Montréal, Québec, Canada

 

Yuriy Shapoval, National Academy of Sciences Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk

In this war Ukraine suffered the highest number of human losses of all the “Union republics” in the former USSR. Thus, questions emerge as to why this happened precisely that way? Was it accidental? In the quest for answers to these questions, researchers from many countries (and not just researchers) are still engaged in debates, but one thing is certain: it is impossible to ignore or keep silent about the Holodomor in the historical chain of humanitarian catastrophes that afflicted humankind in the twentieth century.

Scholarly research is continuing, knowledge about the Holodomor is expanding, and access is slowly being gained to documents that reflect the activities of the highest Soviet leadership in 1932-1933 and the conduct of regional leaders, particularly the party-state nomenklatura of the Ukrainian SSR. These documents are allowing scholars to gain an understanding of the technology of the crime per se, whose mechanisms helped the Stalinist regime to extract grain, justifying this by the need to modernize. The lives of millions of people were swallowed by this Moloch.

 

These documents are helpful in attaining a clearer understanding of the doctrinal and situational motives that governed the communist establishment, as well as in recreating the situation in those times at the macro- and micro-levels, which is crucially important in the formulation of general, realistic conclusions and judgments. Among other things, new research is repudiating claims about the absence of specific features of the government’s actions in one region or another in the former USSR in 1932-1933.

In recent years, documents and other materials housed in numerous archives in Ukraine have become accessible. Among them are the Branch State Security Service Archives of Ukraine (HDA SBU). In the summer of 2006 a number of archival sources, access to which was forbidden for a long time, were declassified.

 

The employees of the Soviet security service unintentionally turned out to be rather good historians, recording in their documents the situation in the countryside, the demands of the government and its own efforts to carry them out, the mood of the population and the repressive measures that were applied to it, and actions to block the leakage of truthful information about the essence and scale of the Holodomor. Some of these documents and materials were included in the scholarly collection of documents entitled The Declassified Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine in GPU-NKVD Documents.[2]

However, the Soviet security service left behind another category of extraordinarily interesting and important documents. These materials not only relate to the situation in the Ukrainian SSR, but also show how events in Ukraine were being recorded by foreign diplomatic bodies, specifically the information and assessments drafted by Polish, German, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese diplomats about the Holodomor.

 

Through various channels these materials fell into the hands of the Chekists, who were diligently tracking the members of foreign diplomatic missions. These documentary testimonies, together with already published documents written by foreign diplomats about the famine in the early 1930s in the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR,[3] are a unique and important source for further research, which, I am convinced, have never been studied by scholars.
 
THE APPROACHING FAMINE 
Stalin’s “great breakthrough” (i.e., accelerated industrialization and forcible collectivization) was such a breakneck change of policy that dissatisfaction and resistance among the broadest strata of society was inevitable. This led to the emergence of an opposition within ranks of the Bolshevik party itself, even among its leaders. It is not surprising that the peasants launched the most active resistance to the regime.

The representatives of foreign missions recorded all this. According to the opinion of one Italian diplomat, which he voiced in July 1930, even before 1928 “it was possible to consider that the Government will be able to overcome the crisis, but today, in connection with the latest failed collectivization measures that have sparked powerful resistance on the part of the population, it is evident that the Soviet government will not be able to cope with the tasks that it is facing.”[4]

However, the Stalinist regime viewed terror and the merciless crushing of uprisings as an effective means of subduing the disgruntled population. In a memorandum on the political situation among the peasants of Ukraine, which was written in connection with the “policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class,” during the period from January 20 to February 12, 1930 the head of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, Vsevolod Balytsky, reported that a total of 12,000 people had taken part in 37 mass peasant protests in January; as of February 9, 1930, 11,865 people had been arrested, and peasants had carried out 40 terrorist acts in response to the policy of “dekulakization.”[5] Balytsky was even forced to head an “operational headquarters” for the struggle against peasant protests and was in charge of crushing these protests in various regions of Ukraine.

In order No. 74, issued by the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR on March 31, 1930, Balytsky emphasized that “on March 19, 1930 the organs of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, with the active participation of poor peasants and leading rural activists, completed an operation to expel kulaks from districts of all-out collectivization in Ukraine.

 

Despite the exceptionally tight deadlines for the preparation of this operation, the lack of experience in conducting this kind of mass work, as well as the significant complexity of the work itself, the entire operation to expel the kulaks in Ukraine was successfully carried out: the work was finished on time, the control figure of expulsions of kulak farmsteads, as outlined in the plan, was exceeded on the whole. . . .”[6] As of June 1, 1930, 90,000 farmsteads were “dekulakized,” the total figure reaching more than 200,000 during the years of collectivization. This is a clear-cut illustration of the war that the Bolshevik government had unleashed against the peasantry.

Tracking these dramatic events, the personnel of various diplomatic missions noted the rise in the agricultural crisis. For example, Japanese consular officials, who traveled to certain regions of the Ukrainian SSR in 1929, mention a “food crisis” and the fact that, despite the Civil War and the devastation that had already been experienced, the “material situation of the majority is not improving but deteriorating.”[7] As early as 1928 officials of the Italian Consulate, who were analyzing the situation of the peasants and the government’s policies toward them, say that famine is to be expected,[8] and that the communists’ own actions “are building up the counter-revolution.”[9]

 

In 1930 officials of the Turkish Consulate noted that the USSR was exporting food with the goal of obtaining hard currency instead of feeding its own people, and that the government “is forcing its working class and the entire population to starve.”[10] Foreign diplomatic missions were also constantly reporting to their superiors about disturbances caused by food shortages, which were taking place in large Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv.

Specific to Ukraine was the fact that this republic, together with the North Caucasus, supplied more than half the grain produced in the entire USSR. Speaking about Ukraine in 1931, Stalin noted that “a number of grain-producing districts are in a state of devastation and famine.”[11] Nevertheless, the Kremlin leaders assumed that Ukraine had huge supplies of grain that collective farms and independent farmers were supposedly concealing from the state.

 

For this reason the government resorted to pressure methods in order to complete the state grain deliveries. Already in 1931 the grain delivery plans had to be reduced for a number of oblasts in the Ural and Middle Volga regions, as well as Kazakhstan, yet such reductions were practically not instituted in Ukraine and the North Caucasus.

Compared to the previous year, in 1931 Ukraine supplied less grain, and already that year more than 150,000 people had died in the republic.[12] All the same, on January 3, 1932 a meeting of the Politburo of the CC CP(B)U) discussed Stalin and Molotov’s telegram, which contained an order to unswervingly carry out the state grain delivery plans. Eighty-three top officials then dispersed throughout Ukraine in order to organize the plans’ implementation. A special resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) (CC AUCP(B)) proclaimed February 1932 a militant shock month for the completion of the state grain deliveries.

 

By March-April 1932 there were large numbers of starving people in Ukrainian villages, while children abandoned by their parents roamed the cities. This was an obvious sign of a calamity, but it in no way stopped the government.       

Foreign diplomats were observing, analyzing, and reflecting all this in their documents. On May 11, 1932 the Polish consul in Kyiv writes:

         I report that every day I received increasingly more news about the famine in Right-Bank Ukraine, which is felt particularly acutely in the province.

         According to the latest reports, almost every day there are cases of people who are collapsing from weakness and exhaustion being collected from the

         streets of such cities as Vinnytsia and Uman. The situation may even be worse in the countryside, where, according to information from a reliable

         source, robberies and murders as a result of starvation are daily occurrences.[13]
 
Foreign diplomats were quite well informed about the state of affairs, and this level of informedness influenced the quality of their assessments of the agricultural situation both in the USSR as a whole and the Ukrainian SSR in particular. With good reason, therefore, the cover letter from the OGPU of the USSR, accompanying the copy of a report drawn up by the German consul in Odesa about the state grain deliveries, which arrived at the counterintelligence division of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR in January 1930, demanded to know the sources of the consulate’s information about Soviet grain exports that were being channeled through the Port of Odessa.[14]

In 1932-1933 the Stalinist leadership de facto clearly designated two main opponents. The first one was the peasants, who were refusing to work on collective farms and die in the name of modernization. In the USSR the peasantry had been turned into an object of constant expropriation, a resource for modernizing transformations. The second opponent was the none-too-reliable party-state leadership of Ukraine, which, to a certain degree, was conducting a “flexible” line in the “tension field” between the Kremlin’s demands and the tragic local realities.

Stalin issued a clear signal in his now widely publicized and fundamentally important letter to Lazar Kaganovich, dated August 11, 1932. In it he questions the loyalty of the entire party organization of the Ukrainian SSR, while simultaneously demanding that allegedly concealed grain be squeezed out of Ukraine regardless of sacrifices (which could be justified by the lofty goals of modernization) and that a repressive “purge” of society be carried out in order to eradicate “Ukrainian nationalists.”[15] Stalin then dispatched his loyal associates to Ukraine, who introduced punitive practices that were diverse in form but universal in their fatal result.

Particularly dangerous to the Stalinist regime was the fact that the peasants were trying to escape from the places where they were starving. In one of his letters to Kaganovich, dated June 1932, Stalin expresses his dissatisfaction with the fact that “several tens of thousands of Ukrainian collective farmers are still traveling all over the European part of the USSR and demoralizing the collective farms for us with their complaints and whining.”[16]

A document prepared by Polish intelligence in September 1932 states: “Nearly all of Ukraine is traveling in search of bread, the trains are packed to the rafters; to get on a train [people] have to stand in lineups for several days.”[17] This situation quickly changed after so-called food blockades of Ukraine’s borders were erected in the fall and winter of 1932-33.

 

The blockades were manned by interior troops and the militia, who prevented peasants from leaving the country and, hence, spreading information about the famine. Also instituted at this time was a ban on what was known as a food “reverse,” which meant that private individuals were not permitted to bring food into Ukraine from Russia and Belarus without the state’s permission, with the volume of food products entering the republic restricted by a special decision.

On January 22, 1933 Stalin and Molotov circulated a directive to party and state organs, in which they emphasized that the migration processes which had begun as a result of starvation among the peasants had been organized by the “enemies of Soviet power, SRs, and agents of Poland with the goal conducting agitation ‘through the peasants’ in the northern districts of the USSR against the collective farms and generally against the Soviet government.”

 

In connection with this directive, the government organs and the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus were ordered to prevent the mass departure of peasants to other districts. Instructions were issued to the transport divisions of the OGPU of the USSR. The Soviet regime thus transformed Ukraine into a starvation ghetto, which was not done in any other Soviet republic.

“The situation in Ukraine is worsening day by day, starvation is staring people in the face, each time in a more brutish and stronger form…”[18] Polish diplomats write in February 1933. On March 12, 1933 the Kyiv oblast’ division of the GPU informed the head of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR about the critical food situation in Kyiv, noting in particular that 400 corpses had been picked up in the city in January, 518 in February, and 248 over a period of eight days in March.[19] The Chekists added that every day 100 or more children are abandoned in the city.[20]

Another document that was prepared by Polish diplomats in March 1933 reports mass dismissals of office workers and laborers in Kyiv. “Bread ration cards are taken away without exception from all those who have been dismissed. In the future, the loss of employment will result in the necessity to leave the city in connection with the system of passports that is being introduced. The number of thefts and robberies is increasing along with the growing number of unemployed people. In many cases, dismissed laborers and state officials are invited to leave for the countryside.

 

However, owing to the famine reigning there and the dissatisfaction of the urban population, those who are unemployed try at any cost to remain in the city.”[21] During a private conversation, one of the leaders of Kyiv oblast’ admitted that the supplies of necessary seeds did not even meet 60 percent of the required amount, and “therefore, regardless of the official announcement of the free trade in grain, constant searches and grain requisitions are continuing to take place, and the ban on transporting grain and the complications that make it difficult for peasants to travel are still in force at railway stations.”[22]

A document issued by the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR in February 1933 states that Kyiv oblast’ is the leading Ukrainian region with respect to the number of peasants who have left to escape death by starvation.[23] Were Ukrainian peasants under the illusion that the situation was better in Russia? No, they were not. This is what is recorded in a report by the Polish consul, who took a trip from Kharkiv to Moscow in May 1933.
 
         During my entire journey I was most struck by the difference in the appearance of the villages and fields of Ukraine in comparison with the   

         neighboring TsChO (Central Chernozem oblast’) and even with the non-grain-producing vicinities of Moscow. Ukrainian villages are in significant

         decline; emptiness, desolation, and destitution waft from them; houses are in a semi-collapsed state, often with [missing] roofs that have been torn off;

         new homesteads are nowhere to be seen; children and elderly people resemble skeletons; there is no sign of livestock. . . . When I later ended up in 

         the TsChO (at first, in the vicinities of Kursk and Orel), I had the impression that I had arrived in Western Europe from the Country of soviets. There

         are significantly more plowed and sown fields, the villages are clean, more decent, the houses are restored, and relatively greater well-being is

         evident among the people; you can see cattle grazing. . . .[24]
 
In June 1932 the Japanese consul in Odesa undertook a long journey through various regions of the USSR. He reported that “in comparison with the peasants of other republics, Ukrainian peasants make a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, their emaciated bodies, and their begging: even in large railway stations peasants and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread. . . .”[25]

It is extremely interesting to note that already in 1933 foreign diplomats were trying to ascertain the technology of the Holodomor. This question is fundamentally important. Certain contemporary Western researchers reproach their Ukrainian colleagues for ignoring the fact that Ukrainians also took part in the grain deliveries. Some even write that the “Soviet leadership partially depended on the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who occupied state positions on the most varied levels.”[26]

Yes, there were Ukrainians in the governing structures. However, no serious researcher would dare write about “hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians,” who, in the conditions of Stalinist dictatorship, have a say in the government’s decisions. They simply did not exist. In connection with this, we find a more accurate analysis in an announcement issued on November 18, 1933 by the Polish vice-consul in Kyiv, Petr Kurnicki. Convinced that the secret of the Bolsheviks’ successes lies in “the complete disregard of means and victims,” the Polish diplomat states:
 
         The realization of all this took place through the deployment of huge cadres of newly educated communists who, first and foremost, are not bound by

         anything to the local population or [who have been] imbued with theoretical conclusions to such a degree that they have practically become fanatics,

         who carry out all kinds of orders while turning a blind eye to all consequences that will affect the population.[27]
 
According to some data, more than 54,000 people starved to death in Kyiv in 1933.[28] That same year the German Consulate in Odesa reported: “The horrors of last spring have passed and for the most part forgotten. The communist rulers are not letting the peasants remember their misfortunes for long, and this is being achieved by the fact that, on the heels of one misfortune they are already preparing others, and willy-nilly the old horrors are being forgotten.”[29]
 
Reverberations of the Holodomor
The Soviet leadership was engaged in what may be called lies for export. As early as January 14, 1933, when he was replying to numerous queries from abroad, Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, issued a special declaration in which he claimed that there was no famine in the Soviet Union whatsoever, and that all talk of one was nothing but fabrications. Meanwhile, in the international arena Ukrainians were making efforts to informing the world community about the real situation.

Oleksander Shulhyn, the representative of the government in exile of the Ukrainian National Republic, contacted the Grain Commission that was established by the London Economic Conference of 1933. He writes:
 
         At the time when the committee of advisers should be establishing the volume of grain that the USSR will export abroad, we are asking you, in the

         name of humaneness, to object to any kind of exports of food products, particularly grain, from the USSR. This grain belongs by rights to those who

         sowed it and who today are starving to death – the peasants of Ukraine and the Kuban. On our part, we strenuously protest against this export, which

         we cannot qualify as anything other than criminal.[30]
 
It is generally known that after dispatching Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine in late 1932 and officially confirming him in January 1933 as the second secretary of the CC CP(B)U, Stalin ordered him to liquidate what was euphemistically called “economic difficulties” and the “failure in the agriculture” of the Ukrainian SSR. Postyshev, who virtually controlled Ukraine until early 1937 (Stanislav Kosior, the weak leader of the CC CP(B)U notwithstanding), accused the Ukrainians themselves of organizing the famine, that is to say, “Ukrainian nationalists” and “Petliurites.” Postyshev and his “team” (people from his milieu, as well as party workers who had come from Russia to reinforce the cadres) implemented the policy of pumping grain out of Ukraine and simultaneously “purging” the party and all social spheres.[31]

The GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, headed by Balitsky, was enlisted to carry out this work. A “massive operation to inflict an operational blow on the class enemy” began already in the fall of 1932. Its goal was also to uncover “counter-revolutionary centers that are organizing sabotage and the disruption of the state grain deliveries and other economic-political measures.” At this point, the Chekists significantly escalated the scale of their actions.

In Soviet Ukrainian agriculture a “counter-revolutionary organization” was uncovered, in which agrarian specialists were implicated and which was soon “linked” with similar organizations in Moscow, Rostov, and Minsk. In Moscow arrested Ukrainian specialists were also implicated in some kind of all-Union organization whose goal, according to official claims, was “to wreck agriculture and cause a famine in the country.” Arrests throughout the regions had a mass character, and the thirty-five members of that mythical organization headed by the former Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the USSR, a Ukrainian named Fedir Konar, were sentenced to death by the Collegium of the OGPU of the USSR on March 11, 1933.

 

Between November 1932 and January 1933 alone, the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR liquidated 1,208 “counter-revolutionary” collective farm groups. In 1933, nearly 200,000 people were “purged” at 24,191 collective farms.[32] The inspections affected Soviet state farms, the Zagotzerno (Grain Procurement) system, and the system of food cooperatives. It should be noted that a “purge” of the CP(B)U itself was also proclaimed. A significant contingent of individuals who could be easily blamed for organizing the famine was thereby formed.

While the Soviet government hunted for guilty parties, the consequences of the famine were making themselves felt. They were quite conspicuous not only in rural areas but also in cities. In July 1933 a female Polish consular official based in Kharkiv noted that the epidemic had not abated in the summer but instead had grown, affecting increasingly wider strata of the population.

 

She writes: “The mortality rate is rising every day. There are very many beggars on the streets; lately, small children have been seen with greater frequency.”[33] In the same month, July 1933, the Italian consul in Kharkiv notes: “Some doctors have confirmed to me that the mortality rate in villages often reaches 80 percent, and it is never lower than 50 percent. Worst affected are Kyiv, Poltava, and Sumy oblasts, where one can already speak of depopulation.”[34]

On November 2, 1933 the German consul in Kyiv records the following:

 

         In the last few weeks the typhus epidemic has once again grown very significantly in Kyiv. Every day around 11 people are delivered to hospitals

         throughout the city. This number includes only residents of Kyiv. Together with non-locals – people from the countryside – the number of hospitalized

         individuals is significantly higher and reaches nearly 200.[35]
 
During his speech at the XVII Congress of the AUCP(B) in 1934, Stalin issued a statement about the population increase in the USSR in 1933. After this declaration, all mentions of the famine disappeared – even from secret documents. The government named those who were responsible for the famine, but the famine itself became a taboo subject. In information items prepared on the food situation in the Soviet Union, officials at the German Embassy comment: “The government’s victory has been achieved: the peasant has been brought to his knees.”[36]

But, as newly discovered documents attest, the famine did not disappear. In April 1934, Jan Lagoda, the deputy trade counselor at the Polish Embassy in Moscow, went on a trip around the Ukrainian SSR, visiting Kyiv, Korosten, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, Koziatyn, and Uman. In his report about his journey he writes:
 
         I became convinced that in the oblasts which I visited the rural population is starving. There are very many people who are clearly starving, there are

         very many abandoned children at railway stations, who are feeding themselves any which way they can. . . . As a result of my observations, I can say

         that the famine in Right-Bank Ukraine is a very widespread phenomenon. . . . Against this background an epidemic of malignant influenza, like the one

         in the West in 1918, has spread; it is immeasurably dangerous. Very many people are dying of influenza. The phenomena associated with last year’s

         famine have still not faded from people’s memories, on trains they talk exclusively about the famine.[37]
 
Meanwhile, the Soviet government was doing everything to erase all memories of the tragedy. This was done in various ways, including scare tactics, with the aim of forcing people not to discuss the famine. In October 1933 Kurnicki, the Polish vice-consul, insisted that “the news about the possibility of famine are in no way exaggerated,” noting the “government’s concrete efforts to create and strengthen patriotism and state ambitions.”

 

According to his observations, “now, when you speak with those doctors, who one year ago had gladly taken advantage of every opportunity to eat breakfast or lunch at the Consulate, readily complaining about all sorts of shortcomings, today you notice a complete change in their attitude: they are trying to bluff, [saying] that everything is wonderful, even better than anywhere else. . . .”[38]

In November 1936 German diplomats compiled information about how Soviet propaganda was counteracting the spread of truth about the tragic events of 1932-1933 and continuously seeking to contradict the very existence of the famine. This was the goal of a Soviet film entitled Harvest. According to information prepared by the German diplomats, this film “is being sent abroad in thousands of copies. It is screened everywhere that the truth about the famine catastrophe of 1932-1933 and subsequent times has become a matter of public knowledge.”[39]

 

The film shows an area located in the lower Dnipro region where the famine had raged. It was now supposedly a well-to-do collective farm employing happy peasants, who are wonderfully fed. “The propaganda in this film,” the Germans’ information emphasizes, 

 

         should be contrasted with the fact that individual highlights from the collective farm shown on screen have been craftily cobbled together, that the

         majority of collective farms are far from achieving the profitability of the old, independent farmsteads, that the forcible collectivization which was

         achieved only meant that millions of rural residents were evicted from their buildings and deported to forced labor camps, and – above all – with the

         fact of the famine catastrophe of 1932-1933 and the subsequent period. These catastrophes, which show not only the Soviet government’s inability to

         overcome the problem of supporting its people but also its exceptional diabolic desire to destroy certain strata of the population (“the organized

         famine”), are historical facts, the details of which are explained today by the testimonies of reliable witnesses. . . . In addition, it must be emphasized

         that with the state of Soviet food production as it is, one can reckon on a repeat famine.”[40]
 
On January 18, 1934 the plenum of the CC CP(B)U confirmed the agenda of the XII Congress of the Ukrainian party. It was decided to submit a proposal for confirmation by the XII Congress of the CP(B)U about transferring the capital of Ukraine to Kyiv.[41] 

Already by January 31, 1934 the Italian consul Sergio Gradenigo drew up a report in which he attributed great significance to this decision. He even concluded that the most fertile areas of Left-Bank Ukraine would be annexed to Russia:
 
         With the help of the famine, this territory, which has already been depopulated, has been settled by a new population – for the past two months

         Russians  have been brought here by the trainload from Siberia    . . . . The transfer of the capital to the border is obviously entirely aimed at

         concealing the persecutions of the Ukrainian people, which will escalate even more after the capital is returned to its historic place. This return of the

         capital to Kyiv . . . is launching the process of territorial decapitation at the same time as national decapitation is already taking place on a broad

         scale. and will continue further; it will inevitably be accompanied by famine in the nearest future.[42]
 
In his report of May 3, 1933 Gradenigo revisits the question of the Ukrainian capital’s transfer to Kyiv. He writes that repressions of the Ukrainian intelligentsia are increasing.
 
         In recent months, the suppression of any kind of Ukrainian nationalist activity is taking place steadily; its episodes are unfolding in Moscow, Kyiv,

         [and] Kharkiv.

         On the other hand, parallel with this action of destroying even the slightest attempt to manifest Ukrainian separatism, the policy of laying emphasis on

         the Ukrainian national character is gaining greater momentum, which I predicted the minute when it was decided to make Kyiv the capital of Ukraine

         again. That is to say, there is an intention to supplant Ukrainian nationalism of a separatist orientation, which looks toward Poland, with centripetal

         nationalism, which would incline the Ukrainians of Poland toward possible or desirable unification with the Ukrainians of the USSR.[43]
 
After conducting infernal trials by famine and repressions everywhere, the Soviet government once again made Kyiv the capital at the very time when the consequences of these tragic events were still fully felt.

In conclusion, I cannot stress enough the need for further research on the history of the Holodomor and its specific features in one region or another of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, not only in the countryside but cities as well. Such research, based on previously unknown documentary and factual material and on the eradication of obsolete historiographic stereotypes and perceptual pigeonholing, is extremely pressing not just in terms of analyzing the totalitarian past. It is also important for gaining an understanding of the true nature of the Soviet regime, which is, regrettably, still veiled in various kinds of myths and propagandistic stereotypes.

 

An important role in mapping out the real situation during the Holodomor can and should be played by documents and materials that were created by foreign diplomats who were based in Ukraine in those years. Furthermore, although most of these documents and materials from the 1930s were never made public by the leaders of these foreign countries owing to certain political motives (e.g., Italy was buying fuel from the USSR and did not believe it necessary to “quarrel” with the Kremlin), and despite the fact that some of these sources contain certain inaccuracies, they are nonetheless valuable and important.
 
FOOTNOTES:
[1]. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (New York: Scribner, 1946.), p. 130.
[2]. Rozsekrechena pami’iat. Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini v dokumentakh GPU-NKVD (Kyiv: Stylos, 2007).
[3]. See, e.g., Andrea Graziosi, ed., “Lettres de Char’kov’. La famine en Ukraine et dans le Caucase du Nord à travers les rapports des diplomates italiens, 1932-1934,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 1-2 (1989) ; Andrea Graziosi, ed., Lettere da Kharkov. La carestia in Ucraina e nel Caucaso del Nord nei rapporti dei diplomatici italiani, 1932-1933 (Torino : Einaudi, 1991) ; Lubomyr Luciuk and Bohdan Kordan, eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine : British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-33 (Kingston, ON: Limestone Press, 1988); Dymitri Zlepko, ed., Der ukrainische Hunger-Holocaust (Sonnenbühl : Verlag Helmut Wild, 1988); “Ukraina. Holod 1932-1933 rokiv : za povidomlenniamy brytanskykh dyplomativ,” Vsesvit 11 (1989) : 153-62 ; Upokorennia holodom. Zbirnyk dokumentiv (Kyiv : Instytut ukrainskoi arkheohrafii, 1993), pp. 47-101 ; Wsevolod Isajiw, Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, 1932-33 : Western Archives, Testimonies and New Research (Toronto : Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, 2003) ; Lysty z Kharkova. Holod v Ukraini ta na Pivnichnomu Kavkazi v povidomlenniakh italiiskykh dyplomativ, 1932-1933 roky (Kharkiv : Folio, 2007) ; Andrii Kudriachenko, “Holodomor v Ukraini 1932-1933 rokiv ta ioho suspilno-politychni naslidky za otsinkamy dokumentiv politychnoho arkhivu MZS Nimechchyny,” in Holodomor v Ukraini : Odeska oblast. 1921-1923, 1932-1933, 1946-1947. Doslidzhennia, spohady, dokumenty (Odesa : Astroprynt, 2007), pp. 20-27 and elsewhere.
[4]. Branch State Security Service Archives of Ukraine (henceforward: HDA SBU), fond 13, file 418, vol. 1, pt. 3, fols. 629-33.
[5]. Cited in Andrea Graziosi, “Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales à travers les rapports de GPU d’Ukraine de février-mars 1930,” Cahiers du monde russe 3 (1994) : 480-81.
[6]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, file 2174, fol. 31.
[7]. Ibid., fond 13, file 418, vol. 1, pt. 3, fols. 583, 592.
[8]. Ibid., fond 13, file 419, vol. 1, pt. 2, fol. 471.
[9]. Ibid., fond 13, file 419, vol. 1, pt. 2, fol. 459.
[10]. Ibid., fond 13, file 418, vol. 1, pt. 3, fol. 632.
[11]. Cited in Valerii Vasyliev and Yuri Shapoval, eds., Komandyry velykoho holodu. Poizdky V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha v Ukrainu ta na Pivnichnyi Kavkaz. 1932-1933 rr. (Kyiv: Heneza, 2001), p. 23.
[12]. Stanislav Kulchytsky, “1933 rik: stalinskyi teror holodom,” Uriadovyi kurier, 8 (Nov. 2002).
[13]. Central Military Archive (Tsentralnyi Viiskovyi Arkhiv, henceforward: TsVA), Warsaw, Department II of the Chief Command, file I.303.4.3043, fol. 64.
[14]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, fond 13, file 22, fol. 234.
[15]. See Stalin i Kaganovich. Neizdannaia perepiska. 1931-1936 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), p. 274.
[16]. Ibid., p. 179.
[17]. TsVA, file I.303.4.5424, p. 28.
[18]. Ibid., file I.303.4.1985 (without pagination).
[19]. See Holod 1932-1933 rokiv na Ukraini: ochyma istorykiv, movoiu dokumentiv (Kyiv: Politvydav Ukrainy, 1990), p. 437.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. TsVA, file I.303.4.1867, fol. 130.
[22]. Ibid., fol. 131.
[23]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, fond 68, file 228, fol. 140.
[24]. TsVA, file I.303.4.1867, fols. 32-34.
[25]. HDA SBU, Odesa, file 66, vol. 4, fol. 2241.
[26]. “Mark Tauger o golode, genotside i svobode mysli v Ukraine,” 2000: 1-2 (397), 11-17 January. http://2000.net.ua/e/44514.
[27]. TsVA, file I.303.4.1993 (without pagination).
[28]. See Holod-henotsyd 1933 roku v Ukraini: istoryko-politolohichnyi analiz sotsialno-demohrafichnykh ta moralno-psykholohichnykh naslidkiv (Kyiv-New York: M. P. Kots Publishers, 2000), p. 277; and Serhii Vakulyshyn, Holodova katastrofa v Kyievi (Kyiv: Heoprynt, 2005), p. 72.
[29]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, fond 13, file 161, vol. 1, fol. 42.
[30]. Cited in Taras Hunczak, “Holodomor 32/33 – bil sertsia vsiiei Ukrainy,” Den 132, Aug. 1, 2003.
[31]. For a more detailed discussion, see Yuri Shapoval, Ukraina 20-50-kh rokiv: storinky nenapysanoi istorii (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1993); Robert Kusnierz, Ukraina v latach kolektywizacji i Wielkiego Glodu (1929-1933) (Torun: GRADO, 2005); and Rozsekrechena pamiat.
[32]. Yuri Shapoval and Vadym Zolotariov, Vsevolod Balytsky. Osoba, chas, otochennia (Kyiv: Stylos, 2002), p. 193.
[33]. TsVA, file I.303.4.2094 (without pagination).
[34]. Lysty z Kharkova, p. 183
[35]. Cited in Kudriachenko, “Holodomor v Ukraini,” p. 23.
[36]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, fond 13, file 161, vol. 11, fol. 22.
[37]. Archive of New Acts (henceforward: AAN), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Warsaw, file 9513, fols. 200, 208-11.
[38]. TsVA, I.303.4.1993, vol. V-47 (without pagination).
[39]. HDA SBU, Kyiv, fond 13, file 161, vol. 14, fol. 42.
[40]. Ibid., fol. 45.
[41]. The official transfer of the higher party and state institutions from Kharkiv to Kyiv took place on June 24, 1934.
[42]. Cited in Upokorennia holodom, p. 96
[43]. Lysty z Kharkova, p. 225.

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