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The Famine of 1932-33 The famine that occurred in 1932-33 was to be for the Ukrainians what the Holocaust was to the Jews and the Massacres of 1915 for the Armenians. A tragedy of unfathomable proportions, it traumatized the nation, leaving it with deep social, psychological, political, and demographic scars that it carries to this day. And it cast a dark shadow on the methods and achievements of the Soviet system. The central fact about the famine is that it did not have to happen. Stalin himself proclaimed that "nobody can deny that the total yield of grain in 1932 was larger than in 1931." As Conquest and Crawchenko have pointed out, the harvest of 1932 was only 12% below the 1926-30 average. In other words, food was available. However, the state systematically confiscated most of it for its own use. Despite the pleas and warnings of Ukrainian Communists, Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas in 1932 by 44%. His decision, and the regime's brutal fulfillment of his commands, condemned millions to death in what can only be called a man-made famine. The regime's disregard for the human costs of its policies was evident in a series of measures implemented in 1932. In August, party activists received the legal right to confiscate grain from peasant households; that same month the infamous law that carried a death penalty for the theft of "socialist property" was enacted. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a government silo or a collective farm field could be, and often was, executed. Under extenuating circumstances, such "crimes against the state" were punished by ten years of hard labor. To prevent peasants from abandoning collective farms in search of food, a system of internal passports was put into effect. In November, Moscow enacted a law stipulating that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the peasants until the government's quota had been met. In January 1933 Stalin ordered his plenipotentiary, Pavel Postyshev, to castigate the Ukrainian Communists for their "lack of Bolshevik vigilance" and to speed up the collection of grain. Under his leadership, gangs of party activists conducted brutal house-to house searches, tearing up floors and delving into wells in search of any grain that remained. Even those already swollen from malnutrition were not allowed to keep their grain. In fact, if a person did not appear to be starving, he was suspected of hoarding food. In retrospect, a party activist has described his motivations at that time in the following manner: "We believed Stalin to be a wise leader... We were deceived because we wanted to be deceived. We believed so strongly in communism that we were ready to accept any crime if it was glossed over with the least little bit of communist phraseology." Famine, which had been spreading throughout 1932, hit full force in early 1933. It is estimated that at the outset of the year an average peasant family of five had about eighty kilograms of grain to last it until the next harvest. In other words, each member had to survive on about 1.7 kg a month. Lacking bread, peasants ate pets, rats, bark, leaves, and the garbage from the well-provisioned kitchens of party members. There were numerous cases of cannibalism. According to a Soviet author, "The first who died were the men. Later on the children. And last of all, the women. But before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Even as whole villages died out, party activists continued confiscating grain. One of them, Victor Kravchenko, later wrote: "On the battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degree, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror... The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood." Of course, Stalin and his associates saw things differently. In 1933, Mendel Khataevich, another of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine and the leader of the grain-procurement program, proudly stated: "A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It's a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We have won the war!" UKRAINE, a History, by Orest Subtelny
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