they were now bringing about. (46)
Sources (n. 67 page 466):
"For the recollections of the activist," Conquest, Harvest, 233.
"For quotation and details on the importance of purges," Šapoval, "Lügen," 133.
"On purges of the heights," Davies, Years, 138.
Snyder cites no evidence at all that "this final collection was murder." Rather, this is yet another example of "begging the question": he is supposed to prove "murder," not merely assert it.
The "activist" quoted by Conquest is Lev Kopelev, from his memoir published in 1980. The quotation only documents that people starved, a fact that no one denies. Snyder quotes this passage later in the book as well. In his old age Kopelev came to believe that the famine was "man-made" but he had no such doubts at the time.
In Chapter One of the present books we have quoted Robert Conquest's repudiation of his former position, expressed in his book The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) that the famine was "man-made." Snyder is aware of this too because he cites, and therefore has read, Davies and Wheatcroft, where Conquest's repudiation is published. Therefore, Snyder is simply concealing this information from his readers.
Shapoval, "Lügen," has no such quotation on p. 133. He does mention arrests of heads of kolkhozes for sabotaging grain collections, but up to January 1, 1932 - well before the famine. He states that 80% of raion secretaries were removed in the first half of 1932, but says nothing about any relation to the famine.
But even these statements fo not refer to any primary source evidence. Instead Shapoval refers us to a book of his own that is hard to find in the US. Shapoval refers to "page 160" of this book. This is a page of an article of his own, Shapoval's, in Ukrainian. The very same text - the entire article - is also published in Russian, immediately following the Ukrainian text. Ukrainian p. 160 corresponds to Russian pp. 173-174.
And this page does contain interesting information. For instance, it reveals that the 1932 plan for grain collection from the Ukraine was officially reduced three times. Even then it had been less than half-fulfilled by November 1, 1932.
Делегаты конференции прнияли резолюцню, которую 9 июля 1932 года утвердил пленум ЦК КП(б)У и которой «к безусловному исполнению» прини мался установленный для Украины план хлебозаготовок - 356 млн. пудов по крестьянскому сектору. Этот план впоследствии трижды сокращался, а к 1 ноября 1932 года от крестьянского сектора Украины поступило лишь 136 млн. пудов хлеба.(16)
Translated:
Delegates to the conference passed a resolution which was confirmed by the Plenum of the CC of the CP(b)U on July 9 1932 and by which "for unconditional fulfillment" the established grain collection plan for the Ukraine was accepted - 356 million poods from the peasant sector. This plan was thereafter reduced in size three times, and by November 1 1932 only 136 million poods of grain had been obtained from the peasant sector of the Ukraine. (Emphasis added)
Shapoval's source for this statement is a 48-page pamphlet published in 1989 by Kul'chyts'kyy.(17) But it isn't likely that Shapoval invented it, since it does not tend to support his anticommunist and "Holodomor" bias. Why would Stalin et al. reduce the plan for grain collection from the Ukraine if their aim was to starve Ukrainians?
In a later work Kul'chyts'kyy explains that in 1989 he did not understand that the famine was a "Holodomor"!(18) In 1990 the fabrication-myth of the "Holodomor" had not yet become obligatory, the "Ukrainian Nationalist party line."
"To Be Purged = Death"?
Shapoval has nothing about the "purged," i.e. demoted officials "sharing the fate of those whose deaths they were now bringing about" - i.e., suffering execution. Snyder apparently invented this, as he invented the "five million murdered." Even Shapoval does not claim that these sources have any bearing at all on Snyder's point: the question of whether the famine was "deliberate."
Davies, Years, 138 has nothing about any "purges of the heights" or of anything else in Snyder's paragraph. Davies discusses January 1933 in the pages beginning at p. 197 ff. There is nothing about "the heights" here either.
"Collective Farming Did Not Work"
Snyder makes the following claim which can only be called bizarre:
Ukrainians who chose not to resist the collective farms believed that they had at least escaped deportation. But now they could be deported because collective farming did not work. Some fifteen thousand peasants were deported from Soviet Ukraine between February and April 1933. Just east and south of Soviet Ukraine, in parts of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union inhabited by Ukrainians, some sixty thousand people were deported for failing to make grain quotas. In 1933 some 142,000 more Soviet citizens were sent to the Gulag, most of them either hungry or sick with typhus, many of them from Soviet Ukraine. (47-8; emphasis added GF)
Sources (n. 72 p. 466):
"On the fifteen thousand people deported," Davies, Years, 210.
"On the sixty thousand people deported from Kuban," Martin, "Ethnic Cleansing,"
Snyder's claim that "collective farming did not work" is ideologically-motivated nonsense. There had been famines for a thousand years in Russia and in the Ukraine, long before collective farming. Like it or not - and Snyder obviously doesn't - collective farming put an end to the age-old cycle of famines. The collective farms "worked" until the end of the USSR when they were forcibly dissolved.
Evidently Snyder is trying to please today' Ukrainian nationalists, who favor the kulaks and despise the poor peasants, many of whom helped the collectivization movement. For a great many poor peasants did help collectivization and also helped grain procurement. The late James E. Mace, a hero to Ukrainian Nationalists and a staunch anticommunist, reluctantly acknowledged the important role of the Committees of Poor Peasants, or "Komitety nezamozhnykh selian" in the collectivization movement in the Ukraine.(19)
Davies, Years, 211 relates that 15,000 households, not "peasants," were exiled "for refusing to collect in the seed, and to sow, and for much vaguer reasons." Davies refers briefly to archival materials. These persons were clearly not starving, since they had grain, including seed grain.
Deportations and Martin's Error
Martin, "Ethnic Cleansing," 846 states:
... ultimately, a total of 60,000 Kuban Cossacks were deported for failing to meet their grain requisitions.
The 2005 volume Stalinskie Deportatsii gives the number as 45,000 (790). However Martin's whole article is of questionable reliability since it contains at least one serious error. On this same page 846 Martin states:
The December 14 Politburo decree ordered the deportation of the entire Kuban Cossack town of Poltava for "the sabotage of grain delivery."
Martin is in error. Poltava is a city in the Ukraine. Its inhabitants were not deported. Martin has confused this town with stanitsa Poltavskaia, or just plain Poltavskaia, a Kuban Cossack village in the Krasnodar region of Russia. All of its 9,000 inhabitants wre deported in December, 1932 for sabotage of grain collection, and the town was resettled by demobilizied Red Army men and renamed "Krasnoarmeiskaia" (= "Red Army village").
The Bolsheviks published a booklet explaining why its inhabitants had been deported.(20) This pamphlet is cited in Roi Medvedev's book Let History Judge. Today the whole text of that pamphlet is available to anyone on the internet.(21) There's no excuse for this elementary error by Martin.
The deportations in question were from the Kuban. Moreover, Martin explicitly states these were Kuban Cossacks, not Ukrainians. Cossacks do not consider themselves either Ukrainians or Russians, though Kuban Cossacks usually speak Ukrainian.
Snyder evidently wants us to believe that this was somehow an anti-Ukrainian action, and so does not say "the Kuban," but instead uses the clumsy circumlocution "parts of the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union inhabited by Ukrainians." This is another passage suggesting that Snyder is trying to conform to the historical falsehoods of Ukrainian nationalists.
According to the authoritative book Stalinskie deportatsii 1928-1953 (2005) published by the strongly anticommunist and anti-Stalin "Memorial Society" during 1932 313,000 kulaks and others were deported "from various areas" to Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Urals, "and elsewhere."
Snyder gives no evidence for the following statement:
In 1933 some 142,000 more Soviet citizens were sent to the Gulag, most of them either hungry or sick with typhus, many of them from Soviet Ukraine.
Neither Davies nor Martin say anything about any 1933 sending of "Soviet citizens to the Gulag," as Snyder claims in the passage under discussion, much less that they were "hungry, or sick with typhus" or that "many" were "from Soviet Ukraine."
Snyder:
In the camps they tried to find enough to eat. Since the Gulag had a policy of feeding the strong and depriving the weak, and these deportees were already weak from hunger, this was desperately difficult. When hungry prisoners poisoned themselves by eating wild plants and garbage, camp officials punished them for shirking. At least 67,297 people died of hunger and related illnesses in the camps and 241,355 perished in the special settlements in 1933, many of them natives of Soviet Ukraine. Untold thousands more died on the long journey from Ukraine to Kazakhstan or the far north. There corpses were removed from the trains and buried on the spot, their names and their numbers unrecorded. (48)
Sources (n. 73 p. 467):
"On the 67,297 people who died in the camps," Khlevniuk, Gulag, 62, 77.
"On the 241,355 people who died in the special settlements," Viola, Unknown Gulag, 241.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the GULAG from Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale University Press, 2004), 77, does indeed cite this figure. Khlevniuk usefully gives the death rate for 1932 (4.8%) and for 1933 (15.2%). Assuming the difference is due to the famine, if 4.8% of the 440,008 prisoners in 1933 had died, that would be 21,121 people instead of 67,297, meaning that about 46,176 deaths in 1933 were above the rate of 1932 and thus largely or wholly attributable to the famine.
But this doesn't really tell us anything. Nobody denies that there was a terrible famine in 1932-33. The question is: Was the famine "man-made" by collectivization, and "deliberate," in that "Stalin" took grain away from starving people for the purposes of political punishment? These figures tell us nothing about this.
Lynne Viola, The Unknown GULAG. The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements (Oxford University Press, 2007) cites the figure of 241,355 deaths on page 141, not page 241. Viola herself cites V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR 1930-1960 (Moscow: Nauka, 2003).
Zemskov's figures are 89,754 deaths in 1932 and 151,601 in 1933 for the total of 241,355. These figures tell us nothing about the famine. The special settlements, as their name implies, were villages, not prisons, and included families - old persons, parents, children. There is no indication how many of these people died above the number that would be expected to die in non-famine years.
Conclusion: Snyder gives no evidence for the following statements:
that "the Gulag had a policy of feeding the strong and depriving the weak";
that "hungry prisoners" were "punished for shirking" for "eating wild plants and garbage";
that "untold thousands" died on the journey or that no records were kepts of such deaths.
Evidently he has invented these "facts."
Snyder relates more horror stories of starving people. Whether these specific stories are true or not is not important. Terrible things happen during famines, so these stories could be true and, if they are not, other similar to them undoubtedly were.
But they have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue of whether the famine was "man-made," "deliberate" or not. They do not even help us understand whether the Soviet authorities should have handled it differently than they did.
Snyder: "Half a Million Youngsters in Watchtowers"
In a broader sense, though, it was politics as well as starvation that destroyed families, turning a younger generation against an older. Members of the Young Communists served in the brigades that requisitioned food. Still, younger children, in the Pioneers, were supposed to be "the eyes and ears of the party inside the family." The healthier ones were assigned to watch over the fields to prevent theft. Half a million preadolescent and young teenage boys and girls stood in the watchtowers observing adults in Soviet Ukraine in summer 1933. All children were expected to report on their parents. (50)
Sources (n. 79 p. 467):
"On the half a million boy and girls in the watchtowers," Maksudov, "Victory," 213.
Quotation," Kuśnierz, Ukraina, 119.
Kuśnierz does have this quotation on page 119 ("the eye and the ear of the Party in the family") - it is the familiar story of Pavlik Morozov.
Maksudov's Falsification
Maksudov, "Victory," 213, states:
Surveillance towers appeared across the countryside; mounted patrols hid in ambush; adults and even small children were employed to spy on their friends and relatives. Kosior estimated that 500,000 Pioneers guarded the fields from their own parents during the summer of 1933. The law of August 7 that threatened execution or imprisonment for anyone caught stealing grain came to be called the "ears of wheat" law.
Maksudov's note 58 (p. 234) says: "Ivan Trifonov, Ocherki istorii klassovoi bor'by v SSSR, 1921-1937. (Moscow, 1960), 258."
The actual title of this book is Ocherki istorii klassovoi bor'by v SSSR v gody NEPa (1921-1937).(22) Here is what Trifonov actually wrote:
Лучшими помощниками политотделов являлись комсомольцы. Во всех колхозах Северного Кавказа она создали отряды «легкой кавалерии». Отряды бдительно охраняли общественное имущество, боролись с потравами, задерживали воров и расхитителей. На Украине в 1933 г. в сборе колосков и охране урожая участвовало 540 тыс. детей. В колхозах республики работали 240 тыс. комсомольцев и 160 ударных комсомольских бригад по ремонту тракторов.
Translated:
The best assistants of the political departments were the Komsomol members. In all the collective farms of the North Caucasus the Komsomol established "light cavalry" squads. Detachments vigilantly guarded public property and struggled against damage by animals, detained thieves and plunderers. In Ukraine in 1933 540 thousands children took part in the collection of ears and crop protection. In the collective farms of the republic worked 240 thousand Komsomol members and 160 Komsomol shock brigades in repairing tractors. (258)
Maksudov has seriously falsified this passage. Trifonov say nothing about "surveillance towers"; about any statement at all by Kosior; about Pioneers "guarding the fields from their own parents"; or about children "spying on their friends and relatives"; or - as Snyder adds - about "reporting on their parents." The "half million children" Trifonov mentions were not "standing in the watchtowers," as Snyder claims, but helping to glean the fields and protect the crops.
The "Law of Three Ears" - this is in fact the sobriquet of this law - punished theft of government property, included the property of collective farms and cooperatives.(23) Michael Ellman, a very anti-communist researcher, claims that 11,000 persons were executed under this law but gives no evidence whatsoever for this statement. (Ellman, 2007, p. 686) The relevant document, available to Ellman in 2007 but evidently not used by him, states that 2,052 persons had been sentenced to death under the law. A number of cases of very large-scale theft are noted in this report to Stalin of March 20, 1933 (Lubianka 1922-1936 No. 349, p. 417). It does not note how many of these death sentences were commuted, though such commutations were generally frequent.
This law was supported by many peasants, as Tauger argues:
Without question, however, many other peasants had worked willingly during the whole period, earning many labour-days and siding with the system. As an example of this, we can consider peasants' views of the notorious 7 August 1932 law on socialist property, which authorized arrests of people for thefts and imposed capital punishment in some cases, and under which more than 100,000 people (mostly peasants) were arrested. An OGPU study of peasant attitudes towards this law in Ivanovo oblast found that most peasants supported it and even considered it overdue, because of the numerous outrages and scandals involving theft that they had witnessed and could not prevent. (Tauger 2004 85-6. Emphasis added.)
Snyder cites a document in the multivolume Tragediia sovetskoi derevni ("Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside"), edited by staunch opponents of collectivization but still a very useful collection of primary source materials. The document in question, a report on the reaction of peasants in a certain region to the August 7, 1932 law, contains a section on "negative reactions" but a longer one on "positive reactions", with examples given.(24)
On February 1 1933 the Politburo decreed that the following persons should not be prosecuted under this law:
лиц, виновных в мелких единичных кражах общественной собственности, или трудящихся, совершивших кражи из нужды, по несознательности и при наличии других смягчающих обстоятельств.
Translated:
those guilty of individual acts of petty theft of public property, or workers who have committed theft because of need (poverty), or from lack of consciousness and in the presence of other mitigating circumstances.
This was confirmed by an order of the Presidium (the executive body of the Soviet government) of March 27 1933. A joint instruction of the Central Committee and the Central Executive Committee - that is, the main bodies of the Party and the Government, of May 8 1933 greatly restricted the punishments under this law. Several other decrees limited punishment under this law and released persons convicted under it.
In any case it is evident that the 500,000 Pioneers and their parents were not starving.
Snyder relates more horrifying stories, none of which have any bearing on the issue at hand: whether the starvation was "deliberate."
Why Were Those In Charge of the 1937 Census Arrested?
Snyder:
The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers executed. In 1933, Soviet officials in private conversations most often provided the estimate of 5.5 million dead from hunger. This seems roughly correct, if perhaps somewhat low, for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, including Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia. (58)
n. 87, p. 467: "On the Soviet census, see Schlögel, Terror. For discussion of 5.5 million as a typical estimate, see Dalrymple, "Soviet Famine," 259."
Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich, 2007) isn't an easy book for most readers to find, so why pick it? Possibly because it is another work of the "USSR, land of terror" school, relentlessly anticommunist. It is devoid of any effort at historical objectivity, and is full of outright falsifications.
Dalrymple's article is from the 1960s, merely an attempt to establish that there had indeed been a famine. Far more recent estimates have been made by recent scholarly studies.
Mark Tauger estimates roughly five million deaths as a result of the famine. But others estimate a much lower figure. The careful Ukrainian-Canadian scholar John-Paul Himka writes:
These could not be specialists in demography, however, since all recent studies based on a careful analysis of census data come up with numbers in the range of 2.6 to 3.9 million.... Jacques Vallin, France Meslé, Serguei Adamets, and Serhii Pirozhkov, "A New Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses during the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s," Population Studies 56, 3 (2002): 249-64; this study arrives at the figure of 2.6 million.(25)
The 1937 census was not cancelled because the population count was "too low," as hinted by Snyder and stated by Schlögel. It was declared defective and rescheduled for 1939, when the questions about nationality were simplified, the questions about literacy were changed, and the question about religious belief was omitted altogether, so respondents did not have to say whether they were religious or not.
Several of those in charge of the census were indeed arrested, tried, and at least in one case, executed. But this had nothing to do with the census. Ivan Adamovich Kraval', the main official in charge of the census, was named by one of the defendants in the March 1938 Moscow Trial (the "Bukharin-Rykov" trial) as a member of the Right-Trotskyite conspiracy against the Soviet government and Party leadership. The census was cancelled in January 1937 but Kraval' was not even arrested until May.
In fact as early as January 11, 1937 Kraval' had been named as a clandestine Bukharinite from as far back as 1919-1921 and again in 1924 by Valentin Astrov, also a Bukharin supporter and member of his "school." This is significant because Astrov lived until 1993, long enough to write that the NKVD had not mistreated him in any way and that his testimony to them against Bukharin and his supporters was truthful, not the result of any compulsion.(26)
Lazar' S. Bradgendler, another leading census official, was also arrested, tried, and convicted of involvement in a Right-Trotskyite conspiracy. He was not executed but sentenced to 10 years in a camp.
Fortunately there are a number of Russian studies of the Soviet census of 1937 where all these matters are explained. Snyder failed to consult any of them.
Footnotes
(1)See the note to the book by Douglas Tottle in the previous chapter.
(2)Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska 1931-1936 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001, p. 179.
(3)Stalin i Kaganovich, 198 note 3. Emphasis mine (GF)
(4)Pis'ma I.V. Stalina V.M. Molotovu. 1925-1936 gg. Sbornik dokumentovM. Moscow: "Molodaia Gvardiia" 1995, p. 242.
(5)Holod v SSSR 1929-1934. Tom pervyi. 1929-iiul' 1932. Dokumenty. Kniga 2 ((Moscow: MFD, 2011), pp. 261-2. Note that Davies and Wheatcroft transliterate the first word as „Golod".
(6)Mark Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933." Slavic Review 50, 1 (Spring 1991), 88-89. Emphasis added
(7)Moscow: MDF, lzd. "Materik," 2005.
(8)"Историк Виктор Кондрашин: 'Не Россия убивала Украину. Вождь - свой народ.'" Известия 22 октября 2008.
(9)Сайт Новостей. «Критика на тормозах.»
(10) The January 24 document is referred to in a published source, so we may assume it is correct. See Golod 1932-1933 rokiv na Ukraini: ochyma istorykiv, movoiu dokumentiv. Ed. Ia. Pyrih Kyiv: Politvydav Ukrainy, 1990, No. 157 (Голод 1932-1933 рокiв на Украïнi: очима iсторикiв, мовою докумеитiе. Кер. кол. упоряд. р. Я. Пирiг. - К.: Полiвидав Украïни, 1990. № 157).
(11)In late January and early February 1933 he was removed from his posts as secretary and member of both the Orgburo and the Politburo, and First Secretary of the Khar'kov Oblast' Committee, of the CP(b)U. However, he moved to the position of Chairman of the Central Committee of the Union of Metal Workers, and 2nd Secretary of the Donetsk Oblast' Committee of the CP(b)U. Terekhov remained a candidate member of the CC VKP(b) until the 17th Party Congress in January 1934. He was not re-elected to this position, but was transferred to government work in the Commission of Soviet control attached to the SNK of the USSR. From 1939 to 1956 Terekhov was the Assistant Chief of Light Metal Working industry, and retired in 1956.
(12)R. Ia. Terekhov appears in a photograph taken at the XXII Party Congress in Ogoniok 29.X. 1961, p. 17. "Tertkhov Roman Iakovlevich" is listed as a voting delegate to the Congress in the transcript of the Congress. See XXII S"ezd Kommunistichekoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. 17-31 1962. T. 3, p. 533. (XXII Съезд Коммунистической Партии Советского Союза. 17-31 октября 1961 года. Стенографический Отчёт. М.: Гос. Изд. Политической Литературы, 1962. III, c. 533.
(13)Furr, Khrushchev Lied.
(14)At http://www.archives.gov.ua/Sections/Famine/Publicat/Fam-Pyrig-1933.php#nom-161
(15)Klu'chyts'kiy, also a famine specialist, is so politically biased that he tailers his results to "fit" the myth of the "Holodomor." This makes his research worthless. See, for example, his four-part essay in English "What Is The Crux of the Ukraine-Russia Dispute?" at http://www.day.kiev/ua/263850 (accessed 02.24.2014)
(16)IUrii Shapoval, "'Povelitel'naia neobkhodimost': god 1932-y." Den' November 23, 2002. At http://www.day.kiev.ua/ru/article/panorama-dnya/povelitelnaya-neobhodimost-god-1932-y This is a Ukrainian newspaper of nationalist tendency.
(17)Kul'chyts'kyy S. V. 1933. Tragedia holodu. Kyiv: T-vo "Znania" URSR, 1989. (Кульчицький С. В. 1933. трагедiя голоду. К. Т-во «Знання» УРСР, 1989).
(18)"And I did not yet understand the special nature of the Ukrainian famine." ("Та специфiки украïнського голоду я ще розумiв.") Кульчицький С. "Голодомор 1932-1933 рр. в украïнi як геноцид." (Kul'chyts'kyy S. "Holodomor 1932-1933 rr. v Ukrainiiak henotsyd.") In Проблеми iсторiï Украïни: факти, судження, пошуки. - Киïв: Iнститут iсторiï Украïни НАН Украïни, 2005 - № 14. - c. 225-300. Quotation at p. 252.
(19)James E. Mace. "The Komitety Nezamozhnykh Selian and the Structure of Soviet Rule in the Ukrainian Countryside, 1920-1933." Soviet Studies 35 (4) October 1983, 487-503.
(20)Radin, Shaumian. Za chto zhiteli stanitsy Poltavskoi vysyliaiutsia s Kubani v severnye kraia. Rostav-na-Donu, 1932.
(21)In the 1970s I requested this book from the Lenin Library in Moscow through the Inter-Library Loan office at my university (then a college). The Lenin Library refused my request though I was able to obtain other books from Soviet libraries.
(22)Трифонов И. Очерки истории классовой борьбы в СССР в годы НЭПа (1921-1937). М.: Изд-во политической литературы, 1960.
(23)The text of the law, in Russian, is online here
(24)V. Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni t. 3 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), Dok. No. 170, 479-481.
(25)"Encumbered Memory. The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33." Kritika 14 (2) Spring 2013, p. 426 and note.
(26)Astrov, "Kak Eto Proizoshio.." Literaturnaia Gazeta March 29, 1989; Astrov, "...S menia sledovateli trebovali pokazaniia." Izvestiia February 27, 1993, p. 3. Vladimir Bobrov and I have discussed Astrov's confessions in detail in "Verdikt: Vinoven!" Chapter 1 of Pravosudie Stalina (Moscow: EKSMO, 2010), 13-63. I discuss it more briefly in English in Chapter 16 of The Murder of Sergei Kirov pp. 318-319.
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