Where was the Holodomor 1932 1933. Archive of Alexander N

During the second half of the 19th century, the famine years caused by crop failures - 1873, 1880, 1883, 1891, 1892, 1897 and 1898 - were especially cruel. In the 20th century, the famine years of 1901, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1911 and 1913 stood out especially. However, these food problems in the Russian Empire after 1892 did not lead to a noticeable increase in mortality, and there is no documented evidence of mass deaths from famine. The causes of famine in the 20th century lay not in the sphere of exchange, but in the sphere of bread production, and they were caused primarily by extreme fluctuations in harvests in Russia due to their low absolute value and insufficient land provision for the population, which, in turn, did not give it the opportunity accumulate cash or grain reserves in productive years. The exceptional instability of harvests is primarily the result of unfavorable climatic conditions. The most fertile areas are characterized by particularly uneven precipitation. Along with low yields, one of the economic prerequisites for mass famine in Russia was the insufficient supply of land to peasants. These factors became possible causes of the 1917 Revolution.

Devastation, economic chaos, and a crisis of power after the Civil War caused a new mass famine in 1921-1922. This famine was the first under Soviet rule. Regional and local food problems and hunger among certain segments of the population, caused by various factors, periodically arose during the years 1923-1931. The second mass famine in the USSR broke out in 1932/33. during the period of collectivization - then about 7 million people died from hunger and diseases associated with malnutrition [ ] . And finally, after the Great Patriotic War, the last mass famine in the history of the Soviet Union was noted in 1946-47.

At the same time, as historian V.V. Kondrashin notes in his book dedicated to the famine of 1932-1933:

Other Russian researchers believe that the cause of the famine of the 1930s was the consequences of forced grain procurements in 1929 and complete collectivization, which began in 1930, which created a food shortage in the countryside. The famine was a direct result of the course of the Stalinist leadership towards accelerated industrialization, which required foreign exchange sources for its implementation, one of which was grain exports. For this purpose, impossible grain delivery targets were set for peasant farms.

Prerequisites for the occurrence

Forced collectivization

From 1927−1929, the Soviet leadership began to develop a set of measures for the transition to complete collectivization of agriculture. In the spring of 1928, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and the Kolkhoz Center of the RSFSR prepared a draft five-year plan for the collectivization of peasant farms, according to which by 1933 it was planned to unite 1.1 million farms (about 4%) into collective farms. The Resolution of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated July 10, 1928, “The Policy of Grain Procurement in Connection with the General Economic Situation,” stated that “despite the achievement of 95% of the pre-war norm of sown areas, the marketable yield of grain production barely exceeds 50% of the pre-war norm.” In the process of finalizing this plan, the target level of collectivization was increased, and the five-year plan approved in the spring of 1929 already provided for the collectivization of 4–4.5 million peasant farms (16–18%).

With the transition to complete collectivization in the fall of 1929, the party and state leadership of the country began to develop a new policy in the countryside. The planned high rates of collectivization suggested, due to the unpreparedness of both the bulk of the peasantry and the material and technical base of agriculture, such methods and means of influence that would force the peasants to join collective farms. Such means were: strengthening the tax pressure on individual farmers, mobilizing the proletarian elements of the city and countryside, party, Komsomol and Soviet activists to carry out collectivization, strengthening administrative-coercive and repressive methods of influence on the peasantry, and primarily on its wealthy part.

According to some researchers, this created all the prerequisites not only for economic, but also for political and repressive measures of influence on the peasantry.

As a result of collectivization, the most productive mass of healthy and young peasants fled to the cities. In addition, about 2 million peasants who fell under dispossession were evicted to remote areas of the country. Therefore, by the beginning of the spring sowing season of 1932, the village approached with a serious lack of draft power and a sharply deteriorated quality of labor resources. As a result, in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and other areas, fields sown with grain became overgrown with weeds. Even units of the Red Army were sent to weeding work. But this did not save, and although the 1931/32 harvest was sufficient to prevent mass starvation, grain losses during harvesting grew to unprecedented levels. In 1931, according to the People's Commissariat of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, more than 15 million tons (about 20% of the gross grain harvest) were lost during harvesting; in 1932, the losses were even greater. In Ukraine, up to 40% of the harvest remained standing; in the Lower and Middle Volga, losses reached 35.6% of the total gross grain harvest. Data from grain balances of the USSR in the early 1930s, reconstructed by Robert Davis and Stephen Wheatcroft from archival sources, indicate a sharp drop in grain harvests for two years in a row - in 1931 and especially 1932, when the harvest was at best a quarter less than the harvest 1930 and 19% less than official data.

Grain procurement

According to the research of Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Kondrashin, in a number of regions of the RSFSR and in particular in the Volga region, mass famine was artificially caused and arose “not because of complete collectivization, but as a result of forced Stalinist grain procurements.” This opinion is confirmed by eyewitnesses of the events, speaking about the causes of the tragedy: “There was a famine because the grain was handed over,” “every grain, down to the grain, was taken to the state under a whisk,” “they tormented us with grain procurements,” “there was a food appropriation system, all the grain was taken away.” According to the testimony of villagers in the Kuban, in the fall, as part of the “procurement of seed materials” for collective farms, all food products (grain, potatoes, etc.) were taken from the residents of the villages, which resulted in mass deaths from starvation.

The villages were weakened by dispossession and mass collectivization, losing thousands of repressed individual grain farmers. In the Volga region, the commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on grain procurement issues, headed by the Secretary of the Central Committee P. P. Postyshev, decided to confiscate grain reserves from individual farmers and bread earned by collective farm workers. Under the threat of reprisals, collective farm chairmen and heads of rural administrations were forced to hand over almost all of the grain produced and stored. This deprived the region of food supplies and led to widespread famine. Similar measures were taken by V. M. Molotov and L. M. Kaganovich in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, which also caused famine and mass mortality among the population.

At the same time, the grain procurement plan for 1932 and the volume of grain actually collected by the state were significantly less than in the previous and subsequent years of the decade. In fact, the total volume of grain alienation from the village through all channels (procurement, purchases at market prices, collective farm market) decreased in 1932-1933 by approximately 20% compared to previous years. The volume of grain exports decreased from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million tons in 1932 and 1.68 million tons in 1933. For the main grain-producing regions (Ukraine and the North Caucasus), grain procurement quotas were repeatedly reduced during 1932. As a result, for example, Ukraine received only a quarter of all grain handed over to the state, whereas in 1930 its share was 35%. In this regard, S. Zhuravlev concludes that the famine was caused not by an increase in grain procurements, but by a sharp drop in grain collection as a result of collectivization.

Already in 1928-1929, grain procurements took place with great stress. Since the beginning of the 1930s, the situation has worsened even more. Objective reasons that caused the need for grain procurements:

• population growth in cities and industrial centers (from 1928 to 1931, the urban population grew by 12.4 million);
• industrial development, growing industrial needs for agricultural products;
• supplies of grain for export in order to obtain funds for the purchase of Western engineering products.

To meet these needs at that time it was necessary to have 500 million poods of grain annually. Gross grain harvests in 1931-1932, even according to official data, were significantly lower compared to previous years.

A number of foreign researchers (M. Tauger, S. Wheatcroft, R. Davis and J. Cooper), based on official data on gross grain harvests in 1931-1932, note that they should be considered overestimated. To estimate the harvest in those years, they began to use not the actual grain harvest, but the species (biological) yield. This assessment system overestimated the true yield by at least 20%. Nevertheless, it was precisely on the basis of this assessment that grain procurement plans were established, which increased annually. If in 1928 the share of grain procurements was 14.7% of the gross harvest, in 1929 - 22.4%, in 1930 - 26.5%, then in 1931 - 32.9%, and in 1932 - 36.9% ( for individual regions, see table. 1).

Grain yields were declining ( see table 2). If in 1927 the average for the USSR was 53.4 poods. per hectare, then in 1931 it was already 38.4 poods. per hectare. However, grain procurements grew from year to year ( see table 3).

As a result of the fact that the grain procurement plan in 1932 was drawn up on the basis of an inflated preliminary estimate of the harvest (in reality it turned out to be two to three times lower), and the party and administrative leadership of the country demanded strict compliance with it, an almost complete confiscation of collected grain began locally from the peasants.

Combating theft

An important role in the fight against hunger was played by the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of August 7, 1932 “On the protection of the property of state enterprises, collective farms and cooperation and the strengthening of public (socialist) property,” popularly nicknamed the “Law of the Three Ears of Ears.” The resolution was of an emergency nature and established criminal liability for theft (10 years in the camps or even the death penalty), including for “the theft and plunder of collective farm property.” Based on this law, in just 5 months, from August 1932 to December 1932, 22,347 people were convicted, of which 2,686 were sentenced to capital punishment by general courts. The RSFSR accounted for the majority of “execution” sentences handed down by USSR transport courts (812) and military tribunals (208). However, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR revised up to half of these sentences, and the Presidium of the Central Electoral Commission issued hundreds of acquittals. As a result, the People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR N.V. Krylenko reported that the number of those executed under sentences in accordance with the resolution did not exceed a thousand people. Contrary to popular reports that during the repressions “among those executed were several hundred children aged 12 to 16 years,” it should be noted that from July 27, 1922 to April 7, 1935, capital punishment for minors (children aged 12 to 18 years) not used.

Repression of the rural population

After the Kaganovich commission arrived in Rostov-on-Don on November 2, a meeting of all secretaries of party organizations in the North Caucasus region was convened, at which the following resolution was adopted: “In connection with the shameful failure of the grain procurement plan, force local party organizations to break the sabotage, organized by kulak counter-revolutionary elements, to suppress the resistance of rural communists and collective farm chairmen leading this sabotage.” For a number of blacklisted districts, the following measures were taken: confiscation of all products from stores, complete stop of trade, immediate closure of all current loans, imposition of high taxes, arrest of all saboteurs, all “socially alien and counter-revolutionary elements” and trial them according to an accelerated procedure that the OGPU was supposed to provide. If the sabotage continued, the population was supposed to be subjected to mass deportation.

In November 1932, 5 thousand rural communists of the North Caucasus, accused of “criminal sympathy” for “undermining” the grain procurement campaign, were arrested, and along with them another 15 thousand collective farmers. In December, mass deportations of entire villages began.

Peasants who resisted the confiscation of grain were subjected to repression. This is how Mikhail Sholokhov describes them in a letter to Stalin dated April 4, 1933

But eviction is not the most important thing. Here is a list of the methods by which 593 tons of bread were produced:

1. Mass beatings of collective farmers and individual farmers.

2. Planting “in the cold”. "Is there a hole?" - "No". - “Go, sit in the barn!” The collective farmer is stripped down to his underwear and placed barefoot in a barn or shed. Duration of action - January, February, often entire teams were planted in barns.

3. On the Vashchaevo collective farm, collective farm women’s legs and hems of their skirts were doused with kerosene, lit, and then extinguished: “Tell me where the pit is!” I’ll set it on fire again!” On the same collective farm, the interrogated woman was placed in a hole, buried halfway, and the interrogation continued.

4. At the Napolovsky collective farm, the representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan, a candidate member of the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Plotkin, during interrogation, forced him to sit on a hot bench. The prisoner shouted that he could not sit, it was hot, then water was poured from a mug under him, and then he was taken out into the cold to “cool off” and locked in a barn. From the barn back to the stove and interrogated again. He (Plotkin) forced one individual farmer to shoot himself. He put a revolver in his hands and ordered: “Shoot, but if you don’t, I’ll shoot you myself!” He began to pull the trigger (not knowing that the gun was unloaded), and when the firing pin clicked, he fainted.

5. In the Varvara collective farm, the secretary of the Anikeev cell at a brigade meeting forced the entire brigade (men and women, smokers and non-smokers) to smoke shag, and then threw a pod of red pepper (mustard) onto the hot stove and ordered not to leave the room. This same Anikeev and a number of workers of the propaganda column, the commander of which was candidate member of the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan Pashinsky, during interrogations at the column headquarters, forced collective farmers to drink huge quantities of water mixed with lard, wheat and kerosene.

6. At the Lebyazhensky collective farm they stood him against the wall and shot past the interrogated person’s head with shotguns.

7. In the same place: they rolled me up in a row and trampled underfoot.

8. In the Arkhipovsky collective farm, two collective farmers, Fomina and Krasnova, after a night interrogation, were taken three kilometers into the steppe, stripped naked in the snow and released, ordered to run to the farm at a trot.

9. In the Chukarinsky collective farm, the secretary of the cell, Bogomolov, selected 8 people. demobilized Red Army soldiers, with whom he came to a collective farmer - suspected of theft - in the yard (at night), after a short questioning, he took them to the threshing floor or to the levada, formed his brigade and commanded “fire” on the tied up collective farmer. If the person, frightened by the mock execution, did not confess, then they beat him, threw him into a sleigh, took him out to the steppe, beat him along the road with rifle butts and, having taken him out to the steppe, put him back and again went through the procedure preceding the execution.

9. (The numbering was broken by Sholokhov.) In the Kruzhilinsky collective farm, the authorized representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kovtun, at a meeting of the 6th brigade, asks the collective farmer: “Where did you bury the grain?” - “I didn’t bury it, comrade!” - “Didn’t you bury it? Oh, well, stick out your tongue! Stay like that! Sixty adults, Soviet citizens, by order of the Commissioner, take turns sticking out their tongues and stand there, drooling, while the Commissioner makes an incriminating speech for an hour. Kovtun did the same thing in both the 7th and 8th brigades; the only difference is that in those brigades, in addition to sticking out their tongues, he also forced them to kneel.

10. In the Zatonsky collective farm, a propaganda column worker beat those interrogated with a saber. On the same collective farm, they mocked the families of Red Army soldiers, opening the roofs of houses, destroying stoves, and forcing women to cohabitate.

11. In the Solontsovsky collective farm, a human corpse was brought into the commissar’s room, placed on a table, and in the same room the collective farmers were interrogated, threatening to be shot.

12. In the Verkhne-Chirsky collective farm, Komsomol officers put those interrogated with their bare feet on a hot stove, and then beat them and took them out, barefoot, into the cold.

13. At the Kolundaevsky collective farm, barefoot collective farmers were forced to run in the snow for three hours. The frostbitten victims were taken to the Bazkovo hospital.

14. Ibid: the interrogated collective farmer was put on a stool on his head, covered with a fur coat on top, beaten and interrogated.

15. At the Bazkovsky collective farm, during interrogation, they stripped people, sent them home half naked, returned them halfway, and so on several times.

Dear comrade Sholokhov!

Both of your letters have been received, as you know. The help that was required has already been provided.

To analyze the case, Comrade Shkiryatov will come to you, in the Veshensky district, to whom I ask you very much to provide assistance.

This is true. But that’s not all, Comrade Sholokhov. The fact is that your letters make a somewhat one-sided impression. I want to write you a few words about this.

I thanked you for your letters, because they reveal the sore point of our party-Soviet work, they reveal how sometimes our workers, wanting to curb the enemy, accidentally hit their friends and descend into sadism. But this does not mean that I agree with you on everything. You see one side, you see well. But this is only one side of the matter. In order not to make mistakes in politics (your letters are not fiction, but pure politics), you need to look around, you need to be able to see the other side. And the other side is that the respected grain growers of your region (and not only your region) carried out the “Italian” (sabotage!) and were not averse to leaving the workers and the Red Army without bread. The fact that the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without blood) does not change the fact that respected grain farmers were essentially waging a “quiet” war with the Soviet regime. A war of attrition, dear comrade. Sholokhov...

Of course, this circumstance cannot in any way justify the outrages that were committed, as you assure us, by our employees. And those responsible for these outrages must suffer due punishment. But it is still clear as daylight that respected grain growers are not such harmless people as it might seem from afar.

Well, all the best and I shake your hand.

Yours I. Stalin

Socialization of livestock

Some researchers consider one of the reasons for the occurrence of famine to be the forced socialization of livestock, which caused a response from the peasantry - the mass slaughter of livestock, including workers, in 1928-1931 (since the autumn of 1931, the number of livestock among individual farmers decreased significantly, and the decline began to occur due to collective farm and state farm herds (the main reasons are lack of feed / poor living conditions and irresponsibility of collective farms).

At the same time, by the decree “On Meat Procurement” (September 23, 1932), from the beginning of the next month, the presentation of obligations “with the force of a tax” for the supply (delivery) of meat to the state began to be handed over to collective farms, collective farm households and individual farms.

Consequences of famine

About 40 million people suffered from hunger and deprivation. [ ] Thus, in the rural areas around Kharkov, mortality in January and June 1933 increased tenfold compared to the average mortality: 100,000 buried in June 1933 in the Kharkov area versus 9,000 in June 1932 [ ] .

Those who worked on the collective farm were paid in grain and seeds, but people in leather coats came and took everything to the last grain, leaving nothing for us.

The older sister worked in Kharkov, where she tried to collect food for us. Her father went to see her and returned with crackers, potatoes, and beetroot. Mom did not eat, she left everything that father brought to the children and died in the spring of 1933 from hunger, and father died at the end of 1933. Everyone could barely move, walking around swollen from hunger. During the famine they ate all the cats and dogs. They caught wild birds, and it was great happiness, then they cooked a delicious dinner.

People tried to walk through the harvested fields to collect spikelets, but people were beaten with whips for this, arrested and locked up in the village council.

In the spring, green grass appeared, which we ate: quinoa, nettle, but some did not have the strength to collect it, their hands did not obey. Those who survived spring found life easier later.

A lot of people died in the village, carts drove around the village, collected the dead and even those who were still barely breathing, and took them outside the outskirts and buried them there in a common pit.

Special report of the SPO PP OGPU for the NVK (Lower Volga region) on food difficulties in the region as of March 20, 1933.

Food difficulties continue to affect new districts and collective farms: as of March 10... 110 collective farms were counted in 33 districts experiencing family food difficulties - 822.

...In most cases, various surrogates are used as food (admixture of chaff, quinoa, pumpkin and potato peels, millet husks, crushed roots of “chakan” plants in flour and bread waste, eating only surrogates without admixture of flour, eating exclusively cabbage, pumpkin, etc. vegetables), and also consumes the meat of dead animals and, in some cases, cannibalism.

OGPU PP for NVK Rud

In the hope of getting food, collective farmers rushed to the cities. But on January 22, 1933, an order signed by Stalin and Molotov was issued, which ordered local authorities and, in particular, the OGPU to prohibit “by all possible means the mass movement of the peasantry of Ukraine and the North Caucasus to the cities. After the arrest of the “counter-revolutionary elements,” other fugitives must be returned to their previous residence.” This order explained the situation as follows: “The Central Committee and the Government have evidence that the mass exodus of peasants was organized by enemies of Soviet power, counter-revolutionaries and Polish agents for the purpose of anti-collective farm propaganda, in particular, and against Soviet power in general.” In all areas affected by famine, the sale of train tickets was immediately stopped; Special OGPU cordons were set up to prevent the peasants from leaving their places, leaving them the bark of trees and local dogs and cats that had not yet been eaten as food. In early March 1933, a report from the OGPU specified that in one month alone, 219,460 people had been detained in operations designed to limit the mass exodus of peasants to the cities. 186,588 people were returned to their places of residence, many were arrested and convicted.

Within a week, a service was created to capture abandoned children. As peasants arrived in the city, unable to survive in the countryside, children gathered here, brought here and abandoned by their parents, who themselves were forced to return to die at home. The parents hoped that someone in the city would take care of their offspring.<…>The city authorities mobilized janitors in white aprons, who patrolled the city and brought abandoned children to police stations.<…>At midnight they were taken by truck to the freight station on the Seversky Donets. Other children found at train stations, on trains, and in nomadic peasant families were also collected there, and elderly peasants wandering around the city during the day were also brought here. There were medical personnel here who carried out the “triage”. Those who were not yet swollen from hunger and could survive were sent to barracks on Golodnaya Gora or to barns, where another 8,000 souls, mostly children, died on straw. The weak were sent on freight trains outside the city and left fifty to sixty kilometers from the city to die far from people.<…>Upon arrival at these places, all the dead were unloaded from the wagons into large ditches dug in advance.

As a result of the famine in Kazakhstan, about 200 thousand Kazakhs fled abroad - to China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Actions of the Soviet leadership to combat famine in 1933

In April 1933, by decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, grain exports from the USSR were stopped due to the fall in grain prices on the world market due to the Great Depression, as well as due to the need to ensure the sowing campaign.

The actions of the Soviet leadership to overcome the food crisis mainly boiled down to allocating food and seed loans to the main grain-growing regions of the USSR that found themselves in the famine zone (including the Ukrainian SSR). Measures were taken to strengthen the collective farms organizationally and economically with the help of MTS (machine and tractor stations), and the creation of personal subsidiary plots for collective farmers and urban residents was partially permitted.

In conditions of increasing hunger in the cities in 1933, the Politburo of the Central Committee adopted decisions on December 23, 1933 and January 20, 1934 on the development of individual gardening. " Meeting the desires of workers to acquire small vegetable gardens to work on them with their own labor in their free time from work in production", the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided in 1934 to allow 1.5 million workers to start their own individual vegetable gardens (including 500 thousand workers in the Ukrainian SSR).

At the same time, data on the functioning of the collective farm system do not allow us to talk about any serious improvement in the situation of the peasantry in subsequent years, after 1933. For example, in 1934-1935. up to 30% of collective farms in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic gave collective farmers an average of only 2 kg of grain per workday (less than 100 kg of grain per eater per year). The leadership of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic repeatedly appealed to the center with a request for food, seed and fodder loans, which were issued, but in minimal amounts. The famine in Mordovia in the first half of 1937 was no less widespread than the famine of 1932-1933.

Estimates of the scale of the disaster

The famine affected an area of ​​about 1.5 million km² with a population of 65.9 million people. [ ] The famine was most severe in the areas that in pre-revolutionary times produced the largest amount of grain and where the share of collectivized peasant farms was highest, however, the Kazakh ethnic group (which at that time was not an agricultural, but a cattle-breeding people) suffered the relatively greatest demographic losses - catastrophic for them The socialization of livestock during collectivization had consequences.

The rural population suffered much more from the famine than the urban population, which was explained by the measures taken by the Soviet government to confiscate grain from the countryside. But even in the cities there were a significant number of hungry people: workers fired from enterprises, “purged” employees who received special passports that did not give the right to food rations.

According to Russian scientists, demographic losses in 1932-33 due to a decrease in the birth rate, exacerbation of diseases associated with hunger, deportations, and repressions amounted to 3,531 thousand people in Ukraine, 1.3 million people in Kazakhstan, 0.4 million people in the Volga region, Northern Caucasus - 1 million people, in other areas - 1 million people. At the same time, direct losses from famine amounted (in the Volga region) to approximately three-quarters, with the number of direct victims of famine being 365,722 people and indirect losses due to a drop in the birth rate in the same region by 115,665 people.

According to the calculations of the historian and researcher of repressions V.N. Zemskov, about 600 thousand people died or committed suicide in kulak exile during the period 1930-1933, despite the fact that hunger was not the main cause of death.

This number has drawn criticism from Ukrainian researchers. A.L. Perkovsky, S.I. Pirozhkov consider it to be understated, due to the fact that S.V. Kulchitsky for his calculations did not use the data of the All-Union Population Census of 1937, but the estimates of the Central Statistical Office. The Ukrainian method of calculation is based on the difference between the forecast of the population of Ukraine compiled in 1932 by academician M. V. Ptukha, who estimated the population at 34.0 million people on January 1, 1937, and the real population of Ukraine (according to the All-Union Population Census of 1937). ) - 29.4 million people, accounting for 4.6 million people. But these are Ukraine’s demographic losses that do not take into account migration, and not losses from hunger.

A study of the famine in the North Caucasus showed the impossibility of determining human losses due to lack of accounting.

The difference between 7.2 million in demographic losses in starving regions and 3.5 million in the country as a whole is due to internal migration. Unfortunately, these are approximate figures, and it is impossible to give more accurate ones without knowing the level of interregional migration and demographic data for all regions. It is necessary to continue the search for archival data, including materials from the NKVD.

Estimates of the total number of victims of the famine of 1932-1933 among different researchers vary significantly and reach 7-8 million people.

The topic of mass famine of the early 1930s first appeared in the Soviet information space only towards the end of perestroika. By now, a clear idea has formed in the post-Soviet information space about the famine of 1932-1933 as one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the Soviet period.

An official assessment of the scale of the famine “caused by forced collectivization” was given by the State Duma of the Russian Federation in a statement dated April 2, 2008. According to the conclusion of a commission under the State Duma, in the Volga region, Central Black Earth Region, North Caucasus, Urals, Crimea, part of Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus, “from hunger and diseases associated with malnutrition”, in 1932-1933, about 7 million people, the reason for which was “repressive measures to ensure grain procurements,” which “significantly aggravated the severe consequences of the 1932 crop failure.” Objectively, the harvest in 1932 was sufficient to prevent mass starvation. A comparative analysis of the population censuses of 1926 and 1937 shows a reduction in the rural population in areas of the USSR affected by the famine of 1932-1933: in Kazakhstan - by 30.9%, in the Volga region - by 23, in the Ukrainian SSR - by 20.5, in the North Caucasus - by 20.4%. On the territory of the RSFSR (excluding the Cossack Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic), 2.5 million people died from hunger.

An article from the electronic version of the Britannica encyclopedia states that in 1932-1933, from 4 to 5 million ethnic Ukrainians died of hunger out of a total number of victims of 6-8 million. The Brockhaus Encyclopedia (2006) estimates the number of famine victims in the range from 4 to 7 million (translation from German):

In 2013, the M. V. Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine held an international scientific conference “Famine in Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century: causes and results (1921-1923, 1932-1933, 1946-1947)”, where estimates of demographic losses as a result of the famine of 1932-1933 have been published: the excess number of deaths of the population of Ukraine amounted to 3 million 917.8 thousand people, Russia - 3 million 264.6 thousand, Kazakhstan - 1 million 258.2 thousand people, in total throughout the entire territory of the USSR - 8 million 731.9 thousand people. Relative losses from the famine of 1932-1933. were the highest in Kazakhstan - 22.42%, in Ukraine - 12.92%, in Russia - 3.17%, the average for the USSR was 5.42%.

According to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (USA), the total demographic losses of the collectivization period, taking into account the correction of population census data of 1926 and 1939, amounted to 11,167 thousand people.

On the territory of the Ukrainian SSR

The peak of mass famine on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR occurred in the first half of 1933. According to the latest estimates published in 2015 by the Institute of History of Ukraine and supported by a number of historians of Western research centers, demographic losses from the famine of 1932-1933 on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR amounted to 3.9 million people as a result of excess mortality (the excess of the actual number of deaths over the calculated figure for normal conditions), as well as 0.6 million people due to a decrease in the number of children born due to the consequences of famine.

According to many Ukrainian and Western historians, the massive famine of the early 1930s in Ukraine (Holodomor) was a consequence of the conscious policy of the Soviet leadership directed against the Ukrainian nation. Thus, Professor Norman Naimark (USA) regards the mass famine in Ukraine as an act of genocide, pointing out that residents of famine-stricken areas were prohibited from moving to cities. Norman Davis, in his work “History of Europe,” declares the Holodomor to be the result of deliberate actions by the Soviet leadership to destroy the nationalist movement and its class support - the wealthy peasantry. According to Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky, the actions of the authorities during the period of mass famine in 1933 should be qualified as an act of genocide.

Researchers who are opponents of this concept point out that the population of the North Caucasus, Volga region, Kazakhstan and other regions found themselves in exactly the same situation, since mass famine in that period covered vast territories and led to the death of many Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs and other people nationalities. The report of the International Conference “Historical and Political Problem of Mass Famine in the USSR of the 30s” (2008, Moscow) stated: “It is not enough to say that not a single document has been found confirming the concept of “Holodomor-genocide” in Ukraine, or at least a hint in the documents of ethnic motives for what happened, including in Ukraine. Absolutely the entire array of documents indicates that the main enemy of the Soviet government at that time was not an enemy based on ethnicity, but on a class basis.”

On the territory of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

On the territory of the Belarusian SSR

According to calculations carried out at the M. V. Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the amount of demographic losses as a result of the famine of 1932-1933. in the Byelorussian SSR is 67,600 people.

Memory of the victims

Since 2009, the national museum “Memorial to the Victims of the Holodomor” has been operating in Kyiv. In the memory hall of this memorial, the national book of memory of the victims of the Holodomor is presented in 19 volumes, in which 880 thousand names of people whose death from hunger is documented today are recorded.

In Astana, on May 31, 2012, the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan N.A. Nazarbayev opened a memorial to the victims of mass famine on the territory of the republic.

see also

Notes

1. Was there a Holodomor in Belarus? // Website “Charter’97” (charter97.org) 05/13/2008. (Belorian)
2. Belarus had its own Holodomor // Website “MENSK.BY” (mensk.by) 2006-12-05.
3. Davydovski Uladzimir. Galadamor near Belarus (1932−1934) // Website “Rights Alliance” (aljans.org) 07/28/2010. (undefined) (unavailable link). Retrieved August 10, 2010. Archived January 1, 2015.
4. // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg. , 1890-1907.
5. Yakushkin N., Litoshenko D.// New encyclopedic dictionary: In 48 volumes (29 volumes published). - St. Petersburg. , Pg. , 1911-1916.;
6. Domain registration has expired
7. Archived copy (undefined) (unavailable link). Retrieved August 10, 2007. Archived September 27, 2007.
8. Archived copy (undefined) (unavailable link). Retrieved September 27, 2007. Archived September 27, 2007.
9. Resolution of the State Duma of the Russian Federation of April 2, 2008 N 262-5 State Duma “On the statement of the State Duma of the Russian Federation “In memory of the victims of the famine of the 30s on the territory of the USSR”
10. Kondrashin V.V. Famine of 1932-1933. The tragedy of the Russian village: scientific publication - M.: "Rosspen", 2008. - 520 p. - ISBN 978-5-8243-0987-4. - Ch. 6. “The famine of 1932-1933 in the context of world famine disasters and famine years in the history of Russia - the USSR,” P. 331.
11. Opinion of historian Nefedov S.A.
12. Nefyodov’s answer to S. A. Mironov B. N.
13. Opinion of historian B. N. Mironov
14. Mironov’s answer to B.N. Nefedov S.A.
15. Institute of Slavic Studies RAS. Famine of 1932-1933: “genocide of the Ukrainian people” or the common tragedy of the peoples of the USSR? (undefined) . International conference "Ukraine and Russia: history and image of history."(April 4, 2008).

Today, Ukrainians and the world remember the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933, which became a real genocide of the Ukrainian people and was organized by the Soviet regime.

According to most historians, the cause of the famine of 1932-33 was the coercive and repressive grain procurement policy for peasants carried out by the communist government.

Marches will be held around the world in memory of the millions of victims. At the same time, the “Light a Candle” event, which has become traditional, will begin at 16:00 Kyiv time. At 7:32 p.m., the country will honor the victims with a minute of silence.

They remind you of the most egregious, terrible and significant facts of the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

NUMBER OF KILLED PERSONS

It is still impossible to calculate the exact number of victims. Experts and historians say that most of the archival data about those who died during this period of time in Ukraine were either destroyed in the USSR or falsified: those who died as a result of famine in martyrologies were massively attributed to death from heart disease or some other disease.

Ukrainian historians voice different numbers of Holodomor victims, while it was decided to take into account the potential number of unborn Ukrainians. In this case, the number of people killed by famine reaches 12 million. Between 4 and 8 million people died between 1932 and 1933. For example, historian Yuri Shapoval and his colleague Stanislav Kulchytsky in their publications indicate a figure of 4.5 million victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933. It is noted that during this period more Ukrainians died than during the Second World War (about 5 million civilians).

When researchers talk about the Holodomor of 1932-33, they mean the period from April 1932 to November 1933. It was during these 17 months, that is, in approximately 500 days, that millions of people died in Ukraine. The peak of the Holodomor occurred in the spring of 1933. In Ukraine at that time, 17 people died of hunger every minute, 1000 every hour, almost 25 thousand every day. Ukrainians aged 6 months to 17 years made up about half of all Holodomor victims.

THEY WERE FORCEDLY TAKING THE HARVEST AND SHOOTING

The organizers and perpetrators of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 forcibly took away crops and livestock from the villagers, which would have helped them survive. The artificially created famine was supported by the blockade, as well as the isolation of areas in distress. In particular, the roads along which villagers tried to get to the cities were blocked, and paramilitary forces surrounded populated areas and detained or shot everyone who tried to escape from starvation.

GEOGRAPHY OF HUNGER

Most Ukrainians died in modern Kharkov, Kyiv, Poltava, Sumy, Cherkassy, ​​Dnepropetrovsk, Zhitomir, Vinnitsa, Chernigov, Odessa regions and in Moldova, which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR.

At the same time, the former Kharkov and Kiev regions (current Poltava, Sumy, Kharkov, Cherkassy, ​​Kiev, Zhitomir) suffered more from famine. They account for 52.8% of the dead. The mortality rate of the population here exceeded the average level by 8-9 or more times.

In Vinnitsa, Odessa, and Dnepropetrovsk, the mortality rate was 5-6 times higher. In Donbass – 3-4 times. In fact, famine engulfed the entire Center, South, North and East of modern Ukraine. Famine was observed on the same scale in those areas of the Kuban, North Caucasus and Volga region where Ukrainians lived.

About 81% of those who died from famine in Ukraine were Ukrainians, 4.5% were Russians, 1.4% were Jews and 1.1% were Poles. Among the victims there were also many Belarusians, Bulgarians and Hungarians. Researchers note that the distribution of Holodomor victims by nationality corresponds to the national distribution of the rural population of Ukraine.

“Studying the registry office data on the nationality of the deceased, we see that in Ukraine people died based on their place of residence, not their nationality. The proportion of dead Russians and Jews in their total number is low, since they lived mainly in cities where the food rationing system operated,” writes historian Stanislav Kulchitsky.

According to Stanislav Kulchitsky, in the fall of 1932 there were almost 25 thousand collective farms in Ukraine, to which the authorities put forward inflated grain procurement plans. Despite this, 1,500 collective farms were able to fulfill these plans and were not subject to punitive sanctions, so there was no mortal famine in their territories.

FINES IN NATURAL

Villagers who did not meet grain procurement plans and owed grain to the state had any food confiscated. However, it was not counted as payment of a debt, but was only a punitive measure. The policy of natural fines, according to the idea of ​​the Soviet regime, was supposed to force peasants to hand over to the state supposedly hidden grain from them, which in fact did not exist.

At first, punitive authorities were only allowed to take away meat, lard and potatoes. Subsequently, they took up other non-perishable products.

Fedor Kovalenko from the village of Lyutenka, Gadyachsky district, Poltava region, said: “In November and December 1932, they took all the grain, potatoes, everything, even beans, and everything that was in the attic. The dried pears, apples, cherries were so small – they took everything.”

In December 1932, the second general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) Stanislav Kosior reported to Stalin: “The use of fines in kind gives the greatest results. The collective farmer and even the individual individual now hold on tightly to the cow and pig.”

In the Volga region and the North Caucasus, fines in kind were used only sporadically.

THE LAW OF “FIVE SPEAKS”

In August 1932, Joseph Stalin proposed a new repressive law on the protection of state property. This was done under the pretext that dispossessed peasants were allegedly stealing cargo from freight trains and collective farm and cooperative property.

The law provided for such violations by execution with confiscation of property, and in mitigating circumstances - 10 years in prison. Convicts were not subject to amnesty.

The punitive document was popularly known as the “law of five ears of corn”: in fact, anyone who collected several ears of wheat on a collective farm field without permission was guilty of theft of state property.

During the first year of the new law, 150 thousand people were convicted. The law was in force until 1947, but the peak of its application occurred precisely in 1932-33.

“BLACK BOARDS”

In the 1920s and 30s, newspapers regularly published lists of districts, villages, collective farms, enterprises, or even individuals who had not fulfilled food procurement plans. Debtors who ended up on these “black boards” (as opposed to “red boards” - honor rolls), various fines and sanctions were applied, including direct repression against entire labor collectives.

It should be noted that putting a village on such “planks” during the Holodomor actually meant a death sentence for its residents.

The right to include villages and collectives in such a list had the regional representative offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine on the representation of district and rural cells.

The “black board” system, in addition to Ukraine, also operated in the Kuban, Volga region, Don region, Kazakhstan - territories where many Ukrainians lived.

CANNIBALISM

Witnesses of the Holodomor talk about cases where desperate people ate the bodies of their own or their neighbors’ dead children.

“This cannibalism reached its peak when the Soviet government... began printing posters with the warning: “Eating your own children is barbaric,” write Hungarian researchers Agnes Vardy and Stephen Vardy of Duquesne University.

According to some reports, more than 2,500 people were convicted of cannibalism during the Holodomor.

HUNDREDS OF STREETS WITH THE NAMES OF THE ORGANIZERS OF THE HOLODOMOR IN UKRAINE

In January 2010, the Kyiv Court of Appeal found seven Soviet leaders guilty of organizing the genocide of Ukrainians. Among them are the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Stalin, the head of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Molotov, the secretaries of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Kaganovich and Postyshev, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Kosior, his second secretary Khataevich and the head of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR Chubar.

Despite the court verdict, until recently there were hundreds of streets in Ukraine named after the organizers of the genocide.

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the law “On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes and the ban on the propaganda of their symbols,” which was later signed by the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. During the process of decommunization in Ukraine, 1.2 thousand monuments to Lenin were dismantled and about 1 thousand settlements were renamed.

FIRST MENTION IN THE PRESS

The first to report the famine in the USSR was the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in December 1933. In three articles in the Manchester Guardian newspaper, the journalist described his depressing impressions from trips to Ukraine and Kuban.

Muggeridge showed the mass death of peasants, but did not voice specific figures. After his first article, the Soviet government banned foreign journalists from traveling to areas where the population suffered from hunger.

In March, New York Times correspondent in Moscow Walter Duranty tried to refute Muggeridge's sensational discoveries. His note was called “Russians are starving, but they are not dying of hunger.” When other American newspapers began to write about the problem, Duranty confirmed the fact of mass deaths from starvation.

RECOGNITION AS GENOCIDE

The concept of “genocide” was introduced into the international legal field only by resolution 96 (I) of the UN General Assembly adopted on December 11, 1946, which determined: “According to the norms of international law, genocide is a crime that is condemned by the civilized world and for the commission of which the main culprits must be punished."

On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which came into force on January 12, 1951.

In 2006, the Verkhovna Rada officially recognized the Holodomor of 1932-33 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. According to the law, public denial of the Holodomor is considered illegal, but the punishment for such actions is not specified.

The Holodomor of 1932-1933 was recognized as an act of genocide of the Ukrainian people by Australia, Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, Ecuador, Estonia, Spain, Italy, Canada, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Slovakia, USA, Hungary, Czech Republic, Chile, as well as the Vatican as a separate state.

The European Union called the Holodomor a crime against humanity. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) called the Holodomor a crime of the communist regime. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called the Holodomor the result of the criminal actions and policies of Stalin's totalitarian regime. The United Nations (UN) has defined the Holodomor as a national tragedy of the Ukrainian people.

A number of churches recognized the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. Among them are the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate, the UOC of the Kyiv Patriarchate, as well as the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Based on materials from the BBC, “League”, and the Ukrainian Embassy in Canada.

Today, October 26, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the Holodomor.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman asked Ukrainians to honor the memory of the Holodomor victims with a minute of silence and light a candle. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko also called on Ukrainians to light candles on Saturday, November 26, at 16:00 in memory of the victims of the Holodomor.
The Kiev city administration has published a list of events that are planned in Kyiv in connection with the Day of Remembrance of Holodomor Victims.
The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has prepared a plan of events to commemorate the memory of the victims of the famines of 1932-1933, 1921-1922 and 1946-1947.

In this article we will try to find out the real causes of the famine of 1932-1933 in the USSR.

Since 1927, the Soviet leadership has been heading towards collectivization. At first it was planned to unite 1.1 million farms (about 4%) into collective farms by 1933. Further, plans for collectivization changed several times and in the fall of 1929 they decided to switch to complete collectivization.

On January 5, 1930, the draft resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the timing of collectivization, edited by Stalin, was approved. In the main grain-growing regions, collectivization was supposed to take place in 1-2 years.

This decree served as an impetus for the unwinding of repressions against the wealthy rural population.

The richest and most productive peasants were dispossessed. About 2.4 million peasants were forcibly taken to remote areas of the country. Approximately 390 thousand of them died.

A huge number of the youngest and most able-bodied peasants fled to the cities. The growth of the urban population in 1929-1931 amounted to 12.4 million people, which is several times higher than the natural population growth.

One of the prerequisites for the famine was the socialization of livestock. As a result of attempts to forcibly take away livestock, peasants began mass slaughter.

Here is the data on the number of cattle by year:

• 1928 - 70 540;
• 1929 - 67 112;
• 1930 - 52 962;
• 1931 - 47 916;
• 1932 - 40 651;
• 1933 - 38 592.

The amount of draft power (horses), which was the main working tool, was more than halved. In 1932, the fields were overgrown with weeds. Even units of the Red Army were sent to weed. Due to a lack of labor resources and draft power, 30% to 40% of the grain remained in the field unharvested.

Meanwhile, the grain procurement plan increased from year to year.

Causes of the famine of 1932-1933

The collective farm chairmen were instructed to hand over all available grain, which was done. The remaining grain was taken from the peasants by force, often descending into the use of violence and sadism. Seeing what was happening in the village, Sholokhov wrote a letter to Stalin.

Here is an excerpt from Stalin’s response to Sholokhov’s letter:

“...respected grain growers in your region (and not only your region) carried out the “Italian” (sabotage!) and were not averse to leaving the workers and the Red Army without bread. The fact that the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without blood) does not change the fact that respected grain farmers were essentially waging a “quiet” war with the Soviet regime. A war of attrition, dear comrade. Sholokhov... It is clear as daylight that respected grain growers are not such harmless people as it might seem from afar..."

From this letter it is extremely clear that the famine was provoked on purpose. The peasants had to be forced to work, and to work a lot, seven days a week, from morning to night. To work more than they worked in their time for the landowners.

As a result of activities carried out by the country’s leadership in villages famine broke out. The scale of the casualties was enormous. About 8 million people died of starvation. About 4 million people died in Ukraine. About 1 million in Kazakhstan. The remaining victims occurred in the Volga region, the North Caucasus and Siberia.

Causes of the famine of 1932-1933 obvious, they were not hidden even at that time. The famine was caused by the leadership of the USSR, which denied the natural laws of economics and did not know how to manage the country's agriculture. Instead of trying to stimulate agricultural development, an attempt was made to frighten the peasants with hunger and force them to work. This policy is generally characteristic of the era of Stalin’s rule and is essentially inhumane.

Now, it would seem, we can put an end to our story. However... A number of modern (non-Stalinist and non-Soviet) historians, for example Zhukov, Yulin, Pykhalov and others, who have unambiguous wide recognition in scientific circles, bring a slightly different view of the events of 1932-1933. I will try to briefly outline the essence of this view.

There is a widely known fact that in the Russian Empire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, great famine occurred with a frequency of approximately once every ten years, periodically affecting one or another province of the country. The most terrible hunger strikes occurred in 1891-1892 and 1911. Comparing the average mortality rate for the five years preceding the famine of 1891-1892 with the mortality rate during the famine itself of 1891-1892, it is easy to see that the number of deaths during the famine years increased by approximately 1.3 million people.

It is not a fact that these 1.3 million died precisely from hunger, but it is clear that death was caused by diseases caused by systematic malnutrition and consumption of various surrogates, such as quinoa, tree leaves, etc., as well as poisoning by grain contaminated with ergot and other similar diseases.

The tsarist government systematically took measures to combat hunger, trying to feed the starving regions, but the lack of developed infrastructure and roads often led to disastrous results. There were several reasons for the systematic hunger strikes. First of all, natural conditions are much more difficult than in Western Europe and, as a result, lower yields. Land scarcity of peasants. Extensive production methods.

The years 1932-1933 were lean. Widespread ergot and other grain diseases were observed. These troubles are superimposed on the sabotage of the grain harvest, which was carried out by opponents of the Bolsheviks, inciting large sections of the peasants against the Soviet regime. Some of the grain was hidden in pits. As is known, this storage method led to spoilage of grain and its transformation into poison for the body.

When we try to find out where, for example, 4 million people died of hunger in Ukraine in 1932-1933, it turns out that this number was calculated using empirical formulas based on population censuses that took place once every 5 or even 10 years .

Meanwhile, there are clear mortality data for each year, based on registry office records. Thus, the average mortality rate in Ukraine for the five years preceding the famine of 1932-1933 was 515 thousand people per year. In 1932, the death rate was 668 thousand people. In 1933, the death rate was 1 million 309 thousand people. Having carried out calculations, we come to the conclusion that the number of deaths during the two years of famine increased by 945 thousand people, which is exactly how many deaths can be attributed to events related to the hunger strike. Even if you add up all the deaths in Ukraine in 1932-1933, there are not even 2 million people, not to mention the figure of 4 million that was given earlier.

Contrary to the popular belief that during the hunger strike of 1932-1933, the USSR sold grain abroad very cheaply and in large quantities, it should be noted that in fact grain exports were stopped at that time. Grain procurement plans have been sharply reduced. Emergency aid was provided to famine-stricken areas.

In this situation, much depended on the actions of local authorities. It should be recalled that the people who went on a hunger strike paid for it, falling under the rink of purges and repressions of 1937.

This historical view transfers the events of 1932-1933 from a planned famine into a national tragedy of the USSR, one of the serious problems facing the new Soviet government.

However, in order to finally get to the bottom of the truth, you need to scour the entire Internet, and perhaps even pull up a bunch of historical documents.

The kingdom of heaven to all who were victims of the tragedy of 1932-1933.

In 1932-1933 there was no drought in Ukraine, Kuban and the Volga region
What were the causes of the famine? Traditionally, famine in Russia was associated with droughts and crop shortages. Therefore, the question of weather conditions and harvest in the grain regions of the USSR on the eve of the tragedy is of fundamental importance to us. We have collected numerous facts on this matter. First of all, there is very important evidence from specialists who directly observed the weather and the 1932 harvest in the grain regions of the USSR. Thus, the Commission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee to study the progress of Soviet economic and cultural construction in the North Caucasus, in its report written in January 1933, touching on the issue of the 1932 harvest, concluded that the weather factor did not deserve attention from the point of view of its inclusion in the final report.
In a letter to Stalin dated July 26, 1932, K.E. Voroshilov, who visited the North Caucasus region, reported: “Climatic (meteorological) conditions of the current spring and summer in S.K. were extremely favorable." Andrew Cairns, a Scottish-Canadian wheat specialist who toured major agricultural areas, including Ukraine, in the spring and summer of 1932, pointed to rainfall and did not provide any information about natural disasters such as droughts, floods, etc. He noted that although the grain crops around Kyiv and Dnepropetrovsk were quite poor, the color of the wheat indicated that it received the required amount of precipitation on time. Cairns observed a similar situation in Kuban.
The same can be said about the Volga region, a region traditionally prone to droughts and crop shortages. In 1931–1933, meteorological specialists established the following weather characteristics in the spring-summer period, which determines the ripening of agricultural crops. 1931 – moderate drought in the area of ​​the cities of Saratov and Stalingrad, severe – in the area of ​​​​Bezenchuk. In 1932 there was no drought. According to experts, this year can be described as “favorable for the harvest of all field crops.” Well-known Russian drought researchers V.F. Kozeltseva and D.A. Based on 40 weather stations located in the European part of the country, including in the regions under consideration, an aridity index was calculated, characterizing the intensity of atmospheric aridity for May–August 1900–1979.
It was found that in 1931 the index of atmospheric aridity in the area of ​​the cities of Saratov, Orenburg, and Astrakhan was significantly weaker than in 1921 and 1924. In 1932, the atmospheric aridity index did not show drought in the Volga region, Don and Kuban. At the request of the author, at the former All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Agricultural Meteorology (Obninsk) using a method developed by Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences O.D. Sirotenko, an employee of the institute V.N. Pavlova, using mathematical modeling, determined the yield of one of the main grain crops of the Volga region, spring wheat, for the period from 1890 to 1990, based on the agroclimatic conditions of these years. Hypothetically, the average level of spring wheat yield for 100 years and its deviations from this level for each of the given 100 years were determined. It was found that in 1931, in the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions, there should have been a significant decrease in the yield of spring wheat due to drought.
In 1932, the situation was already different. Hypothetically, the yield of spring wheat should have been equal to the 100-year average in rural areas of the modern Volgograd and Ulyanovsk regions, decreased slightly in the modern regions of Saratov (by 30%) and Samara (by 10%) regions, and fallen more seriously in the Orenburg region (by 40 %). The fact that in the Volga region in 1932 the weather could not significantly reduce the yield of grain crops is also evidenced by this fact. In Saratov, at the experimental station of the Grain Institute, the wheat harvest in 1932 averaged 15 centners per hectare, while the best farm in the entire Volga region produced a yield of 6 centners per hectare that year.
During a sociological survey of villages in the Volga region and Southern Urals, we asked old-timers a question regarding the influence of weather conditions on the onset of famine. In the questionnaire, it sounded as follows: “Was the grain harvest collected by the peasants of your village on the eve of the famine sufficient to provide their families with bread until the next harvest, or was this harvest completely or partially lost due to drought?” Of the 617 people surveyed, 293 were able to answer confidently. Of these, 206 responded affirmatively and 87 responded negatively. That is, of those who were able to answer this question, the overwhelming majority of witnesses to the events of 1932–1933 in the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions (70.2%) did not recognize the influence of weather conditions on the onset of famine.
At the same time, almost 30% took a different position. But here it should be noted that these 30% did not deny the negative consequences of collectivization and grain procurements for the fate of the peasantry and emphasized that grain was taken out of the village, despite the drought. Thus, eyewitnesses of the events in question confirmed data from other sources about the nature of weather conditions in the Volga region and the Southern Urals in 1932.
In general, we can conclude that in 1931–1932 the weather in the grain-producing regions of the USSR was not entirely favorable for agriculture. However, while maintaining the existing level of agricultural technology, it could not cause a massive shortage of grain. In 1932, there was no drought in the grain regions, similar in its intensity and distribution boundaries to the droughts of the 19th - first half of the 20th centuries, which led to widespread destruction of crops.
We can only talk about local drought in certain areas, of average intensity. Therefore, the famine of 1932–1933 was not the result of natural disasters, but a natural consequence of the agrarian policy of the Stalinist regime and the reaction of the peasantry to it.

Cause of the 1932–1933 famine - grain procurements and collectivization policies

Therefore, the famine of 1932–1933 was not the result of natural disasters, but a natural consequence of the agrarian policy of the Stalinist regime and the reaction of the peasantry to it.
Its immediate causes were the anti-peasant policy of collectivization and grain procurement, carried out by the Stalinist leadership in order to solve the problems of accelerated industrialization of the country and strengthen its own power. In 1932–1933, famine struck not only Ukraine, but all the main grain-producing regions of the USSR, zones of complete collectivization.
A careful study of the sources points to a fundamentally unified mechanism for creating a famine situation in the grain-producing regions of the country. Everywhere this is forced collectivization, forced grain procurements and state deliveries of other agricultural products, dispossession, suppression of peasant resistance, destruction of the traditional system of survival of peasants in conditions of hunger (liquidation of the kulaks, fight against beggary, spontaneous migration, etc.). The most important thing is that there was a process of simultaneous entry of the collectivized regions of the USSR into famine. We emphasize once again simultaneous entry. The logical chain of events that led to the tragedy can be built as follows - collectivization, grain procurements, the agrarian crisis of 1932, peasant resistance, “punishing the peasants through hunger” in the name of strengthening the regime and establishing the collective farm system.
The inextricable connection between collectivization and famine can be judged at least by such an obvious fact as the cessation in 1930 of the period of stable development of the Soviet village that began after the famine years of 1924–1925. Already 1930 - the year of complete collectivization - marked the return of the specter of hunger. In a number of regions of Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Siberia, the Lower and Middle Volga, food difficulties arose as a result of the grain procurement campaign of 1929, which was used as a catalyst for the collective farm movement. It seemed that 1931 should be a satisfying year for grain growers, since in 1930, due to exceptionally favorable weather conditions, a record harvest was harvested in the grain regions of the country (according to official data - 835.4 million quintals, in reality - no more than 772 million quintals) . But no. Winter-spring of 1931 is a sad harbinger of a future tragedy.
The editorial offices of central newspapers received numerous letters from collective farmers of the Volga region, the North Caucasus and other regions about their difficult financial situation. The main reasons for the difficulties that arose in these letters were named grain procurements and collectivization policies. Moreover, responsibility for this was often placed personally on Stalin. “People are breathing fire, cursing Comrade himself. Stalin, who created this sorrow,” said one of these letters. The experience of the first two years of collectivization clearly demonstrated that Stalin's collective farms, in their essence, had nothing in common with peasant interests. They were considered by the authorities primarily as a source for commercial grain and other agricultural products. The interests of grain growers were not taken into account.
The grain procurement planning system and methods for their implementation spoke very eloquently about this. Already the first year of collectivization clearly showed the goals for which it was carried out. In 1930, state grain procurements, compared to 1928, doubled. A record amount of grain for all the years of Soviet power (221.4 million centners) was exported from villages to account for grain procurements. In the main grain regions, procurement averaged 35–40%. In 1928 they fluctuated between 20–25%. For example, in 1930 in the North Caucasus region, the gross grain harvest increased to 60.1 million centners, compared to 49.3 million centners in 1928.
At the same time, 22.9 million centners were withdrawn from grain procurements, compared to 10.7 million centners in 1928, that is, 107% more. Moreover, the North Caucasus fulfilled not only the initial plan, but also the additional one, donating part of the seed, feed and food grains to account for grain procurements. As a result, as already mentioned, some areas of the North Caucasus Territory in the spring of 1931 experienced serious food difficulties, and seeds had to be imported to them for sowing collective farm fields. The year 1931 was not entirely favorable in terms of weather conditions. Although not as severe as in 1921, drought still struck five main regions of the North-East of the country (Trans-Urals, Bashkiria, Western Siberia, Volga region, Kazakhstan). This had the most negative impact on the yield and gross grain harvests. In 1931, a reduced grain harvest was obtained, according to official data, 694.8 million centners (in 1930 - 772 million centners).
However, state grain procurements were not only not reduced compared to the harvest year of 1930, but were even increased. For example, for the drought-stricken Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions, the grain procurement plan amounted to 145 million poods and 125 million poods, respectively (in 1930 they were 100.8 million poods and 88.6 million poods).

Methods for implementing grain procurement plans

The methods for implementing grain procurement plans were in the nature of surplus appropriation. The order of the era of “war communism” returned to the village. Local authorities, under pressure from the Center, raked all available grain from collective farms and individual farms. With the help of the “conveyor method” of harvesting, counter plans and other measures, strict control was established over the harvest. Dissatisfied peasants and activists were mercilessly repressed: they were dispossessed, expelled, and put on trial.
At the same time, the initiative in the “grain procurement chaos” came from the Stalinist leadership and Stalin personally. A clear indication of this is Stalin’s speech at the October 1931 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. The requests made at the plenum by the secretaries of the Middle Volga and Lower Volga regional committees to reduce grain procurements due to shortages (at the same time specific data on yields were given) Stalin rejected in a sharp form, mocking “how precise” the secretaries had become recently... And People's Commissar of the People's Commissariat of Supply Mikoyan, who was directly responsible for supplying the population with food, was present at the plenum, summing up the reports heard, and emphasized: “The question is not about the standards, how much will be left for food, etc., the main thing is to tell the collective farms: “first of all, fulfill state plan, and then satisfy your plan.”

Reduction of livestock numbers

Thus, pressure on the collective farm village came from the very top. Stalin and his inner circle bore personal responsibility for all the actions of local authorities to implement their decisions and their tragic consequences. The result of such a policy, as well as collectivization in general, was a deep crisis in agricultural production in 1932. Its tangible manifestations were: a sharp reduction in the number of working and productive livestock, spontaneous migrations of the rural population, and a decrease in the quality of basic agricultural work. By the beginning of the 1932 sowing season, the irreparable damage that livestock farming suffered as a result of collectivization became obvious. The country lost half its livestock, losing approximately the same amount of livestock products. Only in 1958 did the USSR exceed the 1928 level for the main types of livestock.
Due to the lack of fodder caused by the consequences of grain procurements, in the winter of 1931/32 there was the sharpest reduction in the number of working and productive livestock since the beginning of collectivization: 6.6 million horses died - a quarter of the remaining draft livestock, the rest of the livestock was extremely exhausted. The total number of working horses and bulls decreased in the USSR from 27.4 million in 1928 to 17.9 million in 1932. In the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions in 1932, a similar picture was observed. There was the largest reduction in the number of livestock in all the years of collectivization. If in 1931, compared to 1930, the number of horses in the Lower Volga decreased by 117.0 thousand, in the Middle Volga - by 128.0 thousand, then in 1932, compared to 1931, this figure in the Lower Volga was 333.0 thousand horses, in the Middle Volga - 300.0 thousand.
Therefore, according to the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR, during the spring sowing campaign of 1932, for example, in the Lower Volga region, the load per working horse averaged 23 hectares (instead of 10 hectares before the start of collectivization). Hence, it was quite natural that the quality of basic field work on collective farms would decline in 1932. The forced socialization of cows and personal livestock of collective farmers was tragic in its consequences for the village. The source of this lawlessness was the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated July 30, 1931 “On the development of socialist livestock farming.” In practice, its implementation resulted in the banal requisition of livestock from peasant farmsteads. The response to this kind of action was the mass exodus of peasants from collective farms demanding the return of their livestock, equipment, and part of the crops. Peasants destroyed livestock, thereby undermining the foundations of not only livestock farming, but also food security.

Mass migration of peasants to cities

The mass migration of the healthiest and youngest peasants to the cities, first out of fear of dispossession, and then from collective farms in search of a better life, also significantly weakened the production potential of the village in 1932. Due to the difficult food situation in the winter of 1931/32, the most active part of collective farmers and individual farmers, primarily men of working age, began fleeing from the countryside to the cities and to work. A significant part of collective farmers tried to leave the collective farms and return to individual farming. The peak of mass exits occurred in the first half of 1932, when the number of collectivized farms in the RSFSR decreased by 1370.8 thousand, in Ukraine by 41.2 thousand.
Unauthorized migration from villages to cities and industrial areas amounted to 698,342 people in the USSR for the period from October 1931 to April 1, 1932. By the beginning of the spring sowing season of 1932, the Soviet countryside approached with undermined livestock production and a difficult food situation for the population. Therefore, for objective reasons, the sowing campaign could not be carried out efficiently and on time. The lack of draft power and violations of the rules of agricultural technology during the agricultural campaign of 1932 were predetermined by the consequences of the agrarian policy of the Stalinist leadership, which was detrimental to agricultural production.

The sowing and harvesting campaigns of 1932 were disrupted

Thus, the reduction in draft power led to serious delays in all major field work and a decrease in their quality. In 1932, according to the report of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee commission, the spring sowing campaign in the North Caucasus lasted for 30–45 days, instead of the usual week or a little more. In Ukraine, by May 15, 1932, only 8 million hectares were sown (for comparison: 15.9 million in 1930 and 12.3 in 1931). The persistent efforts of the authorities to expand the acreage of grain crops to increase their marketability, without introducing progressive crop rotations, introducing sufficient amounts of manure and fertilizers, inevitably led to depletion of the land, a drop in yields, and an increase in plant diseases. A huge reduction in draft power with a simultaneous increase in sown areas could not but result in a deterioration in the quality of plowing, sowing and harvesting, and, consequently, a decrease in yield and an increase in losses.
The facts of the high prevalence of weeds in the fields sown with grain in 1932 in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and other areas, and the low quality of weeding work are widely known. A natural consequence of such objective circumstances was huge losses of grain during harvesting, the extent of which had no analogues in the past. If in 1931, according to the NK RKI, more than 150 million centners were lost during harvesting (about 20% of the gross grain harvest), then in 1932 the harvest losses were even greater. For example, in Ukraine they ranged from 100 to 200 million poods; in the Lower and Middle Volga they reached 72 million poods (35.6% of the total gross grain harvest). In the country as a whole, in 1932 at least half of the harvest remained in the field. If these losses had been reduced by at least half, then there would have been no mass starvation in the Soviet countryside. However, according to sources and eyewitness accounts, in 1932 the harvest was average compared to previous years and quite sufficient to prevent mass starvation. But it was not possible to remove it in a timely manner and without losses.
Therefore, in the end it turned out to be worse than in 1931, although official figures indicate otherwise. A huge shortage of grain in the country after the end of the harvest and grain procurement campaign of 1932 arose due to objective and subjective circumstances. Objective reasons include the above-mentioned consequences of two years of collectivization, which affected the level of agricultural technology in 1932.
The subjective reasons were, firstly, peasant resistance to grain procurements and collectivization and, secondly, Stalin’s policy of grain procurements and repression in the countryside.

Peasant resistance to collectivization is the most important factor in famine

Peasant rejection of collective farms, their active resistance to the policy of collectivization and grain procurements is the most important factor in the agrarian crisis of 1932. The bulk of collective farmers and individual farmers, having an extremely negative experience in 1931, when as a result of grain procurements they were left without bread and were forced to endure a hungry winter, did not want and, due to objective conditions (lack of tax, first of all), could not work conscientiously on collective farms and their farms. Collective farmers preferred to work on the collective farm any other way of earning money: on a personal farm, on state farms, in the city.
Already in the autumn of 1931 and especially in the spring of 1932, the so-called “bagpipes” - collective refusals to work on collective farms - swept across the country. 55,387 peasants took part in them, including 23,946 people in Ukraine. Under these conditions, in order to interest peasants in timely harvesting, in May 1932, resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks were issued, according to which the state grain procurement plan was reduced and after their implementation (from January 15) free trade in bread and meat was allowed (in the case of regular deliveries to centralized funds). In the spring and summer months of 1932, decisions were made on the inadmissibility of the liquidation of personal subsidiary plots of collective farmers, on the return of livestock previously requisitioned for public farms, on the observance of the law and the end of lawlessness in the countryside.
However, all these measures of the so-called “neonep” could not produce results, since they were taken too late. In particular, the decree on “free trade” that the Soviet government was counting on did not work, since at the beginning of May 1932 the collective farmers simply did not have any grain left to sell to the market. It was not enough for his own consumption. The starving peasants were obsessed with one thought: how to survive winter and spring. The Cossacks and peasants, crushed by many years of tyranny, no longer trusted the authorities. Therefore, in the summer of 1932, from the beginning of the harvesting campaign on collective farms, previously unprecedented theft of collective farm grain from the fields, and the mass exodus of the working population from villages to work became widespread.
Self-dissolution of collective farms continued, accompanied, as stated in the OGPU reports, by “the dismantling of livestock, property and agricultural equipment”, “the unauthorized seizure and division of land and crops for individual use.” Collective farmers and individual farmers refused to work in the fields without public catering. Mass unrest broke out in a number of places, which the authorities suppressed with armed force. According to the OGPU, from April to June 1932, 949 mass protests were registered in rural areas of the USSR, compared to 576 in the first quarter. In addition, with the beginning of the harvest season, the theft of collective farm grain by peasants became a widespread phenomenon. The scale of the phenomenon was so great that the Soviet state, on Stalin’s personal initiative, on August 7, 1932, adopted the “famous” Resolution on the Protection of Public (Socialist) Property, providing for a sentence of 10 years and execution for caught thieves.
Local authorities, for the edification of others, published lists of executed peasants under this, aptly called by the people, “the law of five ears of corn.” This situation was natural, since its severity was due to the beginning of the grain procurement campaign, the nature of which convinced the peasants of the correctness of their behavior. The plans issued from above were unsustainable for collective farms and individual farms from the point of view of their organizational and economic state. Thus, the reduced harvest of 1932 was determined by a combination of objective and subjective reasons. Their ratio was not equal throughout the year.
In the spring of 1932, objective factors were dominant - the consequences of forced collectivization and grain procurements, which led to violations of agricultural technology during the sowing and weeding period. Although the subjective factor - the reluctance of the peasants to work conscientiously, also manifested itself. However, it was largely determined by objective circumstances (food difficulties, reduction of taxes, labor, etc.). With the beginning of the harvesting work, a subjective factor became dominant - peasant resistance to grain procurements. The peasants did not want to conscientiously harvest the crops in fear of hunger, which intensified as the grain procurement campaign unfolded.
But here, too, objective reasons of the same kind as during the sowing and weeding period made themselves felt. The entire set of circumstances listed above was based on Stalin’s collectivization policy, which was carried out consciously and decisively. Therefore, the main blame for the agrarian crisis of 1932 lies with the country's political leadership. It was this that gave rise to the crisis and bears the main responsibility for subsequent events. Therefore, in the broad sense of the word, we can say that the reduced harvest of 1932 was the result of a subjective factor - the policy of forced modernization carried out by the Stalinist regime through the ruthless exploitation of the countryside.

The grain procurement campaign of 1932, which left the village without bread, received sufficient coverage in historiography. Its regional features are related only to the size of the territories and the specific personalities of the performers. Otherwise, in its essence, it was the same for Ukraine, and for the Volga region, and for other zones of complete collectivization. In Ukraine, the Volga region, the Central Black Sea Region, the Don and Kuban, approximately the same processes took place. The October 1931 Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on grain procurements concerned all grain regions, and not just Ukraine. Extraordinary commissions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of 1932 on grain procurements were created almost simultaneously, and not only in Ukraine, but also in the Kuban and Volga region. “Black boards” for regions that failed to fulfill the grain procurement plan were introduced not only in Ukraine, but also in the North Caucasus Territory and the Volga region.
The confiscation of all food from peasants for failure to fulfill the grain procurement plan took place in 1932–1933 not only in Ukraine, but also in Russian regions, as evidenced, for example, by the resolution of the Starominsky district committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of the North Caucasus Territory regarding the Novoderevenskaya village. The arbitrariness of the local authorities there in relation to rural workers during the grain procurement period was no less than in Ukraine, which can be judged, at least, from the letters of M.A. Sholokhova I.V. Stalin about the situation in the Veshensky district.

P forced confinement of peasants in famine-stricken areas

The infamous Stalin-Molotov directive of January 22, 1933 on the forced placement of peasants in starving areas did not apply only to Ukraine. It should not be forgotten that the Russian regions also had things that did not exist in Ukraine. These are the floggings of peasants on collective farms in the Lower Volga region during the agricultural campaign of 1931, as well as the general eviction of Cossack villages in the Kuban for “sabotage of grain procurements.” At the same time, Ukrainian specifics were present in the events of 1932–1933, just as all regions have their own specifics, especially in Kazakhstan, if we talk about the consequences of the tragedy.

Lack of “national specificity” of hunger

In the multinational Volga region, for example, the specificity of the famine was the absence of its “national specificity.” This means that in the zone of complete collectivization, Russians, Tatars, Mordovians, and representatives of other peoples equally starved. In this context, it should be noted that, despite the mountains of documents, researchers have not yet discovered a single resolution of the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government ordering the killing of a certain number of Ukrainian or other peasants by starvation!
Returning to the Ukrainian factor in the events of 1932–1933, we point out, in our opinion, one very important circumstance that influenced their course and to a large extent predetermined their tragic consequences. In the summer of 1932, famine in Ukraine played the role of a destabilizing factor for neighboring regions, primarily the North Caucasus region and the Central Black Sea region. The hungry Ukrainian peasants who poured in there stimulated “panic sentiments” among the Cossacks and peasants, thereby disrupting the harvesting campaign and grain procurements.
The very fact of famine in Ukraine came as a shock to Russian peasants. The reaction of the Belarusians was indicative in this regard. In the summer of 1932, Belarus was filled with starving rural residents of Ukraine. Amazed Belarusian workers wrote to Pravda and the country’s top leadership that they did not remember that “Belarus had ever fed Ukraine.” However, a fundamental point should be noted - the famine in the neighboring grain regions of Russia arose simultaneously with the Ukrainian one, and the latter only acted as a catalyst for events, but not their cause. In our opinion, it was the mass flight of Ukrainian peasants from collective farms in the spring and summer of 1932 that, to a large extent, determined the tightening of the policies of the Stalinist leadership in the countryside as a whole, in all regions, including Ukraine. As evidenced by the published correspondence of I.V. Stalin and L.M. Kaganovich, at the beginning of 1932, Stalin believed that the main blame for the difficulties that arose in Ukraine lay with the local leadership, which did not pay due attention to agriculture, because it was carried away by the “industrial giants” and spread out the grain procurement plan in an egalitarian way across regions and collective farms. That is why in the spring of 1932 assistance from the Center was provided: seed and food loans.
However, after Stalin was informed that the leaders of Ukraine (G.I. Petrovsky) were trying to blame the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the difficulties that had arisen, and Ukrainian collective farmers, instead of being grateful for the help provided, abandoned collective farms, traveled around the European part of the USSR and ruining other people's collective farms “with their complaints and whining,” his position began to change. From the practice of providing food loans, Stalin moved on to the policy of establishing strict control over the rural population. Moreover, this trend intensified as peasant opposition to grain procurements grew in the form, first of all, of massive harvest theft in all grain-producing regions of the USSR without exception. Thus, the basis of Stalin’s firmness was the desire to strengthen the collective farm system and break peasant resistance to grain procurements both in Ukraine and other regions. To a certain extent, such a policy was also determined by the international situation.

External factor

The literature on the topic of collectivization somehow silently talks about this, and, meanwhile, the external factor, in our opinion, played a significant role in the events of 1932–1933 in Ukraine and the Soviet countryside as a whole. In December 1931, at a session of the Central Executive Committee V.M. Molotov spoke in strong terms about “the growing danger of military intervention against the USSR.” These were not empty words. As a result of the major failure of the Comintern's policy in China and the aggressive policy of Japan, a real hotbed of military threat arose on the Far Eastern borders of the USSR. In September 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and occupied it a year later. On December 13, 1932, Japan rejected the non-aggression pact proposed by the USSR. At the beginning of 1933, the Japanese army reached directly the Far Eastern borders of the Soviet Union. The Stalinist leadership anxiously awaited Japan's further steps. And in Germany, Hitler came to power, and during the election campaign he initiated a fundraising circle to help the starving Germans in the USSR.
In the context of Japanese aggression in Northern China and the emerging Nazi threat in Europe, a firm and decisive position was important for the Stalinist leadership. “A confident and dismissive tone towards the great powers, faith in one’s own strength,” as V.M. expressed its essence in January 1933 at a session of the Central Executive Committee. Molotov. The external threat factor and the desire to preserve the international prestige of the USSR also predetermined the uncompromising nature of the confrontation between the Stalinists and the peasantry during the grain procurement campaign of 1932 both in Ukraine and in other regions. At the same time, we do not deny that the Stalinist regime had an accompanying motive in its policy in Ukraine in 1932–1933 - the desire to take advantage of the situation and neutralize those layers of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the party-Soviet bureaucracy that advocated preserving the originality of Ukrainian culture and education in conditions of the beginning of unification of national cultures.

The famine of 1932–1933 helped Stalin eliminate opposition to his regime

What happened was approximately what happened during the famine of 1921–1922, when the Bolshevik leadership, under the pretext of saving the starving, dealt with dissident priests who resisted the disorderly confiscation of church valuables (remember the famous letter of V.I. Lenin to V.M. Molotov dated March 19, 1922 ) . The famine of 1932–1933 helped Stalin eliminate in Ukraine, in his opinion, potential opposition to his regime, which could grow from cultural to political and rely on the peasantry.

There are facts on this score, including those given in the 3rd volume of the documentary collection “The Tragedy of the Soviet Village,” dedicated to the Holodomor, which characterizes the activities of the OGPU bodies in the Ukrainian village. In particular, the organs of the OGPU waged a determined struggle against the so-called “nationalist counter-revolution”. Only in the period from January to August 1932, the OGPU of Ukraine discovered and neutralized 8 “nationalist groups of the Ukrainian chauvinist intelligentsia” with 179 participants. By the end of August 1932, 35 such groups with 562 participants had already been liquidated. In addition, the OGPU recorded facts of anti-Soviet agitation among party and economic activists in rural areas by former Ukapists, who claimed that the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government were “strangling Ukrainian national culture.”

In the same vein, one can consider the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated December 14, 1932 “On grain procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Western Region,” which provided for the expulsion of “Petlyura and other bourgeois-nationalist elements from party and Soviet organizations” , as well as the translation in the North Caucasus of the paperwork of the Soviet and cooperative bodies of the “Ukrainian regions”, all newspapers and magazines published there from Ukrainian into Russian, the translation of teaching subjects from Ukrainian into Russian in schools in these regions. However, there were other reasons behind the tragedy in Ukraine, primarily the anti-peasant policy of the Stalinists, Stalin’s distrust of the peasantry as a class, regardless of its nationality.

Characteristic in this regard was Stalin’s order, voiced in his letter from Sochi to Kaganovich and Molotov on June 18, 1932, about the prohibition of bringing the reduced grain procurement plan to the villages, so as not to discourage the peasants. In the same vein, there is an almost anecdotal story about the procurement of eggs in Ukraine, the plan of which assumed that for every hen counted, based on the logic of peasant behavior, there would be at least two, hidden from accounting. Therefore, they launched a plan, the implementation of which was possible if each chicken laid one egg per day. Stalin’s strategy of “insurance against peasant cunning” aggravated the situation, which M. Khataevich was not afraid to point out to Stalin in a letter dated December 27, 1932. He noted that if Ukraine had immediately received a reduced grain procurement plan, it would have been implemented, since people would have been confident in its reality. Peasants in Russia and Ukraine were punished by the 1933 famine for their unwillingness to work conscientiously on Stalin's collective farms.

All the blame for the collapse of the country's agriculture was laid by Stalin and his entourage on the local authorities, “kulaks” and “idler collective farmers”. This was announced to the whole world in the speeches of the leader and his associates at the January 1933 United Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission and the First All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers-Shock Workers (February 1933). The scale of the famine of 1932–1933 is comparable to the situation during the “Tsar Famine” of 1921–1922.

Horrors of hunger

Famine gripped the main breadbaskets of the country and was accompanied by all its horrors. Numerous documents paint a gruesome picture of the suffering of millions of rural residents. The epicenters of the famine were concentrated in the grain regions - zones of complete collectivization, where the situation of the starving population was approximately the same. This can be judged from OGPU reports, reports from MTS political departments, closed correspondence between local authorities and the Center, and eyewitness accounts.

In particular, only we have established that in 1933 in the Volga region such settlements of the Lower Volga region as the village of Ivlevka in the Atkarsky district, the village of Starye Grivki in the Turkovsky district, and the collective farm named after Sverdlov in the Semenovsky village council of the Fedorovsky canton of the ASSRNP were almost completely depopulated. Numerous cases of corpse eating and burials in common pits of famine victims have been identified in the villages of the Saratov, Penza, Samara, and Volgograd regions. As you know, the same thing was observed in Ukraine, the Don and Kuban. There are official figures for the starvation mortality of the rural population in 1932–1933 registered by the registry office.

We do not share the opinion widespread in historiography about the lack of reliable information on mortality in the starving regions of the USSR due to the ineffective work of accounting bodies (registry offices). Our analysis of the primary documentation of 65 district registry office archives and four regional ones, located in the territory that in 1933 was part of the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions, convincingly proved the fact of high mortality due to hunger and related diseases in the period under review at this time. territories. This was also evidenced by a significant drop in the birth rate in 1932–1934 in the studied areas. An analysis of the civil registry records of death contained in the archives of registry offices for 895 rural Soviets for the period from 1927 to 1940 showed that the registered mortality rate of the population in 1933 in the Lower Volga region exceeded the level of 1931 - 3.4 times, 1932 year - by 3.3 times, in the Middle Volga region, respectively, in 1931 - by 1.5 times, in 1932 - by 1.8 times.

The fact that the sharp jump in mortality in 1933 and the drop in the birth rate of the rural population were due to the ensuing famine is indicated by the records of causes of death available in death certificates, which directly or indirectly indicate famine. First of all, in the death registers there are direct indications of the death of peasants in 1933 from hunger. In particular, the “cause of death” column of the death certificate contains entries like: died “from hunger”, “exhaustion”, “starvation”, etc. In the registry office archives we studied, we found 3,296 records of similar content. The onset of famine and the extent of the hardships that befell the village are evidenced by the records available in the death certificates for 1933 about the death of peasants from diseases of the digestive system.

In particular, in the “cause of death” column of death certificates, such entries as “stomach exhaustion”, “inflammation of the intestines”, “bloody diarrhea”, “surrogate poisoning”, etc. are widespread. They convincingly illustrate a characteristic feature of the famine disaster - the death of starving people as a result of eating various surrogates. Documents from the registry office archives record numerous facts of peasant deaths in 1933 from diseases such as “typhoid”, “dysentery”, “dropsy”, “malaria” - constant companions of hunger.

Thus, the demographic statistics of registry offices clearly indicate the enormous scale of the famine disaster, comparable to the main grain-producing regions of the USSR. As the studied sources show, the famine at its epicenters equally affected villages with Russian and non-Russian populations and did not have “national specificity” as such, that is, directed against any one people. This situation is especially convincingly illustrated by the example of the Volga region, one of the most multinational regions of Russia. In particular, it is confirmed by the results of our survey of eyewitnesses of the famine, during which representatives of the main peoples traditionally living in the Volga region were interviewed (449 Russians, 69 Ukrainians, 42 Mordvins, 39 Chuvash, 10 Germans, 7 Tatars, 4 Kazakhs and 4 Lithuanians) . They recorded that the severity of hunger was determined by the territorial location of the village in the region and its economic specialization.

Demographic catastrophe

First of all, the epicenter of the famine were villages located in areas that specialized in commercial grain production. In them, famine equally struck Russian, Mordovian, Ukrainian and other villages. The famine of 1932–1933 was a real demographic catastrophe for the village and the country as a whole. A memorandum from the deputy head of the population and health care sector of the TsUNKHU of the USSR State Planning Committee dated June 7, 1934 indicated that the population of Ukraine and the North Caucasus as of January 1, 1933 alone decreased by 2.4 million people.

Among researchers, there are different estimates of the number of victims of this famine. Expert calculations made in recent years, based on a reliable source base, paint the following picture of demographic upheavals in the territory of the former USSR in 1932–1933. Thus, based on an analysis of census data from 1926 and 1937, as well as current civil registry records, demographic losses from the raging famine in Ukraine were calculated. Its direct losses amounted to 3,238 thousand people, or, adjusted for imperfect calculations, they can range from 3 to 3.5 million people. Taking into account the shortage of those born in 1932–1934 (1,268 thousand people) and the decline in the birth rate, the total losses range from 4.3 to 5 million people. According to our calculations, based on the analysis of materials from 65 archives of the registry office of the Volga region and data from the central bodies of the TsUNKHU USSR, the total demographic losses of villages and hamlets of the Volga region during the famine of 1932–1933, including direct victims of famine, as well as indirect losses as a result of falling birth rates and rural migration population amounted to about 1 million people.
The number of peasants who died directly from hunger and the diseases caused by it was determined to be 200–300 thousand people. In the North Caucasus region, the number of Cossacks and peasants who directly died from hunger and diseases caused by it, according to official data, is estimated at 350 thousand people. However, in relation to this region, it is also necessary to take into account the fact that during grain procurements, the mass eviction of “saboteurs” became widespread in the region. Just one grain procurement campaign in 1932 in the North Caucasus region was accompanied by human losses (victims of hunger, repression and deportations) of 620 thousand people, that is, about 8% of the population of the Don and Kuban.
By analyzing changes in the gender and age structure of the population of Kazakhstan between two censuses (1926 and 1939), the number of Kazakhs who died of hunger and permanently migrated in 1931–1933 was determined to be between 1750–1798 thousand people, or 49% of its original number. In our opinion, modern development of the problem of demographic losses of the population of the USSR in the 1930s allows us to estimate them at 5 - maximum 7 million. Of these, according to calculations by V.B. Zhiromskaya, at least 2.5 million people live in the RSFSR. At the same time, Kazakhstan, which was part of the RSFSR with autonomy rights in the early 1930s, should also be taken into account in the general martyrology of victims. At least 1 million people died there from starvation. Thus, in 1932-33. On the famine-stricken territory of the USSR, which was comparable in terms of rural population density, approximately the same picture of starvation mortality was observed. In the RSFSR, at least 3 million people became victims of famine. The most important question of the topic is the reasons for the truly enormous victims of Ukraine during the Holodomor, in comparison with other regions of the USSR.

Demographic losses of Ukraine in 1932–1933

Peasants were deprived of traditional means of survival during famine

By 1933, in the collective farm village there were no insurance reserves of grain in case of famine, traditional for pre-revolutionary times.
During collectivization, they were not discussed at all, since grain was considered only as a source of funds for the needs of the state. This is especially eloquently evidenced by the grain loans issued to collective farms in 1932–1933. Unlike the pre-collective farm period, they pursued one goal - to force collective farmers to conscientiously fulfill state duties. As is known, at the peak of the famine, from February to July 1933, no less than 35 resolutions of the Politburo and decrees of the Council of People's Commissars were adopted on the issuance of a total of 320 thousand tons of grain for food needs. 1.274 million tons of bread were allocated for seeds, including secret supplies. However, the overwhelming majority of collective farmers, according to the recollections of eyewitnesses and other sources, did not consider them a fact of assistance to the starving population from the state, since the help came late, its size was meager, and it was selective.
First of all, food aid was intended only for those collective farmers who went to work on the collective farm. Both central and local authorities used bread as a tool for agricultural work. During the spring and harvest periods of 1933, the issuance of food loans was suspended on collective farms if collective farmers failed to complete agricultural work. For those going into the field, it was often significantly reduced when they failed to meet the planned production standards. Indicative in this regard is one of the resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b)U regarding what to do with the peasants of the Kiev region who ended up in the hospital as a result of hunger: “Divide all those hospitalized into sick and recovering, significantly improve the nutrition of the latter so that as soon as possible let them go to work.” Collectivization destroyed one of the traditional systems of survival of farmers during famine, associated with the existence in the village of a kulak, or, more precisely, a wealthy, economic grain grower, who was a constant guarantor for the poor in case of famine.
The main result of the agrarian policy of the Soviet government in the countryside by the beginning of 1933 was that, as a result of dispossession, peasants were deprived of the opportunity to receive private assistance within their village - a traditional form of survival in conditions of famine in the pre-collective farm village. Another means of village survival in conditions of famine at all times was begging. In 1932–1933, the government used every means at its disposal to prevent starving peasants from collecting alms. The poor were sent outside the region. In addition, urban workers, military personnel and residents of neighboring regions were prohibited from sharing their food rations with starving collective farmers. The traditional means of survival of peasants in conditions of famine was the sale of personal property, primarily livestock and agricultural implements.
In previous years, when the harvest was low due to drought and the villages were threatened with famine, peasants usually sold draft animals already in the first summer months. Farmers thereby saved bread for family food consumption, since it no longer needed to be used to feed livestock. The catastrophic reduction in the number of working and productive livestock during the years of collectivization and its socialization had the most negative impact on the situation of the peasants. In 1932–1933, peasants found themselves in worse conditions than in previous famine years, since, on the one hand, their draft animals were socialized and could not be sold for grain, and on the other, the livestock remaining at their disposal all cows died from lack of food. The most important means of survival for grain-growing families during famine are vegetable gardens and orchards on their plots, which allow them to obtain food supplies. But in 1932–1933, state control was established over this source of livelihood for the peasant family. There is a huge amount of evidence of the confiscation of products grown on the personal plots of collective farmers and individual farmers, as well as preserved gifts of nature as punishment for failure to fulfill state obligations in all regions of the USSR.
For centuries, a proven tradition of salvation during famine was the ability of peasants to leave the disaster zone, go to work, or simply find a safer place and bide their time. Even without government assistance, the flight of starving people from the epicenter of the disaster to less affected areas significantly increased individual chances of salvation. During the famine, unlike previous years, the outflow of population from famine-stricken areas was difficult due to measures taken by the Soviet state to suppress spontaneous migration from the countryside. The most striking evidence of this was the “famous directive” of Stalin and Molotov of January 22, 1933 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the need to take measures to stop the flight of collective farmers from collective farms.
The very flight of hungry people was regarded as a new form of “kulak sabotage” with the aim of disrupting the spring sowing campaign. It is known in the literature that by the beginning of March 1933, the OGPU and the police detained 219,460 people. Of these, 186,588 people were returned back, the rest were prosecuted and convicted. In the same vein, there were measures to change the rules of otkhodnichestvo and introduce a passport system. In particular, according to the resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated March 17, 1933, in order to retire, a collective farmer had to register an agreement with the collective farm board with the economic body that needed his services. In practice, this procedure was almost impossible to implement, since it required a preliminary agreement with the enterprise, state farm, etc. If a collective farmer left the collective farm without permission to work, he and his family were expelled from the collective farm and thus deprived of the right to receive a food loan, as well as those funds that they had earned on the collective farm or transferred to its indivisible funds. The certification of the urban population, which began in 1933, significantly complicated the employment of collective farmers who left the collective farms without permission. The police now received the right to expel peasants from the cities who did not have employment contracts with industrial enterprises, as well as to prevent unauthorized departure from the village.
Thus, the measures taken by the Soviet state actually attached peasants to collective farms, dooming them to hunger and starvation. They affected all regions and caused a significant increase in the mortality rate of the rural population. Speaking about the reasons for the high hunger mortality rate in 1932–1933 in the Soviet countryside, special mention should be made of the fact that the Stalinist leadership refused international assistance, as well as its policy of hungry grain exports at the peak of the famine. This situation fundamentally distinguished the famine of 1932–1933 from the first “Soviet famine” of 1921–1922 and mass hunger strikes in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Not a single gram was allocated from state reserves to the hungry; grain was sold abroad

Historians have established that in 1933, the Stalinist government did not allocate a single gram from the country's reserve grain fund (1.9997 million tons) for the needs of the village. It is not difficult to calculate that if in the first half of 1933, at the very peak of the famine, this bread had been supplied to the hungry in the amount of a six-month norm per person of 100 kg, at least it would have been enough for 20 million people not to die of hunger. But the matter did not stop there. The same can be said about the hungry grain exports. During the famine, Stalin and his entourage pursued an export policy according to the well-known formula of the tsarist government - “we won’t finish it, but we’ll export it.” Thus, in 1932, 1.6 million tons were exported. In January–June 1933, 354 thousand tons of grain were exported from the starving country.
Two authoritative Russian researchers - N.A. Ivnitsky and E.N. Oskolkov rightly believe that the 1.8 million tons of grain exported abroad in 1933 would have been quite enough to prevent mass starvation. According to N.A. Ivnitsky, the Soviet government, while exporting grain, could simultaneously sacrifice part of the country’s gold reserves for the purchase of other food products abroad. However, this did not happen. And the scale of the famine acquired monstrous proportions.

Stalin's leadership hushed up the famine

Historiography has proven that in 1932–1933, the Stalinist leadership kept silent about the famine, continued to export grain abroad and ignored attempts by the world community to help the starving population of the USSR based on its political course.
Acknowledging the fact of the famine would be tantamount to admitting the collapse of the model of modernization of the country chosen by Stalin and his entourage, which was unrealistic in the conditions of the defeat of the opposition and the strengthening of the regime. Nevertheless, in our opinion, even within the framework of the policy chosen by the Stalinist regime, he had real alternatives to mitigate the scale of the tragedy he created. For example, according to D. Penner, shared by the author of this article, hypothetically, Stalin could take advantage of the normalization of relations with the United States and purchase surplus food there at cheap prices. This step would also be evidence of goodwill on the part of the United States towards the USSR, in connection with the establishment of official diplomatic relations. The act of recognition seemed to “cover” the possible ideological and political costs of the USSR, which agreed to accept American assistance. The high parties would be able to “save their face.” In addition, this step would undoubtedly benefit American farmers.
Also, D. Penner and the author believe that the Stalinist leadership did not use the opportunities for international worker solidarity very rationally. The Soviet government could purchase food as a reward to its workers for their dedicated labor from their “class comrades” who were experiencing severe economic depression abroad. In particular, oranges could be imported from California, where they would be doused with kerosene and destroyed because it was cheaper than selling them on the market. Thus, the workers of the Californian ranches and their colleagues in distant Russia would receive support. This would be a manifestation of true international solidarity, which Stalinist propaganda trumpeted.

Main conclusion

The main conclusion that the author came to as a result of many years of research on this topic is the following: The onset of famine in 1932–1933 in the USSR (in Russia and Ukraine) was not associated with weather conditions and the level of agricultural development prior to collectivization as such. The famine was the result of collectivization, forced grain procurements and the suppression of peasant resistance to the Stalinist regime. All decisions concerning the development of the agricultural sector of the USSR economy in 1931–1933 were consciously made by the Stalinist leadership. The situation was aggravated by his policy of limiting and eliminating traditional methods of survival of peasants during famine, as well as the USSR's refusal of international assistance. Therefore, we can call the famine of 1932–1933 in Russia and Ukraine an organized, man-made famine.
At the same time, as world practice shows, the element of “man-made” was present in all hunger strikes, and the Stalinist regime was not original here. But it is impossible to justify it from the standpoint of humanism and religious morality.

Was the Holodomor a genocide of the Ukrainian people?

We do not support the opinion of Ukrainian historians about national genocide by famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933. There are no documents on this subject that would indicate that the Stalinist regime had a plan to destroy the Ukrainian people or reduce their numbers. In the cases of genocide of peoples known in the 20th century (the Armenian massacre of 1915, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda), the regimes that unleashed it acted consciously, that is, they set a similar goal and carried it out with the help of the repressive bodies of the state, which received appropriate orders at the level of the highest political leadership , about which relevant archival documents and eyewitness accounts have been preserved. There was nothing like this in Ukraine. Moreover, there are documents that clearly indicate that Stalin did not have the idea to destroy the Ukrainian people and Ukraine through “terror,” “genocide,” and starvation. They are associated with food and seed loans, other types of state assistance provided to Ukraine with the personal participation of Stalin in 1933, which is described in great detail in the fundamental monograph by R. Davis and S. Wheatcroft that we mentioned. Here are just a few of them. June 27, 1933 11 p.m. 10 min. Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b)U M.M. Khataevich sent Stalin a coded message with the following content: “The continuous rains that have continued for the last 10 days have greatly delayed the ripening of grain and harvesting. On collective farms in a number of districts, all the bread we were given has been completely eaten up; the food situation has greatly worsened, which is especially dangerous in the last days before harvesting. I beg you, if possible, to give us another 50 thousand poods of food loans.” The document contains I. Stalin’s resolution: “We must give.”
At the same time, the request of the head of the political department of the Novouzensk MTS of the Lower Volga region Zelenov, received by the Central Committee on July 3, 1933, for food assistance to the collective farms of the MTS zone was refused. According to the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated June 1, 1933 “On the distribution of tractors produced in June - July and half of August 1933”, out of 12,100 tractors planned for delivery to the regions of the USSR, Ukraine was supposed to receive 5,500 tractors, the North Caucasus - 2,500 , Lower Volga - 1800, Central Black Sea Region - 1250, Central Asia - 550, ZSFSR - 150, Crimea - 200, Southern Kazakhstan - 150. Thus, the Russian regions taken together received 5,700 tractors (47%), and Ukraine alone - 5,500 (45.4%) .
The decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of December 20, 1933 on the purchase of 16 thousand work horses for Ukraine in the BSSR and the Western region should be viewed in the same light. Considering the real situation in the USSR in 1933, including the spread of famine to the territory of Belarus and the Western region, it can be assumed that Ukraine received an undoubted advantage in this regard, compared to other regions of the country. And finally, even the decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of December 23, 1933 and January 20, 1934 on the development of individual gardening, which was extremely necessary in the conditions of the permanent famine that began in the USSR in the 1930s, look “pro-Ukrainian.” “To meet the wishes of the workers - to acquire small vegetable gardens for working on them with their own labor in their free time from work in production,” the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided in 1934 to allow 1.5 million workers to start their own individual vegetable gardens.
The following sizes of deployment in the regions of individual working gardens were planned for 1934: Ukraine - 500 thousand people (including in the Donbass - 250 thousand people); Moscow region – 250 thousand people; Ivanovo region – 150 thousand people; Western Siberia – 100 thousand people; Eastern Siberia – 60 thousand people; Gorky region - 50 thousand people; DCK – 50 thousand people; Kazakhstan – 50 thousand people; Leningradskaya - 50 thousand people; Northern region – 40 thousand people. Thus, the “Ukrainian share” of garden workers in the total mass of USSR workers allowed to engage in gardening amounted to 500 thousand people, or 33.3%! We do not support the point of view of V.P. Danilov about the social genocide of the peasantry in 1932–1933. It seems that to some extent the policy of dispossession of the village can be called social genocide, since it eliminated the layer of wealthy peasants that existed there. But, again, only with a stretch, since the Stalinist regime did not set the goal of the physical destruction of the dispossessed.

There was no social genocide

As for the situation of 1932–1933, it could not be a social genocide, since the actions of the Stalinists in the countryside were not limited to repressive measures, although they dominated. Along with them, the policy of tractorization and mechanization of collective farms and the cultural revolution continued. In addition, as already noted, in the spring of 1933, the starving regions of the USSR received seed and food loans, which made it possible to conduct a generally organized spring sowing campaign and end mass hunger.
Finally, in 1935, the new collective farm charter expanded the possibilities of saving the rural population in case of famine, allowing collective farmers to have personal plots. All these measures look strange and illogical within the framework of the theory of social genocide. In our opinion, the theory of genocide is not applicable at all to the Soviet period in the history of Russia and Ukraine. If we talk specifically about the events of 1932–1933 in the Soviet countryside, then during these years the Stalinist regime simply punished the peasants with hunger for their reluctance to work conscientiously on collective farms and resistance to collectivization. At the same time, we are in solidarity with V.P. Danilov in terms of his assessment of the famine of 1932–1933 as one of the crimes of the Stalinist regime. There is no other way to evaluate the death of millions of rural workers, plunged into misfortune by the current politicians.
On the other hand, we believe that Stalin and his circle did not plan the famine as an operation against the peasants in advance. The famine was the result of their short-sighted, erroneous agricultural policy, based on anti-peasant ideas. It might not have existed if the Stalinists had not defeated their opponents who opposed forced collectivization. Therefore, the Stalinist Holodomor is a sad experience of what ill-conceived political decisions that rely only on the power of state power, but not on the support of the majority of the people, lead to. This historical experience must be taken into account, including by real politicians in Russia and Ukraine.
Modern knowledge of the circumstances of the tragedy, in our opinion, gives grounds for the conclusion that it is more accurate and scientifically correct, turning to the events of 1932–1933 in the USSR, to talk not about the Holodomor in Ukraine, but the famine in the Soviet village, considering the situation in Ukraine as part of the general tragedy of the Soviet peasantry, including the Russian one. And this tragedy should not divide, but unite peoples! It is our deep conviction that the discussion on the topic of which people suffered more from the Stalinist regime is scientifically unproductive and morally and politically dangerous.

An alternative interpretation of the causes of famine according to V.S. Alliluyev

The famine of 1932-1933, which struck the breadbaskets of the country - Ukraine, Don, Kuban, Volga region, Black Earth regions and Central Russia. Today many argue that it was caused by collectivization. Perhaps in some specific areas the famine was deliberately “organized” in order to discredit collectivization and arouse the anger of the peasantry. But the claim that this famine has nothing to do with a natural disaster is untrue. Famine years are the scourge of Russia (which, however, had little effect on grain exports). In the 18th century, for example, there were thirty-four such famine years, in the 19th century - over forty. The famine was especially severe in 1833, 1845-1846, 1851, 1855, 1872, 1891-1892. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were famine years: 1901, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1911 and 1912, 1921-1922. The territory of the hungry lands expanded in the same sequence. If in 1880-1890 the number of famine-stricken provinces ranged from six to eighteen, then in 1911-1912 the number of such provinces rose to sixty. The famine of the early twenties claimed about five million lives. One can imagine what a terrible tribute Russia paid to this gluttonous ruler! And how could the statists of the Soviet era come to terms with this terrible scourge?! Unfortunately, history has not given us enough time for various searches for more or less painless ways to transform the countryside; even the original idea of ​​step-by-step collectivization was adjusted towards more stringent deadlines: the process of industrialization of the country, the process of rearmament of the army, which required a decision, turned out to be too rapid and large-scale food task in a shorter period of time.

So this is really a sign. If providence wanted the enemy Poles Lech Kaczynski to be completely expendable, then the “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovych was only slightly hit on the head.

And not without results: the Verkhovna Rada has already begun to discuss the issue of abolishing the definition of the “Holodomor” as “genocide,” which, of course, is good, but not enough. So much has been written and said about the “Holodomor” that it is necessary to deal with it, as the ancients said ab ovo.

There was an error...

The first in the West to publish a report on the famine in the USSR was the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. In the second half of March 1933, in the Manchester Guardian newspaper, he spoke about his impressions of a trip to Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The author described terrible scenes of famine among the rural population, witnessed the mass death of peasants, but did not give specific figures. However, already on March 31, 1933, a refutation appeared in the same newspaper entitled “Russians are starving, but are not dying of hunger.” It was written by New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.

However, on February 8, 1935, a new sensational news appeared in the Chicago American: “6 million people died of starvation in the Soviet Union.” Its author was journalist Tim Walker, and his articles on the famine were accompanied by a large number of photographs allegedly taken by him in “the most adverse and dangerous circumstances.”

The public was shocked, but... It soon became clear that the report was a fake from start to finish. Moscow correspondent for The Nation magazine Lewis Fisher found out that Tim Walker had not been to Ukraine at all, since he received a transit visa in September 1934 (and not in the spring, as he claimed). Tim Walker crossed the Soviet border in October, spent a few days in Moscow, then boarded a train to Manchuria and left the USSR. In the six days that passed between his arrival in Moscow and his departure for Manchuria, it was physically impossible to visit the places that he described in his publications.

However, in 1934 there was no famine in the USSR in any case...

And another corrosive journalist, American James Casey, proved that all the photographs had nothing to do with the USSR at all - most of them were taken in Western Europe during the First World War.

This is the prehistory of the “Holodomor”, which, however, has continued in our days, when the SBU disgraced itself with its famous “photo exhibition about the Holodomor”, during which it turned out that those presented at it photographs of “starving Ukrainians” were taken... in the USA during the Great Depression. And the story of the village of Andriyashevka, Sumy region, in which people now living were amazed to find their names and surnames on the lists of “Holodomor victims” has already become a classic...

The presence of such “overlays” in itself makes you wonder whether everything is all right with the “Holodomor”.

Millions and millions...

It is quite easy to notice that the further the 30s went into the past, the more the number of “Holodomor victims” grew. If in August 1933 a certain Ralph Barnes wrote that a million people died from hunger in the USSR, then the current most “modest” estimates revolve around 6-7 million who died in Ukraine alone. Well, the “not modest” estimates go beyond 10, or even 12 million (!) people.

To be convinced of the anecdotal nature of such estimates, it is enough to familiarize yourself with the results of the Soviet population census of 1926, according to which the entire population of Ukraine was 29 million people. Therefore, even 6 million “victims of the Holodomor” is approximately a fifth of the then population of Ukraine.

In case anyone has forgotten, during the war the population of Belarus decreased by the same 20% - and everyone who visited the republic before and after the war unanimously noted that Belarus was literally depopulated. Has anyone noticed something similar in Ukraine, which supposedly suffered the same (in percentage terms) human losses in the early 1930s? No…

But that's not all.

It should be recalled that in Belarus the pre-war population recovered only 15 years after the war - by the early 1960s. How did Ukraine cope with the task of restoring the population after the Holodomor? For how long?

In less than 5 years...

Yes, yes, yes... According to the results of the 1939 census (conducted in January), 29.2 million inhabitants were found in Ukraine. And this despite the fact that in the second five-year plan (1934-1938) Ukraine was an “exporter” of population:

The movement of the population between individual regions of the RSFSR was mutually compensated and did not in any way affect the total for the RSFSR. The Ukrainian, Kazakh and Belarusian republics found themselves in a different situation. Over the past years, there has been a significant transition of the population of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR to the industrial centers of the RSFSR, especially to new industrial areas (materials for the series “Peoples of the Soviet Union.” Census of 1939. Documentary sources of the Central State Archive of the National Economy (TSANH) of the USSR, Moscow, 1990, part 4, pages 792-801).

The question arises: is this situation similar to the consequences of a terrible genocide, which led to the death of either every fifth or every fourth resident of Ukraine?

So how many victims were there?

Meanwhile, it is quite easy to answer the question of how many lives the famine of 1932-1933 cost Ukraine - according to the registry office data.

The fact is that these bodies in 1931 (that is, before the start of the famine) recorded 514.7 thousand deaths in Ukraine. This figure can be taken as the background of natural mortality. According to Alexander Shubin (“10 myths of the Soviet country,” Moscow, 2007, page 198), in 1932, at the end of which the famine began, 668.2 thousand deaths were recorded, and in 1933 - 1850 thousand. If we subtract natural mortality rates from these figures, it turns out that the number of famine victims in Ukraine will be 1,489,100 people.

However, it cannot be ruled out that these figures are also greatly exaggerated.

In any case, if you believe the official website of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, the compilers of the regional “Holodomor martyrologies” presented in the “Books of Memory” have established names and surnames 882,510 people who were considered “victims of the Holodomor.”

On what basis they considered it is a separate conversation, and it is yet to come...

We are talking about something else now - is it a lot or a little?

From my point of view, this is a monstrously large number: just remember that during the three years of the First World War, the Russian Empire lost 2.3 million people. Compare - 2.3 million in three years (this is for a huge empire from Riga to Vladivostok) and 800 thousand in Ukraine alone in a few months in 1932-1933...

But what is a lot for me, a Russian nationalist, is too little for Ukrainian nationalists (“Orange Democrats”). Now they most often mention the figure of 7-8 million peasants who died from famine in the USSR in 1932-1933. I wonder what it is this figure (more precisely, 7,910,000 people) found in German propaganda leaflets, which were dropped on Soviet positions in October 1941. The coincidence itself is significant... But the numbers from Dr. Joseph Goebbels don’t seem “orange” enough.

Their propaganda dumps more and more figures on the heads of gullible fellow citizens - 7 million “victims of the Holodomor” in Ukraine alone! No - 8 million! No, even more - 12 million!

One gets the impression that if power had remained in the hands of the orange team, the number of “Holodomor victims” would have completely exceeded the population of Ukraine in 1932.

Artificially created famine?

Well, God bless them, the “orange democrats”... Let's talk about hunger as such.

What happened in 1932?

Let me remind you that the famine of 1932-1933 was preceded by a number of important events.

The cold and snowless winters of 1929-1930 and 1930-1931 in Ukraine were repeated for two years in a row. The second of them ended in the almost complete destruction of winter crops, and became the reason for the poor harvest of 1931.

The 1932 sowing campaign was carried out exceptionally poorly. According to various estimates, the sown area in 1932 decreased by 14-25% compared to 1931. American researcher Mark Tauger cites a slightly lower figure for under-seeding - 9%. But he also notes that the fields were sown with less grain per hectare than the norm. In some cases, the amount of unsown grain per hectare reached 40%. The sowing campaign lasted for an unprecedentedly long time - with an average duration of about a week, in 1932 in the North Caucasus and Ukraine it lasted more than a month. As a result, according to official data, the 1932 harvest in the USSR amounted to 69.9 million tons of grain.

However, special studies showed that this figure was overestimated. The German agricultural attache in Moscow, Otto Schiller, estimated the harvest collected in 1932 at 50-55 million tons. And according to the calculations of the already mentioned Mark Tauger, the 1932 harvest was even less - 50.06 million tons of grain (Mark Tauger, The 1932 harvest and the famine of 1933. Slavic Review 50:70-89).

For a country with a population of 150 million people, this is very little (300 kilograms of grain per capita, while at least 400 kilograms are required for a more or less normal existence).

Famine in the USSR in the winter of 1932-1933 was inevitable - there was simply physically no bread.

Who was to blame for this?

Let's look at a few more numbers - absolutely stunning, to put it bluntly...

The fact is that, according to official reporting and party data, the yield in Ukraine in 1932 was 8 centners per hectare, but according to the data contained in the reports of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR - only 5.1 centners per hectare.

For the Ivanovo region, we note, there is not such a big discrepancy - here the data of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and the official figures almost coincide: 9 and 9.1 centners per hectare. This is on Ivanovo loams! And on Ukrainian chernozems the yield was... 4.5 centners per hectare (in the Kyiv region), 4.6 centners per hectare (in the Chernigov region), 4.7 centners per hectare (in the Donetsk region).

Was it only bad weather conditions that caused this phenomenon?

Of course not - but neither do they...

And the famous online anecdote about a certain Taras, who declared in a “Holodomor” dispute: “My grandmother told me that the people of Lvov were starving in 1933,” has a very real basis - the famine of 1933 affected not only Soviet Ukraine, but also Polish at that time Galicia, in which there were no collective farms, no grain procurements, no Soviet power.

Who was “genocided”?

This is what Ukrainian journalist Vladimir Kornilov found out, for example, from these books:

...A disappointing answer for the authorities can be obtained by analyzing the data for those regions of Central and Southern Ukraine where local archivists decided not to hide the “inconvenient” column. We open the “martyrology” of the Zaporozhye region. First on the list is Berdyansk. In total, the compilers of the “Book…” classified 1,467 people as “victims of the Holodomor” in this city. 1184 cards indicate nationalities. 71% of them are ethnic Russians, 13% are Ukrainians, 16% are representatives of other ethnic groups.

The number of “Holodomor victims” in the city. Berdyansk (according to the “Book of Memory” of the Zaporozhye region): Russians - 842 people, Ukrainians - 155 people, Jews - 66 people, Bulgarians - 55 people, Germans - 25 people, Greeks - 20 people, Poles - 4 people, Belarusians - 3 people .

This is not to mention the fact that the causes of death in the “famine books” are absolutely amazing. Here are some of them in Berdyansk:

Mileshko Alexander, 20 years old, worker, Russian, date of death - 12/18/1932, cause of death - alcohol poisoning

Shushlov Vladimir, 49 years old, date of death - 03/18/1933, asphyxia, acute alcohol poisoning

Vorobyova Marina, 7 years old, from a family of workers, date of death - 10/09/1933, crushed by a bus

Alexey Nechipurenko, 13 years old, from a family of workers, Russian, date of death - 09/03/1933, cerebral hemorrhage from being hit by a bus

And here is the Belogorievsky village council of the Zaporozhye region:

Konovalenko Luka Pavlovich, 34 years old, collective farmer, Ukrainian, date of death - 06/16/1933, killed by lightning.

But this is not the limit...

...from the “Book of Memory” of the Odessa region: collective farmer from Balta Fyodor Astratonov was killed by a bull on July 26, 1932!

Absolutely all deaths from injuries received at work or in mines are also attributed by the compilers of the “Book of Memory” to the results of hunger. In the Lugansk region, for example, miners Miron Volikh, Kostya Kolin, Vasily Lysenko, Fyodor Miroshnik, V. Moroz, Ivan Paliyanko are considered “victims of the Holodomor”, the cause of death of each of whom is indicated: “died in the mine.”

On July 6, 1933, a resident of the Perevalsky district of the Lugansk region, Vasily Nikolaevich Mishchinko, became a victim of a mine accident - also, it turns out, a victim of hunger. And, believe it or not, twice! That is, in the “Book of Memory” they decided to include Vasily Mishchinko among the victims of famine both according to the lists of the Zorinsky City Council and the lists of the Komissarovsky Village Council. And there are as many such “duplicates” as you like!

The belly does not remember good things

Well? What remains after this of the “millions of victims of the Holodomor”? Are these cases of bygone days comparable to the present state of affairs?

No matter how great the tragedy of 1932-1933 was, it, as we already know, did not lead to the “Holodomor” of Ukrainians - and subsequently Ukraine truly became the breadbasket of the USSR.

But cries about the “Holodomor” have become very necessary for the newly-minted “Ukrainian elite”, when there is an absolute decline in the population of the country, whose authorities periodically ask Russia to help it with bread.

In case anyone has forgotten, the current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in the summer of 2003, when he was prime minister, already turned to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a request to supply grain to Ukraine at preferential prices.

The need for such a step arose after the “brilliant” premiership of... Viktor Yushchenko.