Serhii Plokhy. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 34, Annual 2015.
One of the most insightful and moving eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, was written by Oleksandra Radchenko, a teacher in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. In her diary, which was confiscated by Stalins secret police and landed the author in the Gulag for ten long years, the 36-year-old teacher recorded not only what she saw around her but also what she thought about the tragedy unfolding before her eyes.
“I am so afraid of hunger; I’m afraid for the children,” wrote Radchenko, who had three young daughters, in February 1932. “May God protect us and have mercy on us. It would not be so offensive if it were due to a bad harvest, but they have taken away the grain and created an artificial famine.” That year she wrote about the starvation and suffering of her neighbors and acquaintances but recorded no deaths from starvation. That all changed in January 1933, when she encountered the first corpse of a famine victim on the road leading to her home. By the spring of 1933 she was regularly reporting mass deaths from starvation. “People are dying,” wrote Radchenko in her entry for 16 May 1933: “… People are saying that whole villages have died in southern Ukraine.”
Was Radchenkos story unique? Did people all over Ukraine indeed suffer from starvation in 1932 and then start dying en masse in 1933? Which areas of Ukraine were most affected? Was there a north-south divide, as the diary suggests, and, if so, did people suffer (and die) more in the south than in the north? Were there more deaths in villages than in towns and cities? Were small towns affected? Did ethnicity matter? These are the core questions that the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Digital Map of Ukraine Project attempts to answer by developing the Geographic Information System (GIS)-based Digital Atlas of the Holodomor. The maps included in the Atlas are based on the newly created and growing database that allows one to link together different levels of spatial analysis from the raion to the republican level, and to compare the demographic, economic, environmental, and political indicators in their relation to a given administrative unit.
Most of the questions we try to answer with the help of the GIS database have been informed by the vast literature on the Great Famine, with its focus on the causes of mass deaths from starvation, including environmental factors, levels of collectivization and, last but not least, nationality policy. By measuring the “footprint” of the Great Famine, we also seek to understand the dynamics of the famine, the intentions of the authorities, the fate of the survivors, and the consequences of mass starvation.
The scope of our research has been determined by the availability of geo-referenced maps and “mappable” data. We have been working with a variety of maps of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in its interwar borders prepared with the assistance of cartographers of Kartohrafiia Publishers in Ukraine, led by Rostyslav Sossa. Those maps served as a basis for the maps prepared specifically for this website by the chief cartographer of the Digital Atlas of Ukraine, Gennadi Poberezny, and its IT coordinator, Kostyantyn Bondarenko. They reflect administrative changes in Ukraine’s external and internal borders, allowing us to compare the results of the 1926 and 1939 population censuses with data from the famine years of 1932-33. These maps help us answer many important questions, but they also imposed limitations on our research, as most do not go beyond the raion level, and at this point “stop” at the boundaries of Soviet Ukraine and do not include the neighboring areas of Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Romania, thereby restricting our focus to questions that could be answered within the boundaries of interwar Soviet Ukraine.
Another set of limitations we had to face was the absence of reliable data on population losses in Ukraine at the oblast and raion levels. Such data were produced specifically for the purposes of this project by a group of demographers, including Oleh Wolowyna (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Omelian Rudnytsky, Natalia Levchulc, Pavlo Shevchuk, and Alla Savchuk (all four from the Institute for Demography and Social Studies in Kyiv). Joseph Livesey (University of New York) collected and systematized data on government policies; Heorhii Papakin (Institute of History, Kyiv) collected and systematized data on blacklisted communities; Hennadii Iefimenko (Institute of History, Kyiv) collected and systematized data on collectivization in Ukraine; and Tetiana Boriak (National Academy of Cadres in Culture and Arts, Kyiv) systematized data based on the testimonies of Famine survivors. The map of the 1928 famine is based on data collected by Liudmyla Hrynevych (Institute of History, Kyiv). Hennadii Boriak (Institute of History, Kyiv) provided intellectual leadership for the research projects conducted in Ukraine in conjunction with the Digital Atlas of Ukraine project, and Alexander Babyonyshev (Sergei Maksudov), associate of the Davis Center at Harvard, provided consultations for our project on more than one occasion. Research on the project has been supported by the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University and the Ukrainian Studies Fund.
Not all the results of our research to date have materialized in the form of GIS-based maps. Work is still continuing on many of the projects mentioned above. The maps we offer today, presented in the Map Gallery, reflect the first results of our research. All these maps are also available as parts of the interactive map of the Great Famine, which offers everyone using the website an opportunity not only to check the accuracy of our hypotheses but also to formulate his or her own questions and conduct independent research by comparing different layers of the map. What follows is the first attempt to make sense of the data we collected and of the maps we produced on its basis. It is presented in the form of a chronologically based narrative that includes reference to the individual maps, but is not and should not be viewed as an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Great Famine. Most of the archival documents used to discuss the meaning of the maps come from the most comprehensive collection of the documents of the Great Famine published in 2007 by Ruslan Pyrih.
Where Did They Die?
Contemporary accounts indicate that Oleksandra Radchenko, whose diary was cited above, lived in one of the regions of Ukraine most severely affected by the Famine of 1932-33. Notwithstanding that, the rumor she recorded in her diary designated southern Ukraine as a region that suffered even more than her own. The rumor made perfect sense given the experience of people who had lived through the revolution and the first years of Soviet rule. Southern Ukraine, administratively divided in the early 1930s into the Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk (Stalino) oblasts, had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire and, subsequently, of the Soviet Union. Black earth made those lands especially fertile for growing grain in general and wheat in particular. But the Ukrainian steppe was also known for its occasionally harsh winters and, most of all, for the severe droughts that often afflicted the region, causing poor harvests, starvation, and sometimes famine.
The famine of 1921-23 affected the southern parts of the republic, as did the famine of 1928, which was caused by a severe winter, massive loss of winter crops, and Soviet agricultural mismanagement. Decades later, the famine of 1946-47 also ravaged the south more than any other part of Ukraine. While conditions of revolution and civil war and, later, government policies contributed to all three famines, the underlying factors were poor weather conditions and the resulting poor harvests in the black-earth steppe regions of Ukraine. For those who had lived through or knew of the famines of 1921-23 and 1928, it would be only natural to assume in 1932-33 that, whatever was happening in Kharkiv and other central regions of Ukraine, the situation was much worse in the south.
This is not the picture that emerges from the maps produced by our project. According to the estimates of direct losses provided by the demographic group led by Oleh Wolowyna, the direct losses of the famine amounted to 3.9 million, with 0.6 million unborn children, bringing the overall toll of the famine to 4.5 million people. The oblasts of Ukraine that suffered most were not the steppe regions, traditionally affected by drought, but the boreal-steppe zones of central Ukraine encompassing Kharkiv and Kyiv oblasts. The traditional views on the geographic spread of the Famine of 1932-33, suggesting the south as the most affected area of Ukraine, have been challenged recently also by Stephen G. Wheatcroft, and require reevaluation in the light of the new demographic data.
Let us start with the summary of the demographic data provided by Wolowyna and his group. Direct losses or total excess deaths, estimated as the difference between actual deaths and the “normal” deaths during the non-crisis years, in Kyiv oblast for 1932-34 have been estimated at 1.1 million; in Kharkiv oblast, the estimate is 1.0 million. In southern Ukraine, by contrast, the estimates are considerably lower: 368,000 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast and 327,000 in Odesa oblast. The same applies if we look at direct losses calculated per thousand of population during all three years in which the effects of the Great Famine were felt. In 1933, the year that accounts for more than 90 percent of all losses, there were approximately 184 deaths per thousand in Kyiv oblast and 176 per thousand in Kharkiv oblast, while in Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts the death toll was roughly half that level: 96 per thousand in Odesa oblast and 90 per thousand in Dnipropetrovsk.
A comparison of the maps of the 1921-23, 1928, and 1932-33 famines suggests that the Great Famine had a different “footprint” than the two previous famines and cannot be considered to have been caused primarily by environmental factors or, at least, the same set of environmental factors. This cautious conclusion is supported by the prevailing trend in the historiography of the Great Famine, which emphasizes the human factor, especially government policies, as having caused the famine. It also puts the Famine into the category of “man-made” or, to use Oleksandra Radchenko’s term, “artificial” famines.
Does this mean that environmental factors should be dismissed altogether in explaining the causes of the Great Famine? Our research demonstrates that it would be premature to do so. It also shows that environment did matter, but not in the same way as in the famines of the 1920s. On the eve of and during the Holodomor, environmental factors influenced human actions, particularly government policies that eventually contributed to the death toll of the famine.
Collectivization: Steppe Versus Forest
The first in the long list of those policies was the collectivization drive, the centerpiece of the Soviet agricultural policy, launched by the central authorities in the fall of 1928. The map of the levels of collectivization shows significant differences among individual regions of the republic belonging to different ecological zones. By the autumn of 1932,85 percent of peasant households in the steppe oblasts of Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Donetsk had been collectivized, while the rest of the country lagged significantly behind—from 47 percent of households collectivized in Chernihiv oblast to 72 percent in Kharkiv oblast. In Kyiv oblast, 67 percent of households had been collectivized.
What accounts for that difference? The main reason for the higher level of collectivization in the steppe oblasts was a policy designed and introduced by Joseph Stalin and his advisers in Moscow and implemented by the Ukrainian party authorities in Kharkiv. As shown on the map of ecological zones of Ukraine, the country is divided into four zones: two steppe and two boreal zones. It was the dividing line between the boreal and steppe zones that turned out to be the most important one in the eyes of the Moscow authorities, as they produced plans for the collectivization drive.
For purposes of official reporting on the progress of collectivization, Ukraine was divided into four areas: Steppe, Left Bank, Right Bank, and Polisia. With the introduction of oblast administrative divisions in February 1932, the Steppe region encompassed the Moldavian Autonomous Republic and Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk oblasts; the Left Bank included Kharkiv oblast and parts of Kyiv oblast; and the Right Bank encompassed most of Kyiv oblast and all of Vinnytsia oblast. Polisia was originally divided between Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts, but in October 1932 most of it was included in the newly created Chernihiv oblast. In July of 1932 Donetsk oblast was created, and it included the Donbas industrial region and the eastern parts of Kharkiv oblast. Thus, while in the eyes of the central planners there was no clear oblast-based boundary between the boreal and boreal-steppe regions, there was one between the steppe and boreal-steppe areas.
In the summer of 1930, the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow decreed that the level of collectivization in the steppe areas of Ukraine was to reach the 65-75 percent mark by the end of the 1930/31 agricultural year. In other regions of Ukraine, a collectivization level of 35-45 percent was to be attained during the same period of time. The black-earth zones of the southern Ukraine steppe were considered the principal grain-growing areas of the Soviet Union and were therefore supposed to be collectivized sooner and faster than the others in order to increase the grain yield for the government. As shown on the map of the levels of collectivization, by the fall of 1932, according to official statistics, the Ukrainian authorities overshot the 75 percent target introduced for the previous year and reached the 85 percent mark in some of the southern areas. The other regions lagged behind by at least 10 percent.
Stalin and his advisers in Moscow continually focused their attention on southern Ukraine. In March 1932 additional tractors were sent specifically to the Ukrainian steppelands against the quotas originally allocated by the Moscow authorities to Russia and Belarus. In April of that year Stanislav Kosior, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and other Kharkiv officials visited the southern regions of the Ukrainian steppe oblasts to oversee the sowing campaign firsthand. After the trip Kosior reported on his findings to Stalin. He was glad to note favorable weather conditions and a good crop of winter cereals in Odesa oblast; he also predicted better sowing than in the previous year.
Thus, by the spring of 1932 the Moscow government had created a new political, social, and technological situation in the southern oblasts of Ukraine. Those areas were more collectivized than the rest of Ukraine, had higher numbers of tractors and agricultural machinery, and, because of their ability to produce significantly more grain than areas to the north, they were closer to the central concerns of the Moscow authorities than the rest of Ukraine.
The Advent of Famine
While the south was at the center of Moscow’s attention, the Ukrainian government in Kharkiv had to deal with the entire republic. In the late spring of 1932 the attention of the Ukrainian leadership was focused on Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Kharkiv oblasts, which encompassed the boreal and boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine. What concerned them was the famine that engulfed the region in the first months of 1932.
Famine began to claim lives in central Ukraine and in the tiny Moldavian Autonomous Republic in the winter of 1931-32, about the same time as Oleksandra Radchenko recorded her first mention of famine in her diary. In 1932 there were 13.9 excess deaths per thousand of population in Kyiv oblast, 9.4 in the Moldavian Republic, and 7.8 in Kharkiv oblast. Judging by available official correspondence, the areas hardest hit were in southern Kyiv oblast, around the cities of Bila Tserkva and Uman. Stanislav Kosior singled out those regions in his April letter to Stalin. “What they now mainly expect from those regions is reports that there is nothing to eat; that they will not do any sowing,” wrote Kosior, referring to the expectations of his underlings in Kharkiv. Judging by the tone and content of the letter, Kosior found himself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he subscribed to the official line established in Moscow that there was no famine in Ukraine; on the other, he was sending clear signals that the famine was already there.
What were the causes of the 1932 famine in the southwestern parts of Kyiv oblast? This area was known as a prime sugar-beet region and often referred to as such in official correspondence, with officials paying special attention not only to the grain harvest but also to the yield of beets and potatoes. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, in southern Kyiv oblast, wheat—the main object of desire of the authorities in Moscow and Kharkiv—accounted for anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of the land allocated for growing grain. Still, the wheat and grain harvest was the top official concern, as in any other part of Ukraine. Moscow regarded the entire republic as a grain-producing region and assigned plan targets to the Ukrainian SSR as a whole, not to any group of oblasts belonging to a particular ecological zone of Ukraine. Kyiv oblast came close to fulfilling its grain-procurement quota in 1931, but did so at a prohibitive cost.
In June 1932 the Ukrainian premier Vlas Chubar sent Stalin a letter in which he presented his understanding of the causes of famine in southern Kyiv oblast.
The failure of legume and spring crops in those raions, above all, was not taken into account, and the insufficiency of those crops was made up with foodstuffs in order to fulfill the grain-requisition plans. Given the overall impossibility of fulfilling the grain-requisition plan, the basic reason for which was the lesser harvest in Ukraine as a whole and the colossal losses incurred during the harvest (a result of the weak economic organization of the collective farms and their utterly inadequate management from the raions and from the center), a system was put in place of confiscating all grain produced by individual farmers, including seed stocks, and almost wholesale confiscation of all produce from the collective farms.
What that meant in practice was described in the private diary of Dmytro Zavoloka, a party official in Kyiv oblast. “Grain was requisitioned right up to the top,” wrote Zavoloka in May 1932. “What they found in the granaries and the houses was taken, almost to the last pound (not everywhere, of course). And the poor or middle peasant or collective farmer often had his last pood [of grain] taken away because someone said that he was hiding kulak grain. In certain places grain requisition … turned into cruel treatment of the inhabitants, bordering on usurpation. Also, very often, they dekulakized ‘kulaks’ who were never kulaks at all. But they came up with any odd reason and sold [the farm].”
At the time Zavoloka wrote his assessment of the grain-requisition campaign and its consequences, the famine was reaping its deadly harvest in the boreal-steppe oblasts of Ukraine. According to Chubar, those most severely affected by the famine were individual, non-collectivized peasants whose property was requisitioned by the state for their failure to fulfill the procurement quotas. Next on the list were members of collective farms with large families. By March and April 1932, most villages had hundreds of people either starving or dying of hunger. In May 1932 a representative of the Kyiv Central Committee of the Communist Party picked seven villages in the Uman district at random. There were 216 registered deaths from starvation, and 686 individuals were expected to die in the next few days. In one of those villages, Horodnytsia, wrote the party official to Kosior, “up to 100 have died; the daily death toll is 8-12; people are swollen from starvation on 100 of 600 homesteads.”
The situation in neighboring Kharkiv oblast was little better. Ukrainian party official Hryhorii Petrovs ‘kyi wrote to Stalin in June 1932, after his tour of Kharkiv oblast, that “famine has engulfed a good part of the countryside.” He requested assistance in the amount of two million poods of grain. “It will take a month or a month and a half for new grain to appear,” wrote Petrovs’kyi. “This means that the famine will intensify.” A month earlier, officials in Moscow and Kharkiv had received a letter whose authors claimed to represent 5,000 peasants, mostly from Kharkiv oblast, who were trying to board trains heading out of Ukraine in order to get bread and feed their families. “We can sign this declaration with our own blood,” wrote the authors of the letter, “but we are not certain that there is any point in doing so. We inform you in all honesty that until the fruits and vegetables ripen, we are living on the refuse not needed as feed for the chickens, pigs, and dogs of Leningrad, Minsk, Homiel, and other oblasts in the vicinity of Moscow….”
In June 1932, when party officials in Kharkiv put together a list of raions most affected by the famine, Kyiv oblast led with ten raions, followed by two other boreal-steppe oblasts, Vinnytsia with eleven raions and Kharkiv with seven. The steppe oblast of Dnipropetrovsk had five such raions, while Odesa oblast did not make the list. In the same month Chubar asked Moscow to send 1.5 million poods of grain to deal with the famine in the central regions of Ukraine. Stalin was opposed. “As I see it, Ukraine has been given more than its due,” he wrote to his right-hand man, Lazar Kaganovich. “There is no reason to give more grain and nowhere to get it from.” Eventually, Ukraine got 300,000 poods of grain from the all-Union reserves—one-fifth of the requested amount. That happened only because Chubar made a strong case that without such relief, the sugar-beet harvest in Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts would be jeopardized. It worked, but only to a degree.
Why did the boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine suffer more from the famine of 1932 than the steppe areas to the south and the boreal areas to the north? If one trusts official assessments (in particular, Chubar’s letter to Stalin), those areas suffered as a result of a poor harvest of certain crops in 1931, official efforts to make up those losses by increasing grain-procurement quotas, and, last but not least, poor organization of labor on newly established collective farms. It should be noted that the famine was taking place in areas that normally did not lack food supplies. In an average year the stored quantity of grain and potatoes in that part of Ukraine amounted to anywhere between 500 and 750 kilograms per person. Both figures (of wheat production and storage of food supplies) were close to average for Ukraine.
Procurement Quotas
The famine in the boreal-steppe area of Ukraine in the spring of 1932 could not but impair the capacity of collective farms and individual peasants to carry out sowing for the next harvest. People who survived the famine did not have the seed stock, strength, or incentive to do what the authorities wanted them to do. Men, unable to feed their families at home, were going elsewhere in search of bread.
“There are almost no male collective farmers,” wrote M. Demchenko, secretary of the Kyiv oblast party committee, about his visit to a village. “People say that they have gone to get food, heading for Belarus and Leningrad oblast.” Dmytro Zavoloka recorded the same situation in his diary. “It’s clear that after grain requisitions on that scale and such methods of work, the consequences have taken their toll,” he wrote in May 1932. “Large numbers of peasants, including a good part of those on collective farms, have been left without grain. People have begun to flee en masse from their villages wherever their legs will carry them. Entire families are making their way to the farthest reaches of the republic just to avoid staying in their own villages. They avoid work, abandon the land, kill the livestock, and let the farms go to waste.”
There was little sowing in the regions most affected by the famine of 1932. By early May only 18 percent of the planned sowing had been carried out in the Uman region of Kyiv oblast. In early June Zavoloka recorded the results of sowing in Kyiv oblast as a whole: only 51 percent of the fields had been sown, and potatoes had been planted only on 56.7 percent of the land allocated for them. “The right time has passed,” wrote Zavoloka. “Sowing after 10 June is hopeless for growing and even more so for harvesting. This means that in Kyiv oblast alone, almost two million hectares, perhaps more, have been left unsown.” Zavoloka also wrote that with people going hungry, so were the animals. Between 40 and 50 percent of horses in the region did not survive the winter and spring of 1932. “The results of the spring sowing are more than catastrophic,” wrote this party functionary, who tried to reconcile his communist beliefs with party policies in the pages of his diary but ultimately found it impossible to do so.
The Kharkiv authorities tried to deal with the situation by sending their plenipotentiaries, emergency food supplies, and seed stocks to the raions and villages that had been hardest hit. They also tried to reduce the sowing plan assigned to Ukraine by the Moscow authorities. They failed on all accounts. The plenipotentiaries could do little without food supplies, available assistance proved insufficient, and Moscow would not reduce the plan targets. On 5 May the Soviet deputy premier Valerian Kuibyshev demanded that premier Vlas Chubar of the Ukrainian SSR fulfill the centrally imposed plan and ensure the sowing of 11.331 million hectares instead of the 10.64 million hectares proposed by the Ukrainian authorities. While seed stocks for Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts were at the top of the agenda in Kharkiv, Moscow was concerned with sowing in the south. On 29 May Stalin personally intervened in the process of delivering seed stocks to Odesa oblast. “Take steps to ensure that the corn dispatched from Rostov is used as directed. We await your reply,” read Stalins telegram to Kosior and Chubar.
The failure of the sowing campaign in Kyiv and other oblasts located in the boreal-steppe region forced the Kharkiv authorities to ask Moscow to reduce the grain-procurement plan for the summer and autumn of 1932. They argued that 2.2 million hectares of land had been left unsown and that winter crops had perished on 0.8 million hectares. Moscow wanted Ukraine to deliver 356 million poods of grain that year. This constituted approximately 81 percent of the plan target assigned the previous year and 90 percent of the grain actually collected in 1931. As seen from Moscow, this probably seemed a reasonable reduction, but it took no account of the consequences of the famine of 1932 and the disruption of the normal agricultural process by the forcible establishment of collective farms.
Stalin’s aides, Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who visited Kharkiv in July, refused any further reductions. In the same month the party authorities in Moscow imposed a further increase of 4-5 percent to the plan at the raion level in order to make up for potential losses caused by planning errors. It was up to the authorities in Kharkiv to distribute grain-procurement quotas among the Ukrainian regions. They decided to shield the areas most affected by the famine of 1932 and shift the burden of the plan more to the south.
The major beneficiaries of the new scheme were Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts, as well as the small Moldavian Autonomous Republic in the south. Moldavia, which had been hit as hard as Kyiv oblast by the famine of the previous year, had its quota reduced to 46 percent of the grain turned over to the state in 1932. In Kyiv oblast the new quota constituted 65 percent and in Kharkiv oblast, 74 percent of the grain delivered the previous year. The major loser was Odesa oblast, whose quota was increased probably because of the good prospects for the new harvest by 34 percent over that of 1932. In Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, and Donetsk oblasts the reductions amounted to anywhere between 5 and 12 percent, in keeping with the average for Ukraine as a whole. Given the shift of grain-procurement quotas toward the south, the Kharkiv authorities had to change their original plans for collective farms and individual peasants by increasing targets for the former and decreasing them for the latter. Southern Ukraine was much more collectivized than the boreal-steppe region, and the increase in procurement quotas for the south meant that collective farms would have to deliver more grain.
The Ukrainian government kept lobbying for reduced quotas for the areas affected by the Famine of 1932 throughout the summer. In August, when Stalin agreed to reduce the procurement target for Ukraine by 40 million poods (a reduction of approximately 11 percent), Kyiv oblast got a reduction of 11 million poods (close to 35 percent of its original plan); Vinnytsia oblast, 9 million poods (23 percent); and Kharkiv oblast, 8 million poods (11 percent). The quota for Dnipropetrovsk oblast was reduced by 4 million poods (4.5 percent) and Odesa oblast’s, by 2 million poods (2.3 percent). The south was now expected to bear an even heavier burden. The exception to that general rule was the highly industrialized Donetsk oblast, where the plan target was reduced by 5 million poods, or 14 percent of the original plan. That decision was made in consultation between the Moscow and Kharkiv authorities.
However, there were limits to how long the Kharkiv authorities could keep Kyiv oblast at the top of their concerns. In October 1932, when in the face of the failure to meet the quota targets, Molotov and then Stalin were forced to reduce the procurement plan for Ukraine by another 70 million poods (close to 20 percent of the original plan), Kharkiv oblast was the first in line asking for a reduction of its quota by 26.9 million poods (37 percent of the original plan). Kyiv oblast asked for a cut of 5.7 million poods (18 percent), and Vinnytsia oblast requested a reduction of 3.5 million poods (9 percent). It appeared that Kyiv oblast was still very much in trouble, while Kharkiv oblast had become a new, leading disaster area. The major difference from August was that the southern oblasts began to ask for substantial reductions as well. Dnipropetrovsk oblast wanted its quota cut by 16.4 million poods (19 percent) and Odesa oblast, by 14 million poods (16.6 percent).
There can be little doubt that the Kharkiv authorities were doing their best to reduce the procurement burden of the regions most affected by the famine of 1932, all of them in the boreal-steppe region of Ukraine. Through their efforts, they eventually succeeded in reducing the plan quotas—a measure that most affected the central oblasts of Ukraine. It soon turned out, however, that the regions affected by the Famine of 1932 needed famine relief and reduced quotas of grain production.
Grain Requisitions
In the fall of 1932 Kharkiv and Kyiv oblasts, which were located in Ukraine’s boreal-steppe belt, were leading among the Ukrainian regions in fulfilling their quotas for delivering grain to government depositories. In early November 1932 Mendel Khataevich, secretary of the Kharkiv Central Committee and also first secretary of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, asked his Kharkiv and Moscow bosses to allocate 10 percent of all manufactured goods to reward collective farms and individual peasants in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Donetsk oblasts.
Khataevich was prepared to give to some areas and localities of Ukraine while taking from others. In the same telegram he proposed that there should be no further deliveries of manufactured goods to those raions of Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts that were lagging behind in the fulfillment of their quotas. Soon, the policy of blacklisting whole communities—collective farms and raions—was extended to all oblasts of Ukraine. It called for cutting off supplies of manufactured goods to settlements that failed to fulfill their quotas. Kyiv oblast led in terms of blacklisted villages, while Dnipropetrovsk oblast was in first place when it came to blacklisted collective farms. Among other things, this disparity reflected different levels of collectivization in the steppe and boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine.
The lead taken by the boreal-steppe oblasts continued in the new year. By 1 January 1933 the collective farms of Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia oblasts were ahead of their southern neighbors in fulfilling their plans, showing results from 85 percent and higher, with 100 percent fulfillment in Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts. The collective farms of the steppe oblasts and the newly created Chernihiv oblast in the Polisia region lagged behind in plan fulfillment by a margin of at least 10 percent. In the steppe regions the failure to fulfill plan targets led eventually to their further reduction. In January 1933 their plan quotas were reduced by 12 million poods for Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts. For Kharkiv oblast, the quota was further reduced by 3.4 million poods; for Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts it remained the same.
There are several factors that might account for the “leadership” of the boreal-steppe oblasts in fulfilling plan targets. One such factor is that those oblasts benefited from major reductions to their procurement quotas. The final plan for Kyiv oblast reduced the quota by roughly half of the original amount of 31.2 million poods, while the original plan target itself constituted only 65 percent of the grain collected in 1931. The overall reduction was a whopping 68 percent. But the reduction of quotas is only one possible explanation of the “stellar” performance of Kyiv oblast in fulfilling its plan.
Another is the ruthless efficiency of the local party machine in requisitioning grain from the peasantry. By the first months of 1933, when the party sent its people back to the villages in the boreal-steppe areas to collect grain for sowing, there was nothing to collect. If in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, which was lagging behind in the fulfillment of its procurement plan, party workers collected 40 percent of what was required, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia oblasts that number was between 13.4 and 20.5 percent.
For those peasants in the boreal-steppe zones who had survived the requisitions of 1931 and the famine of 1932, the new requisition campaign brought new suffering and claimed more lives. In her diary entry for 30 September 1932, Oleksandra Radchenko recorded the story of a peasant from the village of Piatnytske in Kharkiv oblast who was detained by the authorities. They demanded grain, holding him captive the entire day, and released him only late at night. “They held me for grain procurement,” the peasant told Radchenko, who met him as he returned home after nightfall. “Give, they say, but what is there to give? There are four sacks left; I have to do my sowing; I have to feed my children through the winter.” The peasant was clearly distressed. “His voice shook; he might have burst into tears at any minute,” wrote Radchenko in her diary. “Oh, poor, poor, tormented people.”
The authorities were not only going after grain. They confiscated everything, treating all food supplies as potential “fines in kind” for unfulfilled procurement quotas. “[The] old man, who works on a rabbit farm, was ‘robbed by the authorities,’ as he reported,” recorded Radchenko in her entry for 20 November 1932. “That means they took all the cereal grains and fruit available. He has been dekulakized for two years and is almost indigent, just short of begging. He is 70 years old; the old woman is 65, and their crippled daughter lives in their apartment. And although they are destitute, everything they might have used to live on until February has been taken from them. The servant returned from leave … and cried out in despair, ‘What a horror this is! They are completely ruining individual farmers, taking everything away, going through trunks; cries and weeping everywhere. They shout, ‘Take the children, too,’ and there are five of them in the house.”
The hypothesis that it was pressure from above, not just reduced quotas that accounted for the exceptional performance of the boreal-steppe areas in meeting plan targets, finds corroboration in secret-police statistics. According to GPU (Main Political Directorate) data, in the first ten months of 1932, 300 cases of peasant “terrorism,” a term used to denote violent resistance to the authorities, were registered in Kyiv oblast, 255 in Kharkiv oblast, and 197 in Vinnytsia oblast. Much larger oblasts in the south had rather modest totals: 58 cases in Donetsk oblast, 80 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, and 170 in Odesa oblast. If one also counts the 80 cases registered on territories controlled by border guard detachments, then the numbers for Vinnytsia and Kyiv oblasts, bordering Poland and Romania, should be increased even further. That tendency continued in the remaining months of 1932 and early 1933. Vinnytsia oblast had 98 cases of “terrorism”; Kharkiv oblast, 84; Chernihiv oblast, 87; and Kyiv oblast, 63. During the same months there were only 16 cases registered in Donetsk oblast, 26 in Odesa oblast, and 47 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
The Kharkiv authorities’ efforts to deal with the situation by reducing quotas and shifting the main burden to the south did not change the situation on the ground. The central government demanded grain deliveries from the region whether or not the peasants had anything to eat. By early 1933 it was Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia oblasts, the areas most affected by the famine of 1932, that seemed most vulnerable to the new wave of famine—one that threatened Ukraine as a whole on a much larger scale than that of the previous year.
Politics of Assistance
On 30 January 1933 Oleksandra Radchenko recorded the first death from starvation that she saw with her own eyes. “On the way to Zadorizhne, right next to the road, we saw a dead old man, ragged and thin. There were no boots on him. Obviously, he had fallen and frozen to death or died immediately, and somebody took the boots. On the way back we saw the same old man again. Nobody needs him.'” The famine soon decimated the population of Babanka. In a mere three days, between 24 and 26 April, 22 people starved to death in that village.
The first official reports on the spread of the new famine began to arrive in Kharkiv in early February 1933. Most of them pertained to the boreal-steppe oblasts, especially Kyiv and Vinnytsia. But the first quantities of grain that Ukraine was allowed to take in order to cope with widespread starvation and growing famine did not go to Kyiv and Vinnytsia but to Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts. Kyiv and the boreal-steppe areas were overlooked by the center, which had control over grain depositories and supplies and, in the conditions of the growing crisis, decided who or, rather, where, people would live or die. Moscow needed peasants to live, or least die at a slower rate in the areas that produced most of the grain; a policy that benefited the Ukrainian south. On 7 February 1933 the Politburo in Moscow decreed that Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts could use 200,000 poods of rye each to deal with the food shortages. On 17 February the party authorities in Kharkiv decreed that additional supplies of grain and flour be sent to the industrial Donetsk oblast.
The same “south first” policy continued in the second half of February. On 18 February the Moscow Politburo decreed the release of a million poods of grain to Dnipropetrovsk oblast, 0.8 million to Odesa oblast, and 0.3 million to Kharkiv oblast. As regards Dnipropetrovsk oblast, the resolution corresponded to GPU statistics for March 1933, which indicated that 1,700 people had starved to death there—more than in all other oblasts of Ukraine combined. In Kyiv oblast, according to GPU statistics, only 417 people had died by that time. While the clearly inaccurate GPU statistics can explain Moscow’s particular attention to Dnipropetrovsk oblast, they cannot do so in the cases of Odesa and Kharkiv oblasts. According to the same GPU reports, 37 people starved to death in Kharkiv oblast and 11 in Odesa oblast.
As the Union government focused on the south, it was left to the Kharkiv authorities to take care of the rest of the republic. The problem was that the resources at the disposition of the Ukrainian government were minuscule compared to those available in the center. By mid-March the party authorities in Kharkiv were swamped with reports of the skyrocketing mortality rate in Kyiv oblast. “We have starvation and its consequences in 32-34 raions. In 16 raions we have 123 registered cases of cannibalism and eating of corpses (including 64 cases of cannibalism),” read one of the reports received by the Kharkiv Central Committee. “… On the streets of Kyiv, the following numbers of corpses were picked up: January, 400; February, 518; in the first ten days of March, 249. In the most recent days, an average of 100 children [per day] have been left [in the city] by their parents.” In February 1933 the Kharkiv authorities gave Kyiv oblast 60,000 poods of grain, followed by 80,000 in early March.
On 17 March 1933 the Central Committee in Kharkiv issued a special resolution on means of combating the famine crisis in Kyiv oblast. An appeal was made to Moscow. This time the Moscow authorities reacted and allowed six million poods of grain to be taken from the central depositories to deal with the crisis. This famine relief measure had its effect. According to Oleh Wolowyna’s research, the relative excess death factor (the number of excess deaths in an area or population divided by the relative total population) for Kyiv oblast fell between mid-March and mid-May 1933 by roughly 30 points, from 80 to 53. But the impact was temporary. In May the relative excess death factor began to rise again, exceeded the March peak by mid-June 1933, and reached 85 points. In assessing the impact that the government’s assistance, often offered in the form of loans with the interest, had on the situation on the ground in early spring of 1933, it is important to keep in mind that the rural population of Kyiv oblast was almost twice as large as that of Dnipropetrovsk. There were close to 5 million people leaving in rural areas of Kyiv oblast and 2.8 million in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
The Kyiv crisis of March 1933 did not change the Union government’s policy of offering assistance first and foremost to the main grain-producing oblasts in the south. On 28 May 1933 the Moscow Politburo adopted a resolution allowing the release of 0.3 million poods of grain each to Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts. Donetsk oblast received 0.1 million; the others—nothing at all. It was only after the Ukrainian leadership sent a special appeal to Stalin that Moscow agreed to give a fraction of the assistance it had provided to the steppe oblasts to those located in the boreal-steppe zone. Moscow allowed the provision of 200,000 poods of rye to alleviate famine in Kharkiv oblast, 130,000 poods each in Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts, and 30,000 poods in Chernihiv oblast. For Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts, Moscow cut the amount requested by the Kharkiv authorities by 15,000 poods.
This could not but have a direct impact on the worsening situation on the ground. In the following month the relative excess death factor reached its peak in the boreal-steppe oblasts, approaching 90 in Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts, reaching 100 in Kharkiv oblast, and exceeding the 100 mark in Chernihiv—the oblast that received less assistance than any other in Ukraine. The difference between the boreal-steppe oblasts and those in the steppe zone could not have been more profound. The relative excess death factor in Odesa oblast at that time was 50, while Dnipropetrovsk oblast had a factor of 30, and Donetsk oblast a factor of 15.
The central governments policies favoring the steppe oblasts continued in the aftermath of the famine. In 1933 the Moscow authorities decreed the resettlement of the famine-ravaged areas of Ukraine by peasant families from Russia and Belarus. They wanted 6,679 households to go to Dnipropetrovsk oblast; 6,750 to Odesa; 4,800 to Kharkiv; and 3,527 to Donetsk. The southern oblasts of Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa got the most attention from the center. The same pattern applied to horses shipped to Ukraine from other parts of the Soviet Union. Dnipropetrovsk oblast rerceived 5,719 head of livestock; Odesa, 6,812; and Kharkiv, 2,329. Moscow’s neglect of the non-grain-producing areas of Ukraine during the spring and early summer of 1933 was among the factors that contributed to the higher than average death rate in the forest-steppe regions of the republic.
Beyond the Forest-Steppe Divide
The dividing line between the boreal and steppe areas of Ukraine played an important role in defining the Moscow authorities’ approach to planning their agricultural policies in Ukraine. As has been argued above, those policies contributed to the significantly higher death rate in the two boreal-steppe oblasts of Ukraine, Kyiv and Kharkiv. What that line does not explain is the difference in the death rate between those two oblasts and the boreal regions of Ukraine, which included the area north of Kyiv oblast and all of Chernihiv oblast, where the death rate was significantly lower than in the boreal-steppe areas. In Chernihiv oblast in 1933 the death rate was 75.8 per thousand of population, compared with 183.5 deaths per thousand of population in Kyiv oblast.
The map of losses by raion in 1933 leaves no doubt that while the sources we consulted give no indication that the line between the boreal and boreal-steppe areas mattered in the formulation of government policy, it clearly affected the inhabitants’ chances of survival. Here we are dealing with a situation in which environment could have a direct impact, without the intermediacy of the political factor. One possible explanation of that fact could be the inhabitants’ ability to feed and maintain domestic animals in wooded areas at the time of the famine, as well as their ability to survive on forest products that could not be confiscated by the authorities. Further research is needed to test these hypotheses.
The boreal-steppe divide also does not suffice to explain the lower death rate in Vinnytsia oblast as compared with Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts, which lay within the boundaries of the same ecological zone. The raion data indicates that some raions of Vinnytsia oblast suffered the same level of excess deaths as the boreal-steppe raions of Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts, but all those raions were in the central and eastern parts of the oblast. The western and southwestern parts, which happened to be closest to the Soviet-Polish and Soviet-Romanian border, suffered significantly less.
The answer to this puzzle has been suggested by recent research on the history of Soviet border areas, which indicates that Moscow paid special attention to border regions, supplying them with larger quantities of consumer products than other regions of the Soviet Union. Back in 1930 entire villages in border areas attempted to cross the Soviet-Polish border and find refuge from the horror of collectivization in neighboring Poland. Further research into government policies and strategies of survival in the border regions of Ukraine would be required, but there is little doubt that the death rate in those areas was lower than in the central and eastern parts of Vinnytsia oblast; a factor that influenced the overall death rate in the oblast during the famine.
Last but not least, the boreal-steppe divide does not explain differences in the death rate between the three steppe oblasts: Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Odesa. Donetsk oblast suffered least, Odesa oblast most. The high level of industrialization of Donetsk oblast as compared with Odesa oblast can partly explain this phenomenon: Starving peasants could find employment and survive in major industrial centers that had centralized food supplies. One should not discount also the Moscow authorities’ differential treatment of individual oblasts with regard to famine relief.
This factor becomes especially apparent if one compares Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts, the two main grain-producing areas of Ukraine. Throughout the spring of 1933 Dnipropetrovsk oblast emerged as the main recipient of Moscow’s assistance in the south, obtaining one million poods in February. Odesa oblast received 0.8 million poods of grain. Between mid-March and mid-July the excess death factor in Dnipropetrovsk oblast was significantly lower than in Odesa oblast. In mid-May, for example, it reached 33 points, while that of Odesa oblast stood at 60. The greater quantity of government relief undoubtedly influenced this major discrepancy between the two oblasts, which were quite similar in size of population, level of collectivization, and grain-producing capacity.
In explaining the differences in the amount of aid received from the center, it is hard to overlook the role played by individual party officials in the history of the famine. Mendel Khataevich, who was appointed first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk party committee in January 1933, maintained his position as secretary of the Central Committee in Kharkiv and had direct access not only to Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar but also to Stalin’s right-hand man in Moscow, Lazar Kaganovich. The personalities of oblast and raion party leaders mattered during the Great Famine, and in the spring and summer of 1933 the position taken by a senior party official and his ability to reduce plan targets and receive government assistance could make the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of starving people in the Ukrainian countryside.
There were limits, however, to what local officials could and could not do independently of the Moscow and Kyiv authorities. Wheatcroft has suggested recently that Kyiv oblast’s higher death rate can be attributed to the actions of local officials, who imposed additional quotas on the peasantry in order to feed the cities of the oblast, which, unlike the industrial centers in the east and south of the republic, received few or no shipments from the central depositories. Thus far, this hypothesis has not been substantiated by the documentary evidence with regard to special policies adopted by Kyiv officials. It also does not take into account that not all areas of Kyiv oblast suffered equally, and many raions of Kharkiv oblast suffered as much as the most affected areas of Kyiv oblast.
Let us now turn to the factors that apparently did not matter in the history of the Great Famine. A comparison of the maps of excess death rates with those of Ukraine’s ethnic composition suggests that while place of residence, defined in terms of ecological zones and border versus central location, influenced chances of survival, ethnicity did not. There is, however, one caveat pertaining to this general thesis. The maps indicate that the boreal-steppe regions hardest hit by the famine also happened to be those with the highest percentage of Ukrainians among the rural population. But we have no documentary confirmation that these areas were specifically targeted by the government or left without assistance because of their ethnic composition. Also severely affected were northeastern Kharkiv oblast and concentrations of Jews and Poles outside the border regions of Vinnytsia oblast. Furthermore, the map of urban losses indicates that small towns in Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts with significant Jewish populations were among the localities worst hit by the famine: this data is confirmed by official correspondence.
Finally, one should address the impact on death rates of the official policy of denying supplies to villages and agricultural enterprises that failed to fulfill their grain-procurement quotas, otherwise known as blacklisted communities. Even though clusters of blacklisted villages can be found on the map within or close to areas with the highest rates of excess deaths, current data do not allow one to conclude or even suggest that blacklisting actually led to higher death rates. There can be a number of explanations for this phenomenon; lack of comprehensive data is one of them. The authorities’ inability to enforce blacklisting of communities located near those that were not blacklisted—a “problem” addressed in official reports for December 1932—maybe another.
Conclusions and Hypotheses
While GIS mapping of the Great Famine is only in its initial stages, and this essay is one of the first attempts to interpret the new data and the maps on which it has been plotted, we can already formulate some preliminary conclusions. Given the early stage of research, most of the conclusions are hypothetical and should be regarded more as an agenda for research than as the definitive word on the subject. In this context, it is important to bear in mind that GIS mapping is not only a way of presenting research results, but also a way of posing new questions for research.
For clarity’s sake, I am presenting the preliminary results of the research discussed in this essay in point form.