In the first half of 1933 great famine (Holodomor) broke out in Ukraine. People were dying by the millions. Hundreds of villages and thousands of farmsteads were wiped off the face of the Earth. The dead were buried in cemeteries, wastelands, very often in allotment gardens. They were also thrown into wells, which were then filled up. Long ditches were dug in the gorges and corpses were heaped there.
It was not allowed to write or talk of the famine. And it obviously was not allowed to erect monuments on the graves of the people killed by the famine. The first cenotaphs were raised in 1983 across the globe, in Edmonton and Winnipeg. In May 1986 a monument of the victims of the Holodomor was unveiled in downtown Los Angeles and in 1993 in Chicago. The United States Congress allotted plot in Washington D.C. for a monument to commemorate the Ukrainians who died because of the famine. The monument will be unveiled in the Fall of 2008 on the 75th anniversary of this tragedy of the Ukrainian nation.
In Ukraine monuments in the places of burial of the famine victims started to appear in the Fall of 1989. One of the first to be unveiled was the memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror in Pankowce village in Starosinyavskiy Raion in Khmelnytskiy Oblast. For many years the work involved with localising the famine victims and the raising of monuments or memorial signs was done by social organizations, mainly by the Association of Famine-Genocide of the years 1932-1933 in Ukraine (established in July 1992). In the recent period the work is supervised by the Secretariat of the President of Ukraine. All places of burial of the victims should be found before the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. Work on identifying the dead began in all oblasts.
What happened in Ukraine in the years 1932-1933 then? Why was it impossible to talk about it until December 1987? It is then that the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, was forced to confirm through clamped teeth that there was a famine, one caused by a natural element – drought.
Historians have no trouble proving the intention of the authorities to use terror famine and noticing its results. It is much harder to prove why Stalin had this intention. No documents can attest to that because the leader had no obligation to explain his motives to his subordinates. Nevertheless, when there is no clear document, historians should find fragments of indirect evidence, which together would form a motive.
In 1988 a United States congressional committee, overseen by Executive Director John Meys, recognized Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 as genocide. As a result, on the request of an Ukrainian diaspora organization, an international committee consisting of world class lawyers, led by George Sandberg, was formed. It examined the evidence and supported this decision by a majority of votes. Both committees based their decisions mainly on testimonies of emigrants.
Today we also need eyewitness testimonies. The main terror famine action, which was the confiscation of food during constant searches of individual farmsteads, was conducted in January 1933 based on oral orders on all levels of government, from the Kremlin to a single village. All other technological elements of this form of reprisal are documented. The effects of this Stalinist action, described in countless documents, are also well known.
Documented terror technology consisted of:
- irregular introduction of the “black plank” regime in the first stage of the terror (November-December 1932);
- constant searches of peasant homesteads for hidden grain, sometimes with penalties in kind, confiscation of meat and potatoes (November-December 1932);
- confiscation of all kinds of food during the searches of homesteads (January 1933);
- propaganda action aimed to stir up hate of starving townspeople towards “kulaks-saboteurs”;
- blockade of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Kuban region of North Caucasian Country;
- ban of the term “famine” even in documents labelled top-secret.
Famine terror took place in a situation of socio-economic crisis and the crisis itself had been a result of economic politics. Defining his politics from 1929 to January 1933 Stalin himself found a clear term for it – “rushing”[1]. In industry this politics meant setting unfeasible growth speed, with reprisals of the ones who lagged behind. In the countryside “rushing” took the form of confiscation of crops. Compulsory deliveries of grain were stopped only next Spring and then the state would help the peasants with widely advertised loans for seeds and food. The “general line of socialist industrialization” was accompanied by increased number of deaths of starvation among peasants whose grain was taken and among townspeople, who were given less bread or were left with no central food provision at all.
In the West an influential movement has emerged, consisting of the so-called “revisionists”, that is researchers who want to clear the USSR history of biased opinions from the Cold War period. In particular they object to calling the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 genocide, which is established in historiography thanks to the works of R. Conquest and G. Meys. In unison with them, Russian scholars claim that the grain was sacrificed to a “holy cause” - the industrialization. They claim that without the “rushing” the USSR would not have been able to withstand the attack of Nazi Germany.
Let us leave to the future generations the answer to the question, whether the death of hundreds of thousands of people in various regions of the USSR, including Ukraine, as a result of compulsory deliveries of grain and selling it abroad, can be considered genocide. We are talking of something different here, of extermination of millions of people organized by the Kremlin under the guise of compulsory deliveries and not in their result. Until the last months of 1932 people in Ukraine, and in other regions, were dying because they were deprived of grain. In November 1932 they started dying because they were deprived of all other food.
Our opponents usually give three arguments which disprove, as they believe, the thesis that Holodomor was a genocide. Firstly, people of all nationalities were dying of starvation in the Ukrainian countryside. Secondly, the Ukrainians were not persecuted because of their nationality. Thirdly, can famine be called genocide when Soviet authorities organized help on a large scale for the people of the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban in 1933?
The argument that people of different nationalities were dying in the Ukrainian countryside is not convincing. It does not answer the question why the number of famine victims in Ukraine and Kuban in 1933 was larger by an order of magnitude than in other regions of the European part of the USSR. The answer is simple: terror was aimed against rural areas of Ukraine in which not only Ukrainians lived. The fact that people of many nationalities were dying is understandable. Terror famine could not be targeted at specific people – it hit in a large area.
Other arguments have to be taken into consideration. Let us first focus on the thesis that the Ukrainians were not persecuted because of their nationality. In the United States congressional committee investigating the Holodomor witnesses were asked the same question: why was Stalin exterminating you? Because we are Ukrainian, they answered. How else could the peasants answer? This was the belief which became prevalent in the Ukrainian diaspora and which also became popular in Ukraine after 1991.
And who was Stalin really exterminating? American researcher of Ukrainian national communism, G. Meys, was the first scholar to say that Stalinist terror in Ukraine was targeted not against people of a certain nationality or a professional group but against the citizens of the Ukrainian State created in the period of the fall of the Russian Empire, which survived its own destruction and was revived as a Soviet state. The idea that Ukrainians were to be destroyed as a political factor and as a social organism and not an ethnic group was presented in Meys' report during the first scientific conference dedicated to the Holodomor organized in Montreal in 1983.[2]
Our opponents say that it is impossible to reconcile the organization of famine-genocide with large scale food-aid for the starving. The fact that such aid was given is unquestionable. Robert Davies and Stefen Wheatcroft published a monograph in 2004, in which they enumerate 35 party-government resolutions regarding giving food-aid to the starving regions of the USSR. The first one is dated February 7 and the last one July 20, 1933. Total aid was 320 thousand tonnes of grain of which 264.7 thousand tonnes were directed to Ukrainian SSR and to Kuban, and 55.3 thousand tonnes to all other regions together[3].
These numbers convinced R. Conquest that the thesis of famine-genocide is incorrect. Davies and Wheatcroft emphasise in an annotation on the jacket of their book, that their line of reasoning “differs from the earlier opinions of numerous historians, including R. Conquest”. Conquest acquainted himself with the book when it was still only in manuscript and his verdict is also located on the jacket, next to the annotation of the authors: “It is indeed an extraordinary contribution to research on such an important problem”. In the book the authors cited a fragment of his letter written in September 2003, after reading the manuscript. In this letter Conquest stated, that Stalin did not organize the famine in 1933 on purpose, although he did nothing to prevent the tragedy[4].
Aid for the starving was advertised as care of the party for the people who were in trouble of their own fault. The technology of terror famine is already known. There is only one thing to add, state aid for the starving peasants. Then, and only then, this form of reprisal might be a deliberate action of the Kremlin!
Indeed, can one imagine that Soviet authorities were constantly hunting a man only because he was Ukrainian? It is also impossible to think that the authorities would kill a man just because he was a peasant. Only one conclusion is possible: the Holodomor occurred as a result of specific circumstances.
During the first communist assault in the years 1918-1920 the Bolsheviks managed to build the basics of command economy. In 1929 Stalin began a new assault. He wanted to realize what Lenin did not manage to: drive dozens of millions of small commodity goods producers into communes. As a result, in the early 1930 a colossal social outburst began to develop. Stalin was forced to give up the communes and restrict himself to artels, that is he allowed the peasants to have allotment gardens. Thinking that the kolkhozniks would make do with the crops from their allotment gardens he began taking practically all of the grain from the countryside. Peasants had no right to get any grain until they carried out the plan of compulsory deliveries, which were, in practice, unlimited. Grain found after the end of the purchase was considered hidden from record or stolen. Peasants did not want to work in the kolkhozes without pay and the state accused them of sabotage. Crisis of the kolkhoz system threatened to bring down the entire economy. In January 1933 the government was forced to change unlimited compulsory deliveries into flat-rate state purchase of grain on the conditions of a tax. This meant, that the state finally recognized the property right of kolkhozes and kolkhozniks to the farm produce. The new law changed the relations between the town and the countryside as radically as the decree introducing the tax in kind in Match 1921. The kolkhozes were shaped into what the living generations remember.
Our colleagues in the West understand the socio-economic causes of famine of 1932-1933 in the USSR, though not all of them, as we have already presented, understand the Stalinist politics of “rushing”. Most of them, however, underestimate the other side of the problem – the national one. For them a starving Ukrainian peasant is just a peasant and not a citizen of the Ukrainian Soviet state. They understand the Soviet Union as a union of lawless republics created by the so-called titular nation. But the USSR became such an entity only after the famine of 1932-1933 and the terror of 1937-1938. Before that the Soviet Union was a union of states.
Richard Pipes, recognized as an expert in Russian history, claims, that national Soviet statehood was a fiction since the very beginning, since a dictatorship with its centre in Moscow was hidden beneath it[5]. One must agree with this statement, but should not limit oneself to it. Within the scope of such an opinion of the Soviet authorities we will be able understand neither the Holodomor, nor the confrontation, destructive for the USSR, of B. Yeltsin and M. Gorbachev in Moscow.
When the sick Lenin was faced with the fact of the creation of a common state by way of “autonomization” of national republics, he introduced fundamental corrections to the constitutional structure. A union of states was created into which entered, “together and on equal terms”, the Russian Federation and all the other independent republics. It was emphasized in the constitutions of the union republics and in the all-union constitution that every republic has a right to leave the Soviet Union (of course the procedure was not given). In such a way Lenin managed to outsmart history and maintain the essential part of the shattered pre-revolution empire in a new Soviet shell.
Soviet statehood is a difficult term both in the original, Russian, sense and in the secondary, national one. Ancillary to the dictatorship of Kremlin leaders, the Soviets had real executive power. Thanks to this power the party of the Bolsheviks was turning into a state structure.
The dual structure of power has to be considered Lenin's ingenious invention. But even it was not safe for the centre, which should be called the Kremlin and not Moscow. Moscow is the capital of Russia, the republic with the most rights. Bolshevik leaders changed the all-Russian Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party into an all-union organ. Although Russia remained the state-building republic, the all-union centre did not aim to identify with it (the constitutional structure of the USSR prevented that) nor to create in Moscow a rival centre of Russian power. The rule “together and on equal terms” which applied when formally independent republics joined the USSR was rejected in the years 1990-1991 as a result of the confrontation between M. S. Gorbachev and B. N. Yeltsin.
What was the danger in the dual structure of power during the transition from Soviet statehood on the Kremlin to national statehood? The danger was both of a primary and secondary character. The secondary danger concerned the actions of various political activists who did not share some of the opinions of the centre or who could, already during the course of action, oppose it. That is why the entire Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine perished in the heat of the reprisals, dozens of thousands of the employees of the apparatus and representatives of national intelligentsia.
The primary danger that explained the reprisals lurked in the very same privileges of the structure of power that the Kremlin secured for itself. In the hands of the Soviets, obviously including the national Soviets, real executive power was focused, which gave the party the nature of a state structure. As long as this power was wielded directly by the Kremlin there was no danger of collapse of the Soviet Union. But if such control seeped by itself into local party structures (in the case of a crisis of central government) the danger of a collapse was becoming real. The greatest threat, according to the Kremlin, was Ukraine – a republic with long-lasting tradition of national (not Soviet!) statehood. This republic neighboured Europe and as far as economic potential was concerned (including workforce) it matched all the other national republics put together.
After the creation of the USSR the Kremlin began developing a campaign of entrenching Soviet control in the non-Russian environment in the national republics. In Ukraine this campaign of entrenching quickly left the framework of a purely bureaucratic undertaking and became a tool for a national revival. After the census of 1926 the Ukrainian leadership insistently applied to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party to incorporate into the republic the neighbouring areas of the Russian Federation, including the Kuban Oblast, where Ukrainians were the majority of the population. These efforts were fruitless. The leadership of the Ukrainian SRR managed, however, to get the permission of the Kremlin to Ukrainize the areas beyond the borders of the republic, where the Ukrainians were the majority of the population,. Shortly, in Kuban Ukrainian language was introduced to administrative offices, schools and mass media. The Kremlin watched theses successes with growing concern. Fully Ukrainized Kuban would have to be incorporated into the Ukrainian SRR and that would increase the already dangerously large Ukrainian workforce in the USSR.
After everything that has been said it is only left to present the proof why the decision made by the Kremlin to confiscate food stock in the Ukrainian countryside in January 1933 was possible. The evidence concerns August 1932.
Historians properly assessed Stalin's habit of resting for a couple of months each year in the resorts of North Caucasus. “Tending the property” in the Kremlin were L. M. Kaganovich (party line) and W. M. Molotov (Soviet line). Taking the highest precautions of secrecy Stalin had to contact them by sending handwritten letters via special agents of State Political Directorate (GPU). When Stalin was in the Kremlin the contact was oral and there were no traces of it left in the documentation of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. This circumstance clearly marks the boundaries between the institutional and personal responsibility for everything that happened in the country. It is clear what can be blamed on the higher collective organ of state party, the Chekists and the whole Politburo of the Central Committee, and what Stalin himself and his closest assistants from these years, L. M. Kaganovich, W. M. Molotov and P. P. Postyshev, can be accused of.
Editor-in-chief of the book “The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-36” O. W. Khlevniuk noticed the following rule: even in secret correspondence Stalin was constructing, for himself and for his people, an unreal view of events, allowing the highest authorities to keep “political face”[6]. In a letter to Kaganovich dated August 11, 1932 he was unusually frank, however, because he wanted to make him the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. Kaganovich was in the middle of a staff combination and that is why he should know its essence and the nature of the urgent matters in Ukraine he would be responsible for.
The essence of Stalin's letter dated August 11, 1932 is contained in two paragraphs:
“The most important now is Ukraine. The matters in Ukraine are going badly. Badly on the party line. They say that in two Ukrainian oblasts (Kiev and Dnitropetrovsk, I believe) about 50 regional committees opposed the idea of compulsory deliveries of grain calling them unrealistic. In other regional committees the matters, they say, are not much better. How could it be so? This is not a party but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. Instead of managing the regions Kosior was manoeuvring between the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party directives and the requests of regional committees and manoeuvred himself into a hopeless position. Badly on the Soviet line. Chubar is no leader. Badly on the GPU line. Redens (Stanislav Redens, GPU head in the Ukrainian SSR until January 1933) can not handle the fight against the counter-revolution in such a large and special republic as Ukraine.
If we do not attempt to repair the situation in Ukraine now, we may lose it. Remember that Piłsudski is not asleep and his agents are much stronger than Redens or Kosior believe. Remember also that in the Communist Party of Ukraine (50 thousand members, ha-ha) there is no lack (yes no lack!) of rotten element, conscious and unconscious Petlurans and finally – Piłsudski's agents. As soon as matters go to worse this element will not hesitate to open a front inside (and outside) the party, against the party. The worst part is that the Ukrainian top brass does not see these dangers. It can no longer be so”[7].
If we examine the situation in the USSR in the second half of 1932 based on Soviet newspapers we will find only reports of successful completion of new constructions of the first Five-Year Plan. The GPU reports to which Stalin refers to in his letter to Kaganovich show a different view – gloomy and ominous. The town was starving, the countryside was starving. Communist-party Soviet apparatus was completely confused or openly rebelled. Dissatisfaction with the actions of the authorities was growing among the rank and file party members.
A crisis that took place 1.5 year before the events described should also be mentioned. In early March 1930 Stalin stopped the collectivisation because of peasant outbreaks. Canadian historian Lynne Viola ascertained that the well-known article titled “Dizzy with Success” was published because of the outbreaks in Ukraine and North Caucasus, which in terms of the number of participants, were well ahead all other regions of the USSR put together[8]. Only one thing should be added to what she wrote: Stalin was especially frightened by outbreaks in the border regions of the Ukrainian SSR at that time. He understood that Ukraine is not just a region like the others but also a republic of high status, one neighbouring with Europe. He expressed that in his letter to Kaganovich from August 11, 1932. After enumerating the undertakings which could lead to a breakthrough in Ukraine he ends thus: “Without these and other similar measures (economic and political strengthening of Ukraine, first the border regions etc.) I repeat – we may lose Ukraine”[9].
The second half of 1932 became, therefore, a moment in which two crises met and compounded – in the socio-economic and the national politics of the Kremlin. According to the documents Stalin was most afraid of a social outbreak in starving Ukraine. Reprisals, which soon began, were aimed at once against Ukrainian peasantry (terror famine) and Ukrainian intelligentsia (individual terror on a mass scale, purges in the cells of the communist party). Severe reprisals were directed not against people of a certain nationality but against the citizens of the Ukrainian State. And it is obvious they were Ukrainian. The point is, that citizens of Ukraine, even Ukraine in the humble guise of a Soviet republic, by their very existence were a threat to the Kremlin criminals who took control of the party and the new empire they created.
When we say, that the state made Ukrainian peasants completely dependant on it by confiscating their food supplies, they demand: show us a document! There is no document, there is no genocide. People who survived the Holodomor say that special brigades were conducting searches in peasants' farmsteads and taking all the food. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of testimonies from different villages create a consistent image. If it is so, the only correct conclusion needs to be drawn: those who were conducting the searches were doing so by order, even when it was not written on paper. But they demand a document...
Well, we can present a written document, but only in a proper context. The story has to begin with the “five ears of corn” law, which was supposed to prevent “waste” of crops.
“Meeting the demands of workers and kolkhozniks” (as it is written in the preamble) the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on August 7, 1932 passed a resolution “On the protection of property of State enterprises, kolkhozes and cooperatives, and the consolidation of socialist property”. For theft of property execution by firing squad was proposed and “in case of mitigating circumstances” imprisonment for a period not less than 10 years[10].
In November 1932 Stalin was delegating special commissions for compulsory deliveries of grain overseen by: W. M. Molotov – to Ukrainian SRR, L. M. Kaganovich – to Kuban. According to the instructions he received, Molotov prepared the text of two resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine dated November 18 and of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR dated November 20, identically named “On measures to strengthen state grain procurements” (final text was signed by Stalin). It included ominous items about punishing the “debtors” in kind – taking the meat and potatoes[11]. Taking advantage of the situation created by terrorist actions of these commissions the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party defined the Ukrainization of North Caucasus as “Petlurian”. In a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated December 14, 1932 it was demanded to “in North Caucasus immediately start using Russian instead of Ukrainian in all Soviet documentation, cooperative organs of the “Ukrainized” regions and in all newspapers and magazines, as Russian would be easier to understand for the population of Kuban, and to prepare the schools to change the language of instruction into Russian before Fall”[12]. In December 1932 the peasants' homesteads were constantly searched for grain. Both the ones being searched and the ones doing the searches got used to it. The searches were led by chekists and conducted by starving members of committees of indigent peasants (they received a certain percentage of the found grain) and by workers sent from towns. Just like the year before in compulsory deliveries the countryside was deprived of almost all of the grain even before the searches.
On January 1, 1933 Stalin sent a telegram to Kharkov requesting deliveries of grain and proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR to “spread the information through rural councils, kolkhozes, kolkhozniks and individual workers, that:
a) all who will of their own accord give back to the state the grain previously stolen and hidden need not be afraid of reprisal;
b) kolkhozniks, kolkhozes and individual workers who insist on hiding the grain stolen and concealed from record will be punished in the most severe ways according to the resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated August 7, 1932.”[13]
The telegram, which consisted of the two items quoted above, seems odd. Stalin never addressed the peasants of any union republic with threats. Furthermore, he knew that there was no grain in Ukraine, because the searches conducted by the chekists gave meagre results. The sense of the document is clear, however, if we confront the two items. The second one is addressed to the ones who ignored the demand stated in the first one, that is the ones who did not give the grain away. And how could one ascertain who did not give the grain away? Only by conducting searches! Stalin's telegram was, therefore, a signal to continue the searches.
The people, who survived the Holodomor were saying that during the searches not only potatoes and meat with pork fat was taken from them, as the resolution about the penalty in kind stated, but all foodstuffs. The telegram, therefore, leaves no doubt as to the identity of the man who gave the signal to begin the reprisal action of confiscating food, the organiser of terror famine.
Stalin's actions need to be analysed together. On a joint meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party on November 27, 1932 he connected the failure of compulsory deliveries of grain not with the politics of issues (which he gave up in January 1933, transferring relations between the state and the kolkhozes to the tax system) but with harmful activity and sabotage in kolkhozes and sovkhozes. “It would be unwise – said the General Secretary – if the communists, assuming that the kolkhozes are the socialist form of management, did not answer with a crushing blow to the attack of these separate kolkhozniks and kolkhozes”[14].
The original reason of the terrorist actions was the striving of the Stalinist group to shift the responsibility for the economic collapse in “socialist construction”, which led to famine in the whole country, off themselves. The “crushing blow” was aimed against the republic, which could use the catastrophic results of “rushing” the economy to leave the USSR. Stalin was afraid that the top brass of the Ukrainian SSR could use the social outburst, maturing among the peasants who were starving for two years in a row. The depriving of all the food was an effective way of thwarting the rebellious potential of the Ukrainian countryside.
Stalin did not restrict himself to confiscation of food. On January 22, 1933 he wrote, by his own hand (the manuscript survived) the directive of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR beginning with the words: “Information has reached the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Sovnarkom, that peasants are leaving Kuban and Ukraine in search for food and going to Central Black Earth Region, to Volga, to Moscow Oblast, Western Oblast, Belarus”. The Kremlin demanded a blockade of the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban from the leadership of the neighbouring regions[15].
The people who survived the Holodomor were convinced that the government was exterminating people because of their ethnicity. Reality was more complex: the government was at the same time exterminating and saving the Ukrainian peasants. Pavel Postyshev, who arrived in Ukraine in the end of January 1933 with dictatorial letters of authority, had two tasks: to organize the Spring sowing and to liquidate the “nationalistic aberration” in the party and the Soviet apparatus. In February he delivered the grain supply of the Ukrainian SSR to feed the starving. He was helping only those who could work. That is how peasants were taught to work in a kolkhoz. At the same time Postyshev attacked the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and the nonparty intelligentsia. 74 849 people were arrested by the chekists in 1932 and 124 463 in 1933[16]. Following the Holodomor and mass reprisals of 1937-1938 the republic lost its rebellious potential (with the exception of Western oblasts, which were incorporated into the USSR in 1939).
The politicians who threw Ukraine into the spiral of terrifying reprisals are no more. The totalitarian state, the leadership of which was responsible for the Holodomor, also no longer exists. We expect the international community to recognize this crime as genocide. Above all we expect that from the Russian Federation, which also lost millions of human lives in the years of Stalin's rule.
[1] Сталин И. Сочинения. – vol. 13. – p.183-184.
[2] Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933. – Edmonton, 1986. – p.12.
[3] Davies R.W., Wheatcroft Stephen G. The Years of Hunger. Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. – Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. – p 481-484.
[4] Ibidem, p. 441.
[5] Пайпс Ричард. Россия при большевиках. – М., 1997. – p.184.
[6] Сталин и Каганович. Переписка. 1931–1936 гг. – М., 2001. – p.18.
[7] Ibidem, p. 273-274.
[8] Lynne Viola. Peasant rebels under Stalin. – New York, Oxford, 1996. – p. 138-140.
[9] Сталин и Каганович. Переписка. 1931–1936 гг. – p. 274.
[10] Ibidem, vol. 3, p. 453-454.
[11] Голод 1932–1933 років на Україні: очима істориків, мовою документів. – К., 1990. – p.254; Колективізація і голод на Україні. 1929–1933. – К., 1992. – p.549.
>[12] Ibidem, p. 293-294.
[13] Голод 1932–1933 років на Україні: очима істориків, мовою документів. – p. 308.
[14] Трагедия советской деревни. – vol. 3. – p.559.
[15] Ibidem, pp. 32, 635.
[16] Нікольський В.М. Репресивна діяльність органів державної безпеки СРСР в Україні (кінець 1920‑х – 1950‑ті рр.). – Донецьк, 2003. – p. 119.
prof. Stanisław Kulczycki (born 1937) – Ukrainian historian, deputy director of the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.