The costs of reforms aimed at accelerating industrial development turned out to be much greater than could be expected at first, and were expressed not only in the recession of the economy (GDP per capita in 1932, according to Angus Madison's calculations, was lower than in 1930), but also in increased mortality due to malnutrition. True, any estimates of the number of deaths as a result of this famine must be handled with great caution, since there are no direct sources for their calculation and there was not, which led to the appearance of the most fantastic figures in the media.

We conducted a rigorous analysis of various sources, including the 1937 census, and obtained an estimate of excess mortality in 1932–1933 in the USSR in the amount of 4.2–4.3 million people, of which 1.9 million occurred in Ukraine, approximately 1 million - to the KazASSR, the rest was taken over by Russia, primarily the North Caucasus and the Volga region, as well as the Central and Central Black Earth regions, the Urals and Siberia.

Speaking about the causes of increased mortality in 1932-1933, we must first of all say about what actually did not happen.

First. There was no increase in the amount of grain alienated by the state from collective farms and individual farmers. The grain procurement plan for 1932 and the volume of grain actually collected by the state were radically less than in the previous and subsequent years of the decade. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks lowered the grain procurement plan by a decree of May 6, 1932, which allowed collective farms and peasants to sell grain at free market prices.

In order to stimulate the growth of grain production, this decree reduced the grain procurement plan from 22.4 million tons (the quota of 1931) to 18.1 million, which is only a little more than a quarter of the forecasted harvest. Therefore, it is impossible to say that the collective farmers were "raked out the last". As partial compensation, the state increased the plan for state farms from 1.7 million tons to 2.5 million, and the total grain procurement plan amounted to 20.6 million tons. Since the preliminary plan, drawn up by the People's Commissariat of Trade in December 1931, established a grain procurement plan in the amount of 29.5 million tons, the resolution of May 6 actually reduced it by 30%. Subsequent decrees also reduced plans for the procurement of other agricultural products.

In fact, the total volume of grain alienation from the countryside through all channels (harvesting, purchases at market prices, the collective farm market) decreased in 1932-1933 by about 20% compared with previous years. At the same time, from the beginning of the five-year plan, more than 10 million former residents of the village poured into industrial construction sites and cities, and the number of citizens who received food on cards increased from 26 million in 1930 to 40 million in 1932. Bread norms were steadily declining, and often bread was not given out completely on the cards. In the autumn of 1932, the norms for Kyiv workers were cut from 2 to 1.5 pounds, and the bread rations of employees from 1 to 0.5 pounds (200 g). This is not much more than the norms of besieged Leningrad.

The fact that the famine did not arise as a result of the redistribution of grain resources from the village to the city is also evidenced by the fact that not only rural

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

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

Processions will be held around the world in memory of the millions of victims. At the same time, the Light a Candle campaign, which has become traditional, will start at 16:00 Kyiv time. At 19:32, the country will honor the victims with a minute of silence.

Reminiscent of the most egregious, terrible and iconic facts of the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

NUMBER OF DEAD

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

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

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

HARVEST FORCED AND SHOT

The organizers and perpetrators of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 forcibly took from the villagers crops and livestock that would help them survive. The artificially created famine was supported by the blockade, as well as the isolation of the distressed territories. In particular, the roads along which the villagers tried to get to the cities were blocked, and paramilitaries surrounded the settlements, detained or shot everyone who tried to escape from starvation.

GEOGRAPHY OF HUNGER

Most Ukrainians died in modern Kharkov, Kiev, Poltava, Sumy, Cherkasy, Dnepropetrovsk, Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, Chernihiv, Odessa regions and in Moldova, which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR.

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

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

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

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

According to Stanislav Kulchitsky, in the autumn of 1932 there were almost 25,000 collective farms in Ukraine, to which the authorities put forward inflated grain procurement plans. Despite this, 1,500 collective farms managed to fulfill these plans and did not fall under punitive sanctions, so there was no deadly famine in their territories.

NATURAL PENALTIES

The peasants, who did not fit into the grain procurement plans and owed grain to the state, were confiscated any food. At the same time, it was not counted as payment of a debt, but was only a punitive measure. The policy of fines in kind, according to the idea of ​​the Soviet regime, was to force the peasants to hand over to the state the grain supposedly hidden from it, which in fact was not.

At first, the punitive organs were allowed to select only meat, lard and potatoes. Subsequently, they also took up other long-term storage products.

Fyodor Kovalenko from the village of Lyutenka, Gadyachsky district, Poltava region, said: “In November and December 1932, they took all the grain, potatoes, everything, even beans, and everything that was in the attic. Such small ones were dried pears, apples, cherries - everything was taken away.

In December 1932, the second general secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, Stanislav Kosior, reported to Stalin: “The use of fines in kind gives the greatest result. Now the collective farmer and even the one-owner hold on tight to the cow and the pig.”

In the Volga region and the North Caucasus fines in kind were applied only occasionally.

LAW “ON FIVE SPIKES”

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

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

The punitive document was given the popular name “the law of five spikelets”: in fact, everyone who, without permission, gathered several spikelets of wheat on a collective farm field without permission, was guilty of embezzlement of state property.

During the first year of the new law, 150,000 people were convicted. The law was in force until 1947, but the peak of its application fell precisely on 1932-33.

“BLACK BOARDS”

In the 1920s and 30s, newspapers regularly published lists of districts, villages, collective farms, enterprises, or even individuals who did not fulfill their food procurement plans. lists of honor), various fines and sanctions were applied, including direct repressions against entire labor collectives.

It should be noted that the hit of the village on such “boards” during the Holodomor actually meant a sentence for its inhabitants.

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

The system of "black boards", in addition to Ukraine, also operated in the Kuban, the Volga region, the Don region, Kazakhstan - territories where many Ukrainians lived.

CANNIBALISM

Witnesses of the Holodomor talk about cases when people driven to despair ate the bodies of their own or neighbor's dead children.

“This cannibalism reached its limit when the Soviet government … began to print posters with this warning: “Eating your own children is barbaric,” write Hungarian researchers Agnes Vardy and Stephen Vardy of Ducane University.

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

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

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

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

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

FIRST MENTION IN THE PRESS

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

Mugeridge showed the mass death of peasants, but did not voice specific figures. After his first article, the Soviet authorities forbade foreign journalists to travel to territories where the population suffered from hunger.

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

GENOCIDE RECOGNITION

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

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

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

Australia, Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, Ecuador, Estonia, Spain, Italy, Canada, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Slovakia, USA, Hungary, Czech Republic, Chile, as well as the Vatican as a separate state.

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

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

Based on the materials of the BBC, "League", the Embassy of Ukraine in Canada.

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

The masses of the working population of tsarist Russia were in a state of constant "people's disease" - malnutrition. The slightest crop failure turned this malnutrition into famine. In 1908, even the tsarist Ministry of the Interior was forced to admit in one of its reports that the threat of starvation is every year a very possible fate for a significant number of farmers in Russia.

Hunger had a detrimental effect on the health of the population. As a result of hunger strikes, morbidity sharply increased; according to the data of 1892-1913, the incidence of typhus and scurvy in the famine years increased by 3-4 times, and in 1907 the incidence of scurvy increased by 528% compared to 1905.

Even in the "normal" years, the situation was difficult. This is evidenced by the very low level of the officially established "physiological minimum" - 12 pounds of bread with potatoes per year. In 1906, this level of consumption was registered in 235 counties with a population of 44.4 million. The indignation of the peasants was no longer what they had to eat bread with quinoa and fur bread (with chaff, from unweaned grain), but the fact that “there was no white bread on the nipple” - a baby.

Until 1917, almost all of the surplus product was mercilessly confiscated from the village (“we are not enough to eat, but we will take it out”). All more or less developed countries that produced less than 500 kg of grain per capita imported grain. In the record-breaking year 1913, Russia had 471 kg of grain per capita - and at the same time exported a lot of grain - due to the restriction of domestic consumption, and specifically of peasants. Even in 1911, in the year of an exceptionally severe famine, 53.4% ​​of all grain was exported - more relatively, and all the more absolutely, than in the years of the previous five-year period.

History of famine coverage 1932–1933

The first in the West to publish a report on the famine in the USSR was the English journalist M. Muggeridge. In the last ten days of March 1933, in the Manchester Guardian newspaper, he spoke about his impressions of a trip to Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Muggeridge described terrible scenes of famine among the rural population, testified to the mass death of peasants, but did not give specific figures.

On March 31, 1933, the Manchester Guardian published a rebuttal titled "The Russians are starving but not starving." It was written by the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, W. Duranty, an Englishman by birth and citizenship, who managed to interview Stalin.

In August 1933, the New York Herald Tribune published an article by Ralph Barnes claiming that a million people died of starvation.

Further, the figure grew by leaps and bounds. Duranty hinted in The New York Times that the death toll was at least 2 million. A day later, in the same newspaper, F. Burchell reported 4 million deaths. On February 8, 1935, the Chicago American wrote: "6 million people starved to death in the Soviet Union."

The next stage of awakening the problem was carried out after the creation by the US Congress of a special commission to study the facts of famine in Ukraine, whose executive director was James Mace. The commission concluded that these victims were "starved to death by man-made famine" and "Stalin and his entourage committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933." .

During the Cold War, the Americans funded programs to study the Ukrainian famine not only out of historical curiosity, the “Holodomor” was a weapon in the ideological war against the USSR, “working” both on the social (“totalitarian state” and “inefficient economy”) and national field (“ Russian imperialism”, “oppression of freedom-loving peoples”). The US Congress also showed increased interest in the issue, even creating in 1986 a special commission to investigate this “communist holocaust” (we will talk about the “Ukrainian Holocaust” later).

"Objectivity" of biased researchers of the "Holodomor"

From the very beginning, the Holodomor theme began to be falsified for the sake of ideology. For example, in February 1935, the Chicago American and New York Evening Journal newspapers began to publish articles by T. Walker, a “famous journalist, traveler and researcher of Russia”, who allegedly “spent several years traveling around the Union of Soviet Russia”. Articles devoted to the famine that allegedly raged on the territory of Ukraine in 1934 were accompanied by a large number of photographs allegedly taken by him in "the most unfavorable and dangerous circumstances." It soon became clear that Walker's report was fake from start to finish.

A significant role in exposing Walker belongs to the American magazine The Nation and its Moscow correspondent Lewis Fisher. As Fischer was able to learn, Walker did not set foot on Ukrainian soil at all, since, having received a transit visa in September 1934 (and not in the spring, as he claimed), he crossed the Soviet border in October, spent several days in Moscow, took a train , going to Manchuria, and left the territory of the USSR. In the six days that passed between his arrival in Moscow and his departure for Manchuria, it was physically impossible to visit all the places that he described in his publications.

And as the American journalist James Casey managed to prove, all of Walker's photographs had nothing to do with Ukraine in the 1930s at all. Most of them were made in Western Europe during the First World War and the 1920s. This, in particular, applies to two famous photographic "evidence" of the Ukrainian "Holodomor", and to this day cited as documentary evidence - photographs of a "frog child" and a "Ukrainian peasant" bending over his horse.

The most famous falsifier of the Holodomor is the Englishman R. Conquest. Conquest gained his fame thanks to the books The Great Terror (1969), published in the United States by order of the CIA, and The Harvest of Sorrow (1966). Among the sources from which Conquest borrowed arguments about the "holodomor" and repressions in the USSR were the works of art by V. Astafiev, B. Mozhaev and V. Grossman, Ukrainian collaborators H. Kostyuk, D. Soloviev.

Foreign scientists-Sovietologists A. Getty, G. Hertle, O. Arin, A. Dallin and other specialists, investigating the technology of fabricating information about the famine in Ukraine by representatives of the US Congress Commission, found that 80% of the testimonies pass with the mark “Anonymous Zhinka”, “Friends Anonymously”, “Anonymous Person”, “Mary No.”, etc. Canadian journalist Douglas Tottle, in Fake, Famine, and Fascism: The Myth of the Ukrainian Genocide from Hitler to Harvard, published in 1987, argued that Conquest used frightening photographs of hungry children from the chronicle of World War I and the 1921 famine in his book. . .

Meanwhile, V. Yushchenko, having become president of Ukraine, was not slow to award R. Conquest with the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, 5th degree, for "giving respect to international spilnoti until the "Holodomor" of 1932–1933 was declared a fatal act of genocide against the Ukrainian people" .

And now I will demonstrate the “objectivity” of the work of the US Congress Commission on the “Holodomor” using the following example. In its conclusion, it is indicated that Moscow's policy was not directly aimed at the destruction of any "ethnic or racial group as such." Nevertheless, it concludes here: "Based on the foregoing, the Commission considers it probable that elements of genocide ... took place."

Numerous examples of fraud in writing politically biased articles on the Holodomor are cited by M. Tauger. For example, he writes that Werst indicates that the procurement plan for 1932 was increased by as much as 32% compared to 1931. But in the source cited by him, in almost the same sentence, it is noted that the commissar for procurement A.I. Mikoyan set a high procurement plan at the beginning of 1932 at 29.5 million tons, but then in the spring of 1932 this plan was reduced to million tons. However, Uverst stubbornly points out that Molotov refused to lower the grain procurement plan.

When the falsifiers talk about the export of grain in 1933, they forget to point out that only 220 thousand tons of grain were exported during the actual famine, which was less than 1% of the harvest, and the rest was exported by the end of 1933, when the famine was already over.

One of the methods of struggle on this ideological front is silence. Take, for example, the World Encyclopedia Wikipedia. There, the principle of neutrality is declared the main principle of the presentation of the material. However, in reality, there is no neutrality on the topic of the Holodomor. For example, along with the article “Famine in the USSR 1932–1933.” Wikipedia even has a special article "Holodomor in Ukraine". However, in the same Russian-language Wikipedia there is not a single (!) work by M. Tauger or any other historian who today expresses a different point of view on the “Holodomor”.

Interestingly, although M. Tauger himself announced that he was writing a book about the Holodomor back in 2001, it has not yet been published, although Tauger has already written more than 5 large articles on this topic. A very strange phenomenon, especially considering that usually in the West the publication of finished books is a very fast process. I think it's all for nothing.

"Holodomor" - a nationalist project

Particularly heated debates are taking place in Ukraine, where liberals are doing everything possible to establish a point of view on the famine of 1932-1933. like the famine.

In the textbooks of the modern history of Ukraine, published after 1991, the theme of the famine of 1932-1933. occupies one of the leading positions. No wonder, because this is the cornerstone in the now fashionable theories about the "systemic" destruction of ethnic Ukrainians in the period from 1917 to 1991. (Not the only one, however. And the Chernobyl disaster, and the Second World War, and even the all-Union population censuses, according to current Ukrainian historians, served mainly for the Russification of the “native land”).

The theme of "Holodomor" is very important for Ukrainian nationalism, because it allows you to organically combine the two main vectors of this ideology, Russophobia and anti-communism. An indirect consequence of such a position is the indulgence of the most radical and vulgar forms of Ukrainian nationalism, which develops into outright national chauvinism, as a result of the actual postulation of the “desire for freedom” as a property inherent exclusively to the Ukrainian people.

On November 28, 2002, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted for a draft Resolution (registration N 2432 of November 21, 2002) "On holding parliamentary hearings in memory of the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-33" condemning the policy of genocide, which was carried out at the state level by the leaders of the totalitarian Soviet regime against citizens of Ukraine, the national spirit, mentality and genetic fund of the Ukrainian people. It was decided to hold a special meeting of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in May 2003. 308 deputies voted "for" and 56 deputies voted "against" (communist faction) out of a total of 423 deputies.

The point of view of Ukrainian nationalists has received some recognition at the international level. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Mission to the UN prepared a draft Resolution of the 58th session of the UN General Assembly condemning the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. The UN General Assembly adopted the “Joint Statement of the Delegations of Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guatemala, Georgia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Canada, Qatar, Mongolia, Nauru, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Republic of Moldova, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia Arabia, Syrian Arab Republic, United States of America, Sudan, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, Jamaica on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Holodomor - the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine" (Russian version of document A/C.3/58/9 of the Third Committee), with the delegations of Argentina, Iran, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Peru, the Republic of Korea, South Africa, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan later joining the statement (A/C.3/58/9/Add.1) : “In the Soviet Union, millions of men, women and children fell victim to the brutal actions and policies of the totalitarian regime. Great Famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine (Holodomor) which claimed 7-10 million innocent lives and is a national tragedy of the Ukrainian people... Celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Ukrainian tragedy, we will honor the memory of the millions of Russians, Kazakhs and representatives of other nations who died of starvation in the Volga region, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and in other parts of the former Soviet Union." What is most striking is the Russian signature on the document.

In 2003, Vasily Pikhorovich published an article “On the Causes and Consequences of the Famine of 1932–1933. in Ukraine”, where he writes: “Allegations that the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was a planned action aimed at the destruction of part of the population are devoid of all factual grounds and are one of the tricks of anti-communist propaganda designed to divert the attention of the population from that genocide, which today is carried out by capital on the territory of the countries of defeated socialism.

When the Holodomor is equated with the Holocaust and it is claimed that the world has never known anything like it, this statement is absolutely groundless. Famine during the formation of capitalism existed in Europe, and in England and the United States. But what about the colonies, where the responsibility for the famine already clearly lies with the mother country?

Attention is drawn to the use of double standards by manipulators. On the one hand, the "holodomor" in the USSR is irrevocably condemned. On the other hand, something is not heard of the liberals' incantations demanding that the British repent of the famine of the Irish or Indians. Or are these nations not related to people?

After all, during the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851, Irish nationalist literature blamed the British for this and blamed them, just as Ukrainian nationalists blame the Russian people for the "Holodomor".

Let's take India. In India, in 1866, 7.5 million people died, after 3 years, more than 1.5 million people died in the Rajputani province alone. In Bengal, due to a severe drought and crop failure in 1873-1874, about 15 million people were on the verge of death. About 5 million people of Madras, Bombay, Mysore were starving in 1877-1878. In 1900, famine again in India, as a result of which 1 million people die. The great democrats, the British, also allowed the famine of 1943 in Bengal, even stronger than in 1932-1933 in the USSR, and no one scolds them. The famine of 1943 in Bengal was also caused by a severe crop failure.

Few people know that in 1931-1932, the French colonialists forced Nigerians to pay high taxes, despite the low harvest, which caused a famine in Nigeria worse than the 1933 famine in the USSR.

If, however, one takes the point of view of the manipulators of the "Holodomor", then the Russian people should make claims to Georgia (Stalin was a Georgian by nationality) and Israel (there were many Jews in power in the USSR).

Therefore, we can agree with E. Bezrodny - all these speculations on the topic of “death by the guards of Ukraine” are elementary political speculation by Ukrainian nationalist falsifiers, since the famine was by no means only in Ukraine. The myth of the “Holodomor” is an invention of manipulators of consciousness.

And how many were the victims?

The issue of the number of victims has become the scene of a manipulative struggle, especially in Ukraine. The essence of the manipulations is to: 1) increase as much as possible the number of "victims of Stalinism", denigrating socialism and Stalin in particular; 2) declare Ukraine a "zone of genocide" in order to receive some kind of compensation from Russia or the world community.

The question about the millions who died from the "holodomor" in Ukraine, constantly scrolled by Ukrainian nationalists, with the mention of mind-boggling figures, makes it urgent to answer the question: how many victims of the famine were there anyway? Therefore, before starting an analysis of the mythology associated with the "Holodomor", I will have to analyze the available data on the number of deaths. I hope that the clarification of this issue will make it possible to understand whether the famine was man-made or not.

In general, the question of the number of victims of the famine of 1932-1933. in Ukraine and the USSR is very complicated - there are no exact data here and, it seems, is not expected. The historian Soldatenko generally believes that not only counting the number of victims, but also a more or less accurate assessment of this is impossible. He's writing. “The number of victims (demographic losses), bitter as it may seem, to establish at least approximately, even with an acceptable error (although this sounds cynical, blasphemous, but such is the source base), let’s say a hundred thousand, is unrealistic.”

An article posted on the pages of the online magazine "Demoscope" provides a table of estimates of the number of victims of the Holodomor. In general, opinions on the number of victims differ sharply: figures vary from several hundred thousand to 8 million. Thus, the figure of 7-10 million people appears in the Joint Statement adopted by the UN General Assembly. Conquest, in his 1969 book, reports that those who died of starvation in the USSR in the period 1932–1933 were 5–6 million people, half of them were residents of Ukraine.

Now many liberal democrats mention the figure of 7-8 million peasants in the USSR, who allegedly died from the famine of 1932-1933. Interestingly, it is this figure (if exactly - 7,910,000 people) that is found in the propaganda leaflet of series 1543 by Dr. Goebbels, dropped in October 1941 on Soviet positions. Quite a strange coincidence. It is interesting that M. Tauger, the best American specialist on the famine of 1932-1933, considers the figure of victims of 7-8 million people to be exaggerated.

According to the estimates of the OGPU (true, according to the defector Orlov), which prepared a report intended for Stalin, the number of people who died of starvation was 3.3–3.5 million people. In the textbook on the history of Russia, edited by Sakharov, the total number of famine victims is also defined as 3 million people. It also states that 1.5 million people died of starvation in Ukraine.

The unknown author continues. “Well, okay, let's say it was a very long time ago, and scientists can be wrong. But there are much more recent events with which these, so to speak, "hypotheses" can be compared. It is reliably known that every fifth Belarusian died during the war, and no one in Belarus needs to be explained that this took place, that is, the percentage scale of the tragedy during the so-called “Holodomor” should have been about the same. There must be extinct villages and entire districts of such a size that there would be no way to hide them ... Simultaneous mass graves as a result of famine would be easily distinguishable (graves sag) and would be found immediately. Moreover, all of Ukraine ended up in the hands of the Germans 10 years later, would Goebbels really have missed such an incredible chance, would not have carried out a mass opening of the graves of the “Bolshevik genocide”, because it was difficult to imagine a better chance to attract Ukrainians to his side. But it is known that the vast majority of Ukrainians offered fierce resistance to the invaders, the only exception was Bandera, but it was during the Holodomor that they lived not in the USSR, but in Poland! By the way, the Ukrainians, if they survived such a famine, would not have to explain anything. Instead, the Germans used other methods of dialogue with the population, such as the massacre at Babi Yar. They simply had absolutely nothing to say about the Holodomor.”

V. Pikhorovich considers the most reliable estimates of the Russian publicist S. G. Kara-Murza, according to which "in 1933, about 640 thousand people died of starvation." A close figure is also called by another author “Communist. ru" candidate of theology and candidate of philosophical sciences Evgraf Duluman. According to his calculations, “600,000 people died of famine in Ukraine in 1933,” although he admits that he is wrong by a factor of 2–3.

G. Tkachenko also takes Zemskov's figures as a basis and believes that the victims of the famine were 640–650 thousand people, and not 9-10 million, and even more so 15 million, as the "independent" media broadcast about it.

What happened?

What happened in 1932? Let me remind you that the famine of 1932-1933 was preceded by a number of important events. Cold and snowless winters in Ukraine repeated two years in a row. They ended with "almost complete destruction of winter crops." Then came the bad harvest of 1931.

The 1932 sowing campaign was carried out exceptionally poorly. According to various estimates, the sown area in 1932 decreased by 14–25% compared to 1931. M. Tauger gives a figure of undersowing of 9%. In addition, the fields were sown with less grain per hectare than was required. In some cases, the amount of undersown grain per hectare reached 40%. The sowing campaign went on for an unprecedentedly long time - with an average duration of about a week in 1932 in the North Caucasus, it lasted 35–40 days.

Much is said about the fact that the government of the USSR allegedly forcibly raked the grain from the peasants clean. However, this was not the case at all. When information came from the field about the poor conduct of spring field work, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by a decree of May 6, 1932, reduced the procurement plan. The procurement plan was approved for collective farms and individual farmers (the USSR as a whole) at 18.5 million, i.e., 10% lower. At the same time, grain procurement plans for state farms were raised from 1.7 to 2.5 million tons. The Central Committee not only reduced the procurement plan, but also allowed collective farms and peasants to trade grain on the market based on market prices. Many even thought that the decree of May 6 meant the introduction of a new NEP, since it allowed free trade.

Then for Ukraine, by the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of July 6, 1932, the grain procurement plan from the 1932 harvest was set at 356 million poods (5.7 million tons). On October 22, 1932, the procurement plan was reduced by another 70 million poods. In November 1932, when it became clear that the harvest was very low, the procurement plan was reduced again. For example, for the North Caucasus, the plan was reduced from 2.18 million tons to 1.55 million tons. On January 14, 1933, the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Ukraine adopted a resolution in which it once again reduced the plan - by 29.4 million pounds (0.47 million tons). After the official completion of procurement on February 5, 1933, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (6) of Ukraine, S.V. Kosior, in his report indicated that the total plan for collective farms and individual farmers was reduced from 356 million pounds (5.7 million tons) to 218 million poods (3.5 million tons). This is indirectly confirmed by the chairman of the Council for the Study of the Productive Forces of Ukraine A. G. Shlikhter in his speech at the 17th Congress of the CPSU (b),.

Thus, the original grain procurement plan for the USSR by January 1933 "was reduced by 17% to 17.045 million tons", . In total, from the harvest of 1932, until July 1, 1933, the state “took” no more than 248 million poods (4 million tons) of grain from Ukrainian peasants.

To obtain bread from the peasants in 1932, the government used several methods, such as contracts with producers, market exchanges and non-market measures, which were actually called the term "preparations". Proponents of the hypothesis that the peasants' bread was raked clean forget an important psychological moment. They forget that the peasants are not fools and would not allow everything to be raked clean from them, so that there would not be left for food and for sowing, if the remaining norm were lower than the starvation norm. They already had the experience of the famine of 1920, the experience of working with food detachments. Procurers would simply be killed, as the peasants did in 1918, when the food detachments tried to take more than the starvation norm. Therefore, it is impossible to rake out everything - they simply would not be given.

However, it is not necessary to understand the matter in such a way that everything was done without errors. As always in Rus', local excesses were a ubiquitous phenomenon.

The situation of grain collection can be judged from the minutes of the meeting of the Regional Executive Committee dated 11/18/1932 "On measures to strengthen grain procurement in the region." Due to the fact that the term for the completion of grain procurements ended on December 1, 1932, the RIK decided: “Village councils to organize the seizure of stolen goods from individual collective farmers and individual farms (here it is, confirmation of total theft. - Auth.) in the collective farms of bread. First of all, the seizure should be carried out from idlers, grabbers and a declassed element with a small number of workdays ... Impose a fine on the Jewish collective farm. K. Liebknecht on the additional delivery of meat to the state.

When collecting food, according to eyewitnesses, local performers allowed excesses - they took all the products. A. Kolpakidi and E. Prudnikova write in the book about Stalin "Double Conspiracy". “Sholokhov told how the harvesting of cattle on the Don looked like. “There was a uniform war on the farms - the village performers and others who came for cows were beaten with anything, they were beaten mainly by women and children (teenagers), the collective farmers themselves rarely got involved, and where they got involved, it ended in murder.” As for grain, in July 1932 grain procurements amounted to only 55% of the already underestimated plan. Now the collective farms have declared a “grain strike”, refusing to hand over grain at extremely low purchase prices, in fact for nothing, the Kaganovich method was widely spread, according to which villages and villages that did not pay taxes were “forbidden to sell their products”.

The secret decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of December 14, 1932 "On grain procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Western Region", signed by V. Molotov and I. Stalin, determined exactly how to punish "organizers of sabotage of grain procurements" (including those who had a party card) - expulsion, arrest, imprisonment in a concentration camp for a long time, execution, - the decision "suggested" the Central Committee of the Communist Party (6)U and the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine "to pay serious attention to the correct conduct of Ukrainization, to eliminate to carry it out mechanically, to expel Petliura and other bourgeois-nationalist elements from party and Soviet organizations, to carefully select and educate Ukrainian Bolshevik cadres, to ensure systematic party leadership and control over the implementation of Ukrainization.

There was also enough idiocy on the ground. Individual farmers were especially reluctant to hand over grain, so local leaders asked for permission to carry out threshing jointly "under the control of the Council." The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine prescribed fines in kind for individual farmers in the form of establishing additional tasks for meat procurement in the amount of a 15-month norm. Is it any wonder that cows and oxen were slaughtered?

The plans went down "by districts". Fulfilled - well done, did not fulfill - they can shoot. In the region, the overwhelming majority of farms did NOT Fulfill the plan. Question: where will they go to "collect interest"? Naturally, anywhere. And they will rake it to the skin. Part of the overplanned procurements were superimposed on well-functioning collective farms. However, on January 19, 1933, overplanned preparations were prohibited by the decision of the Central Committee of the Party.

Directives about how many “kulaks” and “sub-kulakists” were in which province and how to deal with them were sent from Moscow through the OGPU, and not through the party line. If we recall that at that time the NKVD (or rather, Yagoda) actually ruled the country and that a conspiracy in the NKVD was later revealed, then the manner in which collectivization was carried out could well be designed to create conditions for a social explosion.

“Because of the shameful failure of the grain harvesting campaign in some regions of Ukraine, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the Party of Ukraine orders the local party and leading bodies to put an end to grain sabotage, which was organized by counter-revolutionary and kulak elements. It is necessary to stigmatize those communists who led this sabotage and completely eliminate the passive attitude towards it on the part of some party organizations. The Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee jointly decided to take note of all those areas in which criminal sabotage was carried out, and apply the following penalties to them:

Suspend in these areas all deliveries of goods of state trade and the cooperative network.

Close all state and cooperative outlets. Remove all available goods;

Prohibit the sale of basic types of foodstuffs previously managed by collective farms and private owners;

Suspend all loans to these areas and immediately cancel previously issued loans;

Carefully analyze the personal files of leading and economic organizations in order to identify hostile elements;

To carry out similar work on the collective farms in order to identify all the hostile elements who took part in the sabotage.

The decree provided for the compilation of black lists of those villages that were found guilty of sabotage and sabotage. Initially, these lists included 6 villages, by December 15, 1932, it included 88 districts out of 358 into which Ukraine was divided.

Here is just one example.

"Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and the Central Committee of the CP (b) U on blackboarding villages that maliciously sabotage grain procurements"

"The Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee decide:

For the obvious disruption of the grain procurement plan and the malicious sabotage organized by the kulak and counter-revolutionary elements, blacklist the following villages: Verbka, p. Gavrilovka, Dnepropetrovsk region with. Lutenki, p. Stone Streams, Kharkiv region, with. Holy Trinity, p. Sands, Odessa region.

In relation to these villages, the following activities should be carried out:

1. An immediate cessation of the supply of goods, a complete cessation of cooperative and state trade on the spot and the removal of all available goods from the relevant cooperative and state shops.

2. A complete cessation of collective-farm trade both for collective farms, collective farmers, and for individual farmers.

3. Termination of all kinds of lending, early collection of loans and other financial obligations.

Regional authorities additionally added 380 collective farms and 51 villages to the "black boards" of the lowest level.

Pay attention to the fact that the resolution does not say anything about the forcible seizure of bread. Villages that do not hand over bread are punished mainly economically. Meanwhile, these measures did not help. Enrolling villages on the black list, where trade was limited, had no effect, since the villages were saturated with manufactured goods and everything you needed could be obtained in the regional center.

There are facts that the leaders of the country did not want excesses. So, Molotov corrected zealous procurers. In a letter to the Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party of Ukraine, Khataevich, he writes: “The Bolshevik, after thinking ... must put the satisfaction of the needs of the proletarian state in an extraordinary order. On the other hand, one must not fall into the opposite opportunistic extreme: “take any grain and anywhere, without regard, etc..”

The food situation deteriorated sharply at the end of 1932 and especially in the first half of 1933.

In the autumn of 1932, the food supply rations for even Kyiv workers were reduced from 3 pounds to 1.5 pounds, and for white-collar workers (workers not engaged in manual labor) from 1 to 0.5 pounds.

Therefore, some sources claim that the beginning of the famine refers to the end of the summer of 1932. This is unlikely. As long as there is no snow cover, food can be found in the forests and rivers in the countryside. Yes, food difficulties began as early as 1932. In 44 regions of Ukraine there was a lack of food, famine began, but by the summer everything was more or less normal. Actually, the famine began in the winter at the end of 1932, but it took on a massive character in the spring of 1933. On March 15, Kosior reported to Stalin: “In total, according to the registration of the GPU in Ukraine, 103 districts are covered by famine.” According to the recollections of most eyewitnesses, the famine peaked at the beginning of the spring of 1933, and the end - at the beginning of the summer of 1933.

So, in the winter of 1932/33, a severe famine arose. Contrary to the statements of Ukrainian nationalists, the famine was not only in Ukraine, but practically throughout the USSR. The Soviet scientist V. V. Kondrashin documented that the famine was not only in Ukraine, but also in the Volga region. Western historian Werth also acknowledges that the famine affected many areas outside Ukraine, including Moscow and even Ivanovo.

The whole country was starving, including Moscow. It would not hurt to remember that Transcaucasia was also starving (in Baku, for example, schoolchildren received 70 g of bread a day), the North-East of the European part of the USSR, the Ivanovo region, Kuzbass, the Northern Territory, the Western region, the Far East, the Gorky region were starving , Ural .

Here is one of the documents to prove the fact of the famine in the Urals.

Special communication of the SPO of the OGPU about the difficulties in the Far East and the Ural region. April 3, 1933

Troitsky district of the Ural region. On the collective farm Stalin of the Mikhailovsky Village Council, the corpses of cattle that fell from glanders, flooded with carbolic solution, the collective farmers of the nationalists and Russians are taken away from the cattle burial ground and used for food. On the basis of hardships, sharp negative sentiments are noted among the collective farmers: “Did I think that in the summer I worked until I dropped, skinned, naked, barefoot, so that now I would sit without bread and swell from hunger, because I have seven of them and everyone is sitting and shouting:“ Give bread!“, - but how can mothers endure this? I’m going to lie down under the tractor, I can’t bear this suffering.”

(Chief SPO OGPU Molchanov. Assistant chief SPO OGPU Lyushkov.)

However, the famine had different intensity in different regions of the USSR. This is evidenced at least by the map of mortality rates presented on Wikipedia. In Ukraine, especially high mortality was in the Kiev region, as well as in the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, where the stratum of the Russian population was very high, which speaks against the claim that the government starved only Ukrainians.

But even within the same area, mortality, and hence hunger, had different intensity. Ukrainian emigrants testified that remote villages suffered from hunger more than those that were located closer to the city.

In 1931, the government reduced the rations for many categories of people and excluded entire groups of workers and even entire cities from the food supply system. Even greater restrictions were introduced in 1932. As M. Dolot testifies, “food was distributed to city dwellers according to bread cards in such small quantities that the peasants could not count on their help.”

The fact that the famine also affected the cities is evidenced by the increase in the death rate of the urban population in 1932-1933. So, from January to July 1932, the death rate among the urban population of Kyiv increased by 70%. It grew by a third at that time even in Moscow. According to the Central Administration of National Economic Accounting (TsUNKhU), in 1933, the negative natural increase for the urban population was 374.6 thousand people. In 1933, the total number of deaths in the cities of the RSFSR and in Ukraine was higher than in the more prosperous previous and subsequent years. The reason for this situation is the famine in the cities due to the decrease in supply rates.

In 1932, food shortages severely weakened the workers and forced many of them to leave their jobs in search of food. The famine struck even the Dneprostroy. In many industries, labor turnover exceeded 100% in a few months, and production levels fell to 1928 levels. Workers stood in long lines for bread, often during working hours. Many demands for more supplies coming from regions where there was a high priority industry were left without consequences.

Smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis spread ... The famine even affected workers who performed priority work of super-high importance for the state, and soldiers of the Red Army, since at the end of May 1932 food supplies for the military were reduced by 16%.

It remains to add that in 1933 the situation was even more difficult. Failure to comply even with the above norms has become not an exception, but a rule. Not to mention the workers in the regions of the Holodomor. Note that this is about the places where they were supposed to eat bread collected, as they say, "for genocide."

That is, the cities of the USSR in 1932–1933. also experienced severe food shortages.

Versions about the causes of hunger

Why did the famine break out in the autumn of 1932? The answer to this question cannot be unambiguous. There are several versions about the causes of the Holodomor. I will focus on the main assumptions.

1). The famine was caused artificially due to exorbitantly high procurement plans.

According to the American historian P. Uwiles, the cause of the famine was the procurement policy of the leadership, aimed at seizing collective farm grain. According to the Ukrainian nationalists, Stalin deliberately killed the Ukrainians in order to destroy them - it was an act of genocide of the Ukrainian people.

But is the point of view correct, according to which the mass death of the population of Ukraine from starvation was largely caused by the conscious and purposeful actions of the Soviet leadership, that Stalin and his entourage specially organized a famine in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Lower Povozhye in order to defeat the resistance of the peasants and break nationalist manifestations?

An analysis of the material already cited shows that this is far from being the case, and this is obvious even to Western historians. Not only objective domestic researchers of the famine of 1933 write about the absurdity of the assumption that Stalin wanted to punish the peasants, American researchers who themselves worked in the archives of Russia and Ukraine, in particular M. Tauger, insist on this. He convincingly proves that the famine was not caused artificially. Moreover, Stalin had no intention of causing famine. “If the Soviet leaders wanted to punish the peasants,” writes M. Tauger, “for resisting collectivization, then why did they do it only in 1932, and not earlier. Therefore, most likely it was pressure and compromise. If the Soviet leaders wanted to punish the peasants, why did they allow malnutrition and even death from malnutrition of hundreds of thousands of workers and members of their families, including in Moscow and even in the Red Army, without ensuring its food supply? M. Tauger does not find an intelligible answer to these questions. The decrease in the procurement plan below that in 1931, and then its even greater decrease, indicates, in his opinion, a search for a compromise, and not a game of fines.

To confirm the conclusions of M. Tauger, we will also use the arguments of G. Tkachenko.

“Firstly, the Bolsheviks, and especially Stalin, were pragmatists, and the Holodomor could lead to a mass peasant uprising - it would be impossible to hide its intention, since the party all this time had both supporters of radical depeasantization and supporters of cooperation. And this, in turn, could lead to the removal of Stalin from power. From the point of view of anti-Stalinists, Stalin's main goal was power. It seems to be illogical."

“Secondly, the artificial device of famine would inevitably lead to the death, first of all, of the poor and middle peasants, who were the main support of Soviet power and the driving force in the process of collectivization. It was supposed to be that part of the peasantry on which Soviet power rested. Only positive examples could convince the peasants of the expediency and justification of joining the collective farms, otherwise they would not have given a radical break in their way of life. Therefore, the “Holodomor”, which the apologists of private property repeat with the fanaticism of the priests, would become the most frightening anti-advertising, which would doom the very idea and cause of collectivization, and with it the Soviet government, to defeat. "Holodomor" was thus contrary to common sense. This is indicated by a well-known proverb: why cut the branch on which you sit.

“Thirdly, the Soviet Union was in a capitalist encirclement. The danger of aggression by imperialism (Germany, Japan and other states) was growing. And the Soviet leadership understood this well. In order to effectively resist the aggressor, to maintain the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state, numerous armed forces were required, equipped with the latest weapons and military equipment. The security of the country required huge human reserves, powerful industrial and scientific potential. "Holodomor" would cause compatriots to reject the policy of the party and the Soviet state and would significantly weaken the economic and defense potential of the country.

As for the killing of predominantly Ukrainians, several independent testimonies clearly prove that this did not happen and could not happen.

Firstly, the mortality rate was the same among Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. This is recognized even by Kulchitsky, who, analyzing the statistics of registry offices for 1933, comes to the conclusion that people died not on a national basis, but according to their place of residence.

Secondly, in 1930, 80% of the Donbass miners came from Ukrainian villages. But no one starved these millions of Ukrainian workers.

Thirdly, judging by the mortality map given on Wikipedia, the famine was most pronounced in Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev regions, but it was the inhabitants of Kharkov who were most opposed to forced Ukrainization. That is, it turns out that Stalin played the tune of Ukrainian nationalists.

Finally, if Stalin specifically starved the Ukrainians, then why did he invest huge amounts of money in the development of Ukrainian industry specifically. Remember Dneproges, Kharkov Tractor Plant and other Ukrainian enterprises built during the first five-year plans.

And now let's recall one interesting fact cited by Mukhin and showing whether the peasants were offended by Stalin for allegedly causing the “Holodomor”. During the war, Nazi Germany in the occupied territories formed the so-called "national" units for military operations, both at the front and in the rear against the partisans. And in Estonia, and in Latvia, and in Lithuania, people signed up to "fight the Bolsheviks." Chechens rebelled in the North Caucasus with the support of Field Marshal von Kleist. Don Cossacks signed up for Krasnov. Even in Central Russia, Vlasov formed the ROA. In the West of Ukraine, which did not know the famine of 1933, hundreds of people signed up for SS units. But those regions, the population of which, it would seem, simply had to rebel against the USSR, since "the Stalinists carried out genocide here", for some reason they did not accept the offensive of the "new order". Hitler did not have a single formation formed in Central and Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the cells of the Soviet underground, as well as the partisans of the detachments of Kovpak, Fedorov, Saburov, Naumov and many other units that received assignments from Moscow, not only enjoyed broad support from the population of these regions, but also consisted overwhelmingly of local residents. The Germans began, it was, to remind about the famine, but they quickly came to their senses and removed the famine of 1933 from their propaganda materials - people remembered who did what.

In recent years, the Security Service of Ukraine has been able to collect approximately 5,000 documents that cover the Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine. Employees of the SBU worked for four years in the branch state archive and in regional archives. The result of this work was the declassification of all identified documents without exception. The documents are posted on the website of the SBU. However, there is no evidence of the guilt of Russia and Stalin there either.

2). The cause of the famine was a poor harvest.

To evaluate the version of crop failure as the main cause of the famine, one must know how much grain was harvested in 1932. According to official data, in the USSR the harvest in 1932 amounted to 69.9 million tons, and in 1933 it was even worse - 68.5 million tons.

However, special studies have shown that this figure was overestimated. Schiller, the German agricultural attaché in Moscow in the early 1930s, estimated the harvest in 1932 at 50-55 million tons, in 1933 at 60-65, and in 1934 at 65-70 million tons S. G. Uvitkroft and R. W. Davis in the report "The Crisis in Soviet Agriculture (1931-1933)" questioned the data of official statistics on crops (69.9 million tons - 1932). In their opinion, the real grain harvest in 1932 was lower than in 1930 (67–68 million tons) and 1931 (60.4–60.5 million tons) and amounted to 53–58 million tons.

The crop failure was caused by many factors that fatally combined in 1932-1933. Among these factors were summer droughts with dry winds in some areas, and in others, on the contrary, heavy rains, an invasion of rodents was observed almost everywhere, and plant diseases spread.

In particular, if we talk about adverse climatic conditions, then one of the reasons for the crop failure was bad weather in winter, during sowing and harvesting. The English geographer D. Grigg noted that in Europe as a whole, grain yields are inversely proportional to the amount of rainfall during the grain growing season, since such rains lead to the spread of plant diseases.

In January 1932, an unexpected warming in the southern regions of the USSR led to the beginning of the growth of winter crops, and then the returning winter cold damaged a significant part of the winter crops. In Ukraine, this led to damage to almost 12% of the winter field sown in autumn. The distribution of losses was uneven. For example, in one area 62% of winter crops were damaged.

Quoting Penner (Penner), M. Tauger notes that heavy rains in a number of areas significantly hampered the harvest. Although there were local droughts in some regions, in general the year 1932 was very warm and humid. In some areas, heavy rains damaged grain and reduced crop yields, especially on the right bank of the Volga, in the North Caucasus and in Ukraine.

Examples of the role of bad weather causing terrible crop failures can be found in the history of other countries. For example, in Romania, dry weather in the autumn of 1931 gave way to a winter with very high levels of snowfall, and then a cold and wet spring, which left the plants weak, susceptible to disease, and caused crop failure.

So, in 1932, the grain harvest was very low. "The poor harvest of 1932 made famine inevitable", - wrote M. Tauger. As a result of the shortage of food, both in rural areas and in the cities of the Soviet Union in 1932-1933. hunger came.

Why didn't the center know how much bread was collected locally? It's all about the methods of estimating the yield. Usually it was estimated by eye. The biological method was also often used, which was based on the fact that a random selection of areas of the field was made and threshing was carried out in these areas of the field. Then the future harvest was recalculated for all fields. In February 1932, the Kolkhoztsentr issued an order ordering the collective farms to estimate the future harvest using metering (an estimated collection is made on randomly selected sections of the field and then projected onto all crops). As M. Tauger points out, this method leads to an overestimation of the expected harvest compared to the harvested one by 15 or even 20%. Very often incorrect information was sent to higher authorities and criticized there.

The Politburo's awareness of the state of affairs on the ground was so low that Stalin in January 1933 at the plenum of the Central Committee noted in his speech that adverse weather conditions caused grain losses in the North Caucasus and Ukraine in 1932, but insisted that these losses were less half of those losses that were registered in 1931.

The charter of the collective farm of March 1, 1930 ordered each collective farm to send an annual final report. But only a small part of the collective farms did this. In 1930, 33% of 80,000 collective farms prepared annual reports, in 1931 26.5% of 230,000 collective farms, and in 1932 only 40% of 230,000 collective farms sent annual reports. Collective farms that prepared annual reports most likely performed better than those that did not submit reports. State farms generally had lower yields than collective farms. The yield in them in 1932 was often 2.9 centners per hectare.

So, there was no reliable information from the field for the leaders of the USSR. The well-functioning bureaucratic machine of tsarist Russia was destroyed. During the years of the NEP, it had not yet been restored and practically did not operate. After the famine of 1932-1933, the information system had to be rebuilt. Often leaders do not know basic things. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich that the state should know "how much the peasantry pays it for the services of the MTS."

3). Famine of 1932–1933 and Ukrainian Jews.

In addition to these versions, there is one more. A very interesting point was noted by S. Pokrovsky, a member of the forum S. G. Kara-Murza. He cites data that by 1932-33, about 500 thousand Jews lived directly in the villages in Ukraine. And about a million (or even more) - in the towns. Let us note, says S. Pokrovsky, that the Jews in the countryside were traditionally not grain growers. That is, they simply did not have their own bread. And even more so, this bread was not in the towns. And neither there nor there were rations. In the conditions of the Holodomor, both rural Jews and the Jews of shtetls simply could not survive. Either they should have been the first to die, or they would scatter throughout the Union, driven by hunger.

By the beginning of the 1930s, it was clear to the leadership of the USSR that it would not be possible to avoid a major war with the imperialist states. Stalin wrote about this in his article “On the Tasks of Business Executives” as follows: We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we will be crushed.”

Having set the task of industrializing the country in 10 years, the leadership of the USSR was forced to come to an accelerated collectivization of the peasantry.
If initially, according to the collectivization plan, only 2% of peasant farms were to be collectivized by 1933, then according to the accelerated collectivization plan, collectivization in the main grain-producing regions of the USSR was to be completed in a year or two, that is, by 1931-1932.

By collectivizing the peasants, Stalin sought to enlarge the farms. It was relatively easy to seize products from large farms. Agricultural products were the main export, providing currency for accelerated industrialization. And most importantly, only large, mechanized farms in the climatic conditions of our country could produce marketable bread.

The main problem of the peasants of Russia was the weather and climatic conditions, the short warm season, and, consequently, the high burden of agricultural labor.

Chayanov, with the help of a thorough statistical analysis of the labor efforts, incomes and expenses of peasant farms, proved that the excessive burden of labor can become a significant constraint on the growth of the duration of labor and its productivity.

The law of A. V. Chayanov, if it is expressed in simple terms, says that the burdensomeness of labor prevents the peasant from raising labor productivity, and when prices for his products rise, he prefers to curtail production.

In accordance with Chayanov's law, under the NEP, the average peasant began to eat better than in tsarist times, but practically ceased to produce marketable grain. During the years of the NEP, peasants began to consume 30 kg of meat per year, although before the revolution they consumed 16 kg per year.

This indicated that a significant part of the grain was redirected by them from deliveries to the city to improve their own nutrition. By 1930, small-scale production reached its maximum.

It was harvested, according to various sources, from 79 to 84 million tons of grain (in 1914, together with the Polish provinces, 77 million tons).

The NEP allowed a slight increase in agricultural production, but the production of marketable grain was halved. Previously, it was given mainly by large landowners, liquidated during the revolution.

The shortage of marketable grain gave rise to the idea of ​​consolidation of agricultural production through collectivization, which became, in the geopolitical conditions of that time, a forced necessity, and it was taken up with Bolshevik inflexibility.

For example, by October 1, 1931, collectivization in the Ukrainian SSR covered 72% of arable land and 68% of peasant farms. More than 300 thousand "kulaks" were deported outside the Ukrainian SSR.

As a result of the restructuring of the economic activity of the peasants, associated with collectivization, there was a catastrophic decline in the level of agricultural technology.

Several objective factors of that time worked to reduce agricultural technology. Perhaps the main one is the loss of incentive to hard work, which has always been the work of the peasant in the "suffering".

In the autumn of 1931, more than 2 million hectares of winter crops were not sown, and losses from the 1931 harvest were estimated at up to 200 million poods, threshing in a number of areas took place until March 1932.
In a number of districts, seed material was handed over to the grain procurement plan. Most of the collective farms did not make settlements with the collective farmers for workdays, or these payments were meager.

Labor activity has fallen even more: “they will take it away anyway”, and food prices in the cooperative network have become 3-7 times higher than in neighboring republics. This led to the mass departure of the able-bodied population "for bread." In a number of collective farms, from 80 to 100% of able-bodied men left.

Forced industrialization led to a much greater than expected outflow of people to cities and industrial areas. The population of cities grew by 2.5-3 million a year, and the vast majority of this increase was due to the most able-bodied men in the village.

In addition, the number of seasonal workers who did not live permanently in the cities, but went there for a while in search of work, reached 4-5 million. The shortage of workers markedly worsened the quality of agricultural work.

In Ukraine, one of the important factors was the sharp reduction in the number of oxen used as the main tax in the process of collectivization. Peasants slaughtered cattle for meat in anticipation of its socialization.

In connection with the growth of the urban population and the increased shortage of grain, the procurement of food resources for industrial centers began to be produced at the expense of fodder grain. In 1932, half as much grain was fed to livestock as in 1930.
As a result, in the winter of 1931/32, there was the most dramatic reduction in the number of working and productive livestock since the beginning of collectivization.

6.6 million horses died - a quarter of the still remaining draft cattle, the rest of the cattle was extremely exhausted. The total number of horses in the USSR decreased from 32.1 million in 1928 to 17.3 million in 1933.

By the spring sowing of 1932, agriculture in the zones of "complete collectivization" came virtually without draft cattle, and the socialized cattle had nothing to feed them.
Spring sowing was carried out in a number of areas by hand, or plowed on cows.

So, by the beginning of the spring sowing season of 1932, the village approached with a serious lack of draft power and a sharply deteriorating quality of labor resources. At the same time, the dream of “plowing the land with tractors” was still a dream. The total power of tractors reached the figure planned for 1933 only seven years later, combine harvesters were just beginning to be used

Decrease in the incentive to work, the decline in the number of working and productive livestock, the spontaneous migration of the rural population predetermined a sharp decline in the quality of basic agricultural work.
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As a result, the fields sown with grain in 1932 in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and other regions were overgrown with weeds. But, the peasants, driven into the newly created collective farms, and having already the experience of “will be taken away anyway”, were in no hurry to show miracles of labor enthusiasm.

Even parts of the Red Army were sent to weeding work. But this did not help, and with a fairly tolerable biological harvest in 1931/32, sufficient to prevent mass starvation, grain losses during its harvest increased to unprecedented proportions.

If in 1931, according to the NK RKI, about 20% of the gross grain harvest was lost during harvesting, then in 1932 the losses were even greater. In Ukraine, up to 40% of the harvest remained in the vine; in the Lower and Middle Volga, losses reached 35.6% of the total gross grain harvest.

By the spring of 1932, an acute shortage of food began to appear in the main grain-producing regions.

In the spring and early summer of 1932, in a number of districts, starving collective farmers and individual farmers mowed down unripe winter crops, dug up planted potatoes, and so on.
Part of the seed aid provided by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March-June was used as food.

As of May 15, 1932, according to Pravda, 42% of the entire sown area was sown.
By the beginning of the harvesting campaign in July 1932, more than 2.2 million hectares of spring crops were not sown in Ukraine, 2 million hectares of winter crops were not sown, and 0.8 million hectares were frozen.

The American historian Tauger, who studied the causes of the famine of 1933, believes that the crop failure was caused by an unusual combination of a set of reasons, among which drought played a minimal role, the main role was played by plant diseases, an unusually widespread pest and grain shortage associated with the drought of 1931, rains in sowing and harvesting time.

Whether the reasons are natural, or the low level of agricultural technology, due to the transitional period of the formation of the collective farm system, but the country was threatened with a sharp drop in the gross grain harvest.

In an attempt to rectify the situation, by a decree of May 6, 1932, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks lowered the grain procurement plan for the year. In order to stimulate the growth of grain production, the grain procurement plan was reduced from 22.4 million tons to 18.1 million, which is just over a quarter of the forecasted harvest.

But, the forecasts of grain yields that existed at that time, based on their biological productivity, significantly overestimated the real indicators.

So the grain procurement plan in 1932 was drawn up on the basis of preliminary data on a higher harvest (in reality it turned out to be two to three times lower). And the party-administrative leadership of the country, after the reduction of the grain procurement plan, demanded strict observance of the plan.

Harvesting in a number of areas was carried out inefficiently and with a delay, the ear was re-stacked, sprinkled, stacking was not carried out, torpedo heaters were used without grain traps, which further increased considerable grain losses.
The intensity of harvesting and threshing of the 1932 crop was extremely low - "they will take it away anyway."

In the autumn of 1932, it became clear that in the main grain-producing regions, the grain harvesting plan was catastrophically not being fulfilled, which threatened starvation for the urban population and frustrated plans for accelerated industrialization.
So in Ukraine, at the beginning of October, only 35.3% of the plan was fulfilled.
The emergency measures taken to speed up procurement did little. By the end of October, only 39% of the annual plan was completed.

Expecting, as in the previous year, non-payment for workdays, collective farm members began to plunder grain en masse. In many collective farms, advances in kind were issued, significantly exceeding the established norms, and inflated norms for public catering were indicated. Thus, the collective farm management bypassed the norm for the distribution of income only after the plans had been fulfilled.

On November 5, in order to intensify the struggle for grain, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine proposes to the People's Commissariat of Justice, regional and district committees, along with the development of broad mass work, to ensure a decisive increase in assistance to grain procurements from the justice authorities.

It was necessary to oblige the judiciary to consider cases on grain procurements out of turn, as a rule, by visiting sessions on the spot with the use of severe repressions, while ensuring a differentiated approach to certain social groups, applying especially harsh measures to speculators, grain dealers.

In pursuance of the decision, a decree was issued, which stated the need to establish special supervision of prosecutors over the work of administrative bodies regarding the use of fines in relation to farms that are far behind the grain delivery plan.

On November 18, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine adopts a new tough resolution, which plans to send 800 communist workers to the villages, where "kulak sabotage and the disorganization of party work have become most acute." https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Resolution_of_the_Politburo_of_the_Central Committee_KP (b) U_18_November_1932_“On_measures_to_strengthen_grain procurements”

The resolution outlines possible repressive measures against collective farms and individual farmers who do not fulfill grain harvesting plans. Among them: 1. A ban on the creation of in-kind funds on collective farms that do not fulfill the procurement plan

2. A ban on the issuance of advances in kind on all collective farms that are unsatisfactorily fulfilling the grain procurement plan, with the immediate return of grain illegally given in advance.

3. Seizure of grain plundered from collective farms, from various kinds of grabbers and loafers who do not have workdays, but have stocks of grain.

4. To bring to court, as embezzlers of state and public property, storekeepers, accountants, accountants, storekeepers and weighers, hiding bread from accounting and compiling false accounting data in order to facilitate theft and theft.

5. The importation and sale of all, without exception, manufactured goods should be stopped in districts and individual villages, especially those that perform unsatisfactory grain procurement.

After the release of this decree, excesses began in the field with its implementation, and on November 29, the Politburo of the Central Committee (b) U issued a decree, which indicated the inadmissibility of excesses. (Annex 1)

Despite the adopted decisions, both the delivery plan and
threshing of bread was significantly delayed. As of December 1, 1932, in Ukraine, on an area of ​​725 thousand hectares, grain is not threshed.

Therefore, although the total volume of grain exports from the village through all channels (harvesting, purchases at market prices, the collective farm market) decreased in 1932–1933 by about 20% compared with previous years, due to low harvests, and with such exports practiced cases of virtually complete seizure of the harvested bread from the peasants. Famine began in the areas of mass collectivization.

The question of the number of victims of the famine of 1932-1933 became the scene of a manipulative struggle, during which the anti-Soviet of Russia and the entire post-Soviet space sought to increase as much as possible the number of "victims of Stalinism." The nationalists of Ukraine played a special role in these manipulations.

The theme of the mass famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukrainian SSR actually became the basis of the ideological policy of the leadership of post-Soviet Ukraine. Monuments to the victims of the famine, museums and exhibitions dedicated to the tragedy of the 1930s were opened all over Ukraine.
The expositions of the exhibitions sometimes acquired a scandalous character due to the obvious fraud with historical material (Appendix 3)

In 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine declared the Holodomor a genocide of the Ukrainian people, carried out with the aim of "suppressing the national liberation aspirations of Ukrainians and preventing the construction of an independent Ukrainian state."

In the Russian Federation, the anti-Soviet forces widely used the famine of 1932-33 as a weighty argument in the justice of transferring the country to the rails of capitalism. During Medvedev's presidency, the State Duma adopted a resolution condemning the actions of the Soviet authorities that organized the famine of 1932-33.

The ruling says:
“As a result of the famine caused by forced collectivization, many regions of the RSFSR, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus suffered. The peoples of the USSR paid a huge price for industrialization ... About 7 million people died in the USSR in 1932-1933 from hunger and diseases associated with malnutrition.

Almost the same number of those who died from the famine of 1932-33 was given by Goebbels' propaganda during the Second World War

The well-known domestic historian and archivist, V. Tsaplin, who headed the Russian State Archive of Economics, names the figure of 3.8 million people

In the school textbook on the history of Russia, edited by Sakharov, which has been in force since 2011, the total number of victims of the famine is defined as 3 million people. It also states that 1.5 million people died of starvation in Ukraine

The venerable ethnographer Professor Urlanis, in his calculations of losses from starvation in the USSR at the beginning of the 30s, gives a figure of 2.7 million

According to V. Kozhinov, collectivization and famine led to the fact that in 1929-1933 the death rate in the country exceeded the death rate in the previous five years of the NEP (1924-1928) by one and a half times. It must be said that a similar change in mortality rates in Russia has taken place since 1994 compared to the second half of the 1980s.

According to Elena Osokina, Doctor of Historical Sciences, the number of registered deaths exceeded the number of registered births, in particular, in the European part of the USSR as a whole - by 1975 thousand, and in the Ukrainian SSR - by 1459 thousand.

If we are based on the results of the All-Union Census of 1937 and recognize as natural mortality in Ukraine in 1933 the average natural mortality for 1927-30, when there was no famine (524 thousand per year), then with a birth rate in 1933 of 621 years, in Ukraine there was natural population growth equal to 97 thousand. This is five times less than the average increase in the previous three years.

It follows that 388,000 people died of starvation.

The materials “On the state of registration of the population of the Ukrainian SSR” for 1933 give 470,685 births and 1,850,256 deaths. That is, the number of inhabitants decreased due to hunger by almost 1380 thousand people.

Approximately the same figure for Ukraine is given by Zemskov in his well-known work “On the Issue of the Scale of Repressions in the USSR”.

The Institute of National Memory of Ukraine, naming the ever-increasing number of victims of the Holodomor every year, began to collect the martyrology, “Books of Memory” of all those who died of hunger. Inquiries were sent to all settlements of Ukraine about the number of deaths during the Holodomor and their ethnic composition.

It was possible to collect the names of 882510 citizens who died in those years. But, to the disappointment of the initiators, among those people who the current Ukrainian authorities are trying to present as victims of the famine of the 30s, not the largest part actually died of starvation or malnutrition. A significant part of the deaths were from domestic causes: accidents, poisoning, criminal murders.

This is described in detail in Vladimir Kornilov's article “Holodomor. Falsification of a national scale. In it, he analyzed data from the "Books of Memory" published by the Institute of National Memory of Ukraine.

The authors of the regional “Books of Memory”, out of bureaucratic zeal, entered into the registers of all the dead and those who died from January 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933, regardless of the causes of death, sometimes duplicating some names, but could not get more than 882,510 victims, which is quite comparable with the annual (!) mortality in modern Ukraine.
While, increasing every year, the official number of "victims of the Holodomor" reaches 15 million.

Things are even worse with the proof of the "genocide of the Ukrainian people." If we analyze the data for those cities of Central and Southern Ukraine, where local archivists decided to meticulously approach the matter and not hide the nationality column, which is “inconvenient” for the east of Ukraine.

For example, the compilers of the “Book of Memory” attributed 1,467 people to the “victims of the Holodomor” in the city of Berdyansk. The cards of 1184 of them indicate nationalities. Of these, 71% were ethnic Russians, 13% Ukrainians, 16% - representatives of other ethnic groups.

As for the villages and towns, there you can find different numbers. For example, data on the Novovasilyevsky Council of the same Zaporozhye region: out of 41 “victims of the Holodomor” whose nationalities were indicated, 39 were Russians, 1 was Ukrainian (2-day-old Anna Chernova died with a diagnosis of “erysipelas”, which can hardly be attributed to starvation ) and 1 - Bulgarian (cause of death - "burned out"). And here are the data for the village of Vyacheslavka in the same region: out of 49 deceased with the indicated nationality, 46 were Bulgarians, 1 each was Russian, Ukrainian and Moldavian. In Friedrichfeld, out of 28 "victims of the Holodomor", one hundred percent are Germans.

Well, the lion's share of the "victims of the Holodomor", of course, was given by the most populated industrial eastern regions. Especially a lot of them turned out to be among the miners. Absolutely all deaths from injuries received in the production of Donbass or in mines are also attributed by the compilers of the Book of Memory to the results of the famine.

The idea of ​​compiling “Books of Memory”, which obligated regional officials to look for documents related to the “Holodomor”, led to an effect that the campaign initiators did not expect.

Examining the documents that local executive officials included in the regional “Books of Memory of the Victims of the Holodomor”, you do not find a single document confirming the thesis that then, in the 30s, the authorities took actions whose purpose was to deliberately cause famine, and even more so completely exterminate the Ukrainian or any other ethnic group on the territory of Ukraine.

The authorities of that time, often on direct instructions from Moscow, made sometimes belated, sometimes clumsy, but sincere and persistent efforts to overcome the tragedy and save people's lives. And this in no way fits into the concept of modern falsifiers of history.

Annex 1
Decree of the Politburo of the Central Committee (b) U of November 29 "On the implementation of the Politburo resolutions of October 30 and November 18",
1. The resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) U on funds in collective farms in the localities is simplified and distorted. The Central Committee warns once again that the application of this decision is a matter that requires great flexibility, knowledge of the actual situation in the collective farms.

It is absolutely wrong and unacceptable to simply and mechanically take out all the funds for grain procurement. This is especially wrong in relation to the seed fund. Withdrawal of collective farm funds and their verification should not be carried out indiscriminately, not everywhere. Collective farms must be skillfully selected in such a way as to really reveal abuses and hidden grain there.

A more limited number of inspections, but inspections that yield serious results, exposing saboteurs, kulaks, their accomplices, and resolutely cracking down on them will put much more pressure on other collective farms where inspection has not yet been carried out than a hasty, unprepared inspection of a large number of collective farms with insignificant results. .

It is necessary to apply various forms and methods of this verification, individualizing each collective farm. In a number of cases it is more advantageous to use covert verification of funds without informing the collective farm about the verification. Where it is obviously known that the check will not give serious results and is not profitable for us, it is better to refuse it in advance.

The export of at least a part of the sowing material should be allowed only in especially exceptional cases, with the permission of the regional party committees and with the simultaneous adoption of measures that actually ensure the replenishment of this fund from other intra-collective farm sources.

For the unauthorized export of at least part of the seed fund, the regional committees in relation to the PKK, and the PKK in relation to their representatives, must apply strict penalties and immediately correct the mistakes made.

2. In the application of repression both to individual farmers, and especially against collective farms and collective farmers, in many areas they are already straying to their mechanical and indiscriminate use, hoping that the use of naked repression in itself should give bread. This is a wrong and certainly harmful practice.

Not a single repression, without the simultaneous deployment of political and organizational work, can give us the result we need. Whereas well-calculated repressions, applied to skillfully selected collective farms, repressions carried through to the end, accompanied by appropriate party-mass work, produce the desired result not only on those collective farms where they are applied, but also on neighboring collective farms that do not fulfill the plan.

Many grass-roots workers feel that the use of repression frees them from the need to carry out mass work or makes it easier for them to do so. Just the opposite. It is the use of repression as a last resort that makes our party work more difficult.

If we, taking advantage of the repression applied to the collective farm as a whole, to the administrators or to the bookkeepers and other officials of the collective farm, do not succeed in uniting our forces in the collective farm, if we do not achieve the consolidation of the activists in this matter, if we do not achieve real approval of this repression from the mass of collective farmers, then we will not obtain the necessary results in relation to the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan.

In cases where we are dealing with an exceptionally unscrupulous, stubborn collective farm that has fallen entirely under kulak influence, it is necessary first of all to ensure support for this repression from the surrounding collective farms, to achieve condemnation and organize pressure on such a collective farm by the public opinion of the surrounding collective farms.

All of the above does not at all mean that enough repressions have already been applied and that at present a really serious and decisive pressure has been organized in the districts on the kulak elements and organizers of the sabotage of grain procurements.

On the contrary, the repressive measures envisaged by the decisions of the Central Committee in relation to the kulak elements both in the collective farms and among the individual farmers have still been very little used and have not produced the necessary results due to indecision and hesitation where repression is undoubtedly necessary.

3. The fight against kulak influence on the collective farms is, first of all, the fight against theft, against the concealment of grain on the collective farms. It is a fight against those who deceive the state, who directly or indirectly work against the grain procurements, who organize the sabotage of the grain procurements.

And yet it is precisely this that receives quite insufficient attention in the districts. Against thieves, grabbers and plunderers of grain, against those who deceive the proletarian state and collective farmers, simultaneously with the use of repression, we must raise the hatred of the collective farm masses, we must ensure that the entire mass of collective farmers stigmatize these people as kulak agents and class enemies.

Appendix 2
Discussion of falsifications of the Holodomor theme in social networks.

1. The falsifications of the “Holodomor” continue to this day and take the form of a spectacle, not even a criminal one, but something like a procession of feeble-minded backward clowns. So recently, the Security Service of Ukraine was caught on a fake of the exhibition "Ukrainian Holocaust" held in Sevastopol - photos were given out by scammers from the Ukrainian special services as photographs of the "Holodomor".

Without batting an eyelid, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Valentin Nalyvaychenko, admitted that “part of” the photographs used in Sevastopol at the Holodomor exhibition were not genuine, because supposedly in Soviet times all (!) photographs of 1932-33 from Ukraine were destroyed, and now "it is possible to find them with great difficulty and only in private archives." This suggests that even in the archives of the special services there are no photo evidence

2. Cases of well-proven hunger are characterized by alimentary dystrophy. Most patients do not die, but become emaciated, turn into living skeletons.

The famine of 1921-22 showed mass dystrophy, the famine of 1946-47 - mass dystrophy, the Leningrad blockade famine - also mass dystrophy, the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps - total dystrophy.

Swelling of the starving people of 1932-33 is recorded everywhere, while dystrophy is very, very rare. There is evidence that swelling indicates poisoning, stored in improper conditions, grain.

The grain was hidden in earthen pits, the grain was not cleaned from fungi, which caused it to deteriorate, becoming poisonous and life-threatening. So, often, people died from grain poisoning by cereal pests, such as smut and rust.

One of the most tragic pages in the history of the Volga village was the famine of 1932-1933. For a long time, this topic was taboo for researchers. When the bans were lifted, the first publications concerning this topic appeared. However, non-traditional sources for historians have not yet been used to disclose it. These are the books of civil status records on death, birth and marriage for the period from 1927 to 1940 for 582 village councils stored in the archives of the registry office of the Saratov and Penza regional executive committees and 31 archives of the registry office of the district executive committees of these regions. In addition, in 46 villages of 28 rural districts of the Saratov and Penza regions, a survey of those who experienced all its hardships and hardships was conducted using a specially compiled questionnaire “Witness of the famine of 1932-1933 in the village of the Volga region”. It contains three groups of questions: the causes of the famine, the life of the village during the famine, and the consequences of the famine. A total of 277 questionnaires were received and processed.

The regions of the Saratov and Penza regions occupy about a third of the Volga region. In the early 1930s, their territory was divided between the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions; in a significant part of the modern territory of the Saratov region, the cantons of the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans (NP ASSR) were located. Specializing in the production of grain and being one of the most fertile regions of the country, this part of the Volga region in 1932-1933. was in the grip of hunger. Mortality on the territory of all the rural Soviets studied in 1933 increased sharply in comparison with the next previous and subsequent years. In 40 former districts of the Lower Volga and Middle Volga regions, on average, in 1933, compared with 1927-1932 and 1934-1935. it increased by 3.4 times. Such a jump could be caused by only one reason - hunger.

It is known that in starving areas, due to the lack of normal food, people were forced to eat surrogates and this led to an increase in mortality from diseases of the digestive system. Act books for 1933 show its sharp increase (by 2.5 times). In the column "cause of death" entries appeared: "from bloody diarrhea", "from hemorrhoid bleeding due to the use of a surrogate", "from poisoning with mash", "from poisoning with surrogate bread". Mortality has also increased significantly due to such causes as “inflammation of the intestines”, “gastric pain”, “stomach disease”, etc.

Another factor that caused an increase in mortality in 1933 in this region of the Volga region was infectious diseases: typhus, dysentery, malaria, etc. Records in act books allow us to speak about the occurrence of foci of typhoid and malaria epidemics here. In with. Kozhevino (Lower Volga Territory) in 1933, out of 228 who died, 81 died of typhus and 125 of malaria. The following figures speak of the scale of the tragedy of the village: in 1931, 20 people died of typhus and malaria there, in 1932 - 23, and in 1933 - over 200. Acute infectious diseases (typhus, dysentery) and mass invasion diseases (malaria) always accompany hunger.

Other causes of death of the population in 1933 are indicated in the act books, which were absent in the past, and now determined the increase in mortality and directly indicate famine: many peasants died “from starvation”, “from hunger strike”, “from lack of bread”, “from exhaustion organism on the basis of starvation”, “from malnutrition of bread”, “from starvation”, “from starvation edema”, “from complete exhaustion of the body due to malnutrition”, etc. In the village. Alekseevka out of 161 dead 101 died of starvation.

Out of 61,861 death certificates available in the examined registers, only 3,043 death certificates are noted as a direct cause in 22 of the 40 districts surveyed. This, however, does not mean that in 1933 no one died of starvation in the rest of the districts; on the contrary, here, too, a sharp jump in mortality indicates the opposite. The discrepancy between the record in the death certificates and its real cause is explained by the fact that the work of the registry offices in the starving areas was influenced by the general political situation in the country. Through the mouth of Stalin, it was declared to the whole country and to the whole world that in 1933 "collective farmers forgot about ruin and hunger" and rose "to the position of wealthy people."

Under these conditions, the majority of registry office workers who registered deaths simply did not enter the forbidden word “hunger” in the appropriate column. The fact that it was unlawful is evidenced by the order of the OGPU of the city of Engels to the city registry office on the prohibition in 1932-1933. fix the diagnosis "died of starvation". This was justified by the fact that the "counter-revolutionary elements", allegedly clogging the statistical apparatus, "tried to motivate every case of death by hunger, in order to exaggerate the colors necessary for certain anti-Soviet circles." When registering those who died of starvation, registry office workers were forced to substitute the cause of death. According to the Sergievsky village council in 1933, 120 out of 130 dead were registered as dead "for unknown reasons." If we take into account that in 1932 only 24 people died there and the causes of their death were accurately determined in the act books, and the next year the death rate increased by more than 5 times, then the conclusion suggests itself that a severe famine had begun, the victims of which were those who died after “ unknown reasons."

The fact of the onset of famine in 1932-1933. in the areas under study is also confirmed by such a demographic indicator, which always testifies to famine, as a drop in the birth rate. In 1933-1934. the birth rate here has fallen significantly compared with the nearest previous years. If in 1927 148 births were registered on the territory of the Pervomaisky Village Council, in 1928 - 114, in 1929 - 108, in 1930 - 77, in 1931 - 92, in 1932 - 75, then in 1933 there were only 19, and in 1934 there were 7 births.

In Novoburassky, Engelssky, Rivne, Krasnoarmeysky, Marksovsky, Dergachevsky, Ozinsky, Dukhovnitsky, Petrovsky, Baltaysky, Bazarno-Karabulaksky, Lysogorsky, Ershovsky, Rtishchevsky, Arkadaksky, Turkovsky, Romanovsky, Fedorovsky, Atkarsky, Samoilovsky districts of the Saratov region. and in Kameshkirsky, Kondolsky, Nyakolsky, Gorodishchensky and Lopatinsky districts of the Penza region. in 1933-1934 the birth rate fell 3.3 times compared with its average level for 1929-1932. The reasons for this phenomenon were high mortality during the famine of potential parents; the outflow of the adult population, which reduced the number of potential parents; a decrease in the adult population's ability to reproduce offspring due to the physical weakening of the body as a result of starvation.

Influenced the birth rate in 1933-1934. the increased mortality in 1933 of such a category of potential parents as young people is confirmed by a significant decrease in the number of registered marriages in those years in rural areas. For example, the number of marriages registered in 1927-1929. in Petrovsky, Atkarsky, Rivne, Kalininsky, Marksovsky, Balashovsky, Ershovsky, Turkovsky, Arkadaksky districts of the Saratov region. decreased by an average of 2.5 times.

The epicenter of the famine, characterized by the highest mortality rate and the lowest birth rate, was apparently located on the territory of the Saratov region, on the Right Bank and in the left-bank cantons of the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans. In 1933, the mortality rate of the rural population on the Right Bank compared with the average mortality rate in 1927-1932 and 1934-1935. increased by 4.5 times, on the Left Bank - by 2.6 times, in the territory of the studied areas of the NP ASSR - by 4.1 times. Birth rate in 1933-1934 compared with its average level in 1929-1932. fell on the Right Bank by 4 times, on the Left Bank - by 3.8 times, in the regions of the NP ASSR - by 7.2 times. As a result of the famine, the vitality of the Volga village was significantly undermined. This is evidenced by a sharp drop in the birth rate in many Saratov and Penza villages: judging by the entries in the act books, in many villages there were no longer so many weddings and no more children were born, as in the years preceding collectivization and famine.

Famine of 1932-1933 left a deep mark in the people's memory. “In the thirty-third year they ate all the quinoa. Hands, feet swelled, died on the go, ”the old-timers of the Saratov and Penza villages recalled a ditty, which reflected the popular assessment of this tragedy. In the course of a questionnaire survey, 99.9% confirmed the existence of a famine in 1932-1933, and they also confirm that it was weaker than the famine of 1921-1922, but stronger than the famine of 1946-1947. In many areas, the scale of famine was very great. Villages such as Ivlevka of the Atkarsky district, Starye Grivki of the Turkovsky district, the collective farm named after. Sverdlov Fedorovsky canton of the NP ASSR, almost completely died out. “During the war, not as many people died in these villages as died during the famine,” eyewitnesses recalled.

In many villages there were common graves (pits), in which, often without coffins, sometimes whole families buried those who died of starvation. Close relatives of 80 out of more than 300 respondents died during the famine. Eyewitnesses testified to the facts of cannibalism in such villages as Simonovka, Novaya Ivanovka of the Balandinsky district, Ivlevka - Atkarsky, Zaletovka - Petrovsky, Ogaryovka, Novye Burasy - Novoburassky, Novo-Repnoe - Ershovsky, Kalmantai - Volsky districts, Shumeyka - Engelssky and Semenovka - Fedorovsky cantons of the NP ASSR, Kozlovka - Lopatinsky district.

The American historian R. Conquest expressed the opinion that famine broke out on the Volga "in areas partially populated by Russians and Ukrainians, but German settlements were most affected by it." On this basis, he concludes that the NP ASSR, "apparently, was the main target of terror by famine" . Indeed, in 1933 the mortality rate of the rural population in the studied areas of this republic was very high, and the birth rate in this and subsequent years fell sharply. A brigade of writers headed by B. Pilnyak, who probably visited there in 1933, reported in a special letter to Stalin about severe famine, facts of mass mortality of the population. Facts of cannibalism were recorded in the starving cantons. Memories of the famine of both Germans and representatives of other nationalities living at that time on the territory of the republic speak of a mass famine that occurred there in 1932-1933.

Comparative analysis of personal data obtained as a result of a survey of witnesses of the famine in the Mordovian village. Osanovka, Baltai district, Mordovian-Chuvash village. Eremkino, Khvalynsky district, Chuvash village. Kalmantay Volsky district, Tatar village. Aspen Guy and Lithuanian village. Chernaya Padina of the Ershov District, in the Ukrainian villages of Shumeyka, Engels and Semenovka, Fedorovsky cantons, and in 40 Russian villages, showed that the severity of hunger was very strong not only in the regions of the NP ASSR, but also in many Saratov and Penza villages located outside its borders .

“What was it: an organized famine or a drought?” - this question was asked in a letter to the editors of the journal “Questions of History” by A. A. Orlova. The onset of famine in the Volga region, including in the regions under study, was usually (in 1921 and 1946) associated with droughts and crop failures. Drought is a natural phenomenon here. 75% of the respondents denied the existence of a severe drought in 1932-1933; the rest indicated that the drought was in 1931 and 1932, but not as severe as in 1921 and 1946, when it led to crop failure and famine. Special literature basically confirms the assessment of the climatic conditions of 1931-1933, given by the witnesses of the famine. In publications on this topic, when listing a long series of dry years in the Volga region in 1932 and 1933. fall out. The drought, average according to the accepted classification and weaker than the droughts of 1921, 1924, 1927, 1946, was noted by scientists only in 1931. The spring and summer of 1932 were typical for the Volga region: hot places with dry winds, not ideal for crops, especially in the Trans-Volga region, but in general the weather is assessed by experts as favorable for the harvest of all field crops. The weather, of course, influenced the decline in grain yields, but there was no mass crop failure in 1932.

Interviewed old-timers of Saratov and Penza villages testified that, despite all the costs of collectivization (dispossession, which deprived the village of thousands of experienced grain growers; a sharp reduction in the number of livestock as a result of its mass slaughter, etc.), in 1932 they still managed to grow a crop, quite sufficient to feed the population and prevent mass starvation. “There was bread in the village in 1932,” they recalled. In 1932, the gross harvest of grain crops in all sectors of agriculture in the Lower Volga Territory amounted to 32,388.9 thousand centners, only 11.6% less than in 1929; in the Middle Volga Territory -45,331.4 thousand centners, even 7.5% more than in 1929. On the whole, the 1932 harvest was average for recent years. It was quite enough not only to prevent mass starvation, but also to hand over a certain part to the state.

Collectivization, which significantly worsened the financial situation of the peasantry and led to a general decline in agriculture, however, did not cause mass famine in this region of the Volga region. In 1932-1933. it did not come as a result of drought and crop shortages, as it had happened before in the Volga region, and not because of complete collectivization, but as a result of forced Stalinist grain procurements. It was the first artificially organized famine in the history of the Volga village.

Only 5 out of more than 300 interviewed eyewitnesses of the events of 1932-1933. did not recognize the connection between grain procurements and the onset of famine. The rest either named them as the main cause of the tragedy, or did not deny their negative impact on the food situation of the village. “The famine was because the bread was handed over”, “all, to the grain, under the panicle of the state they took out”, “they tortured us with grain procurements”, “there was a surplus, all the bread was taken away,” the peasants said.

By the beginning of 1932, the village was weakened by collectivization, grain procurements in 1931, and not entirely favorable weather conditions of the past year, which caused crop failure in some areas. Many peasants were already starving. The main agricultural work was very difficult. An intensive departure of peasants to cities and other regions of the country began, resembling flight. And in this situation, the leadership of the country, who was aware of the situation in the Volga region, approved in 1932 clearly inflated grain procurement plans for the Lower and Middle Volga. At the same time, the difficulties of the organizational and economic development of the newly created collective farms were not taken into account, as was eloquently evidenced by the mass protests of the chairmen of collective farms and village councils, district party and Soviet bodies directed to the regional leadership.

Despite the energetic efforts of the party economic leadership, which practiced in September-November the removal from work and expulsion from the party of the leaders of the districts who "threw the plan"; entering on the "black boards" of collective farms, settlements, districts that do not fulfill the plan; the announcement of an economic boycott by him and other measures, grain procurement plans were not carried out. The situation changed in December 1932, when a commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on grain procurements headed by Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party P.P. Postyshev arrived in the region on Stalin's instructions. It seems that the assessment of the work of this commission and its chairman, which is available in the literature, requires clarification, if not revision.

The Commission and Postyshev personally (as well as V. M. Molotov, who visited Ukraine, and L. M. Kaganovich - in Ukraine and the North Caucasus) are responsible for the artificially organized famine in the Volga region under consideration. It was under the pressure of the commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (in addition to Postyshev that it included Zykov, Goldin and Shklyar), the local leadership, fearing reprisals for disrupting grain procurements, in order to fulfill the plan, went to the seizure of bread earned by collective farmers for workdays and available from individual farmers. This eventually led to massive famine in the village.

The following facts testify to the methods of work of Postyshev and his commission, which demanded that the grain procurement plan be fulfilled at any cost. Only in December 1932, for failure to fulfill the grain procurement plan, by the decisions of the bureau of the Nizhne-Volzhsky regional committee of the party, at the meetings of which members of the Central Committee commission and Postyshev himself were present, 9 secretaries of district committees and 3 chairmen of district executive committees were removed from work; many were subsequently expelled from the party and put on trial. During meetings with the local party and economic activists on grain procurement issues (this was told by the participants in such meetings in the city of Balashov, I. A. Nikulin and P. M. Tyrin), right in the hall where these meetings were held, on the instructions of Postyshev, for failure to comply The grain procurement plan removed from work the secretaries of the district committees of the party and the workers of the OGPU arrested the chairmen of the collective farms. In words, in the press, Postyshev opposed the seizure of grain from collective farms that fulfilled the plan, against violation of the law during grain procurements, but in reality he took a tough position that pushed the local leadership to take illegal measures against those who did not fulfill the plan.

In late December 1932 - early January 1933, a real war began against collective farms and individual farms that did not fulfill the plan. The decision of the bureau of the Nizhne-Volzhsky regional party committee of January 3 stated: “The regional committee and the regional executive committee demand from the district executive committees and district committees of the districts that frustrated the plan to unconditionally fulfill the grain procurement plan by January 5, not stopping at additional procurements in the collective farms that have fulfilled the plan, allowing for a partial return from advance payments to collective farmers. The district Soviet authorities were allowed to start checking the "plundered bread" by collective farmers and individual farmers.

Numerous eyewitness accounts speak of how these directives were carried out in the Saratov and Penza villages. The peasants were deprived of the bread earned for workdays, including those left over from previous years; bread was not given out for workdays; exported seed grain. Often in the course of grain procurement, violence was used against the peasants. In with. Botsmanovo, Turkovsky district, Shevchenko, authorized for grain procurement from Balashov, in order to “knock out” bread, put almost the entire village in a barn under lock and key (testifies M. E. Dubrovin, who lives in the workers' settlement of Turki, Saratov Region). “They came, forcibly took the bread and took it away”, “they gave it, and then took it away”, “went from house to house, took away bread and potatoes; those who resisted were put in a barn for the night”, “they pulled [bread] out of the oven”, recalled the old residents of the Saratov and Penza villages.

To fulfill the plan, grain was taken out not only on horses, but also on cows. The chairman of the Studeno-Ivanovsky collective farm of the Turkovsky district, M.A. Goryunov (lives in Turki), was ordered by the grain procurement commissioner to allocate collective farm horses to assist the neighboring collective farm in the export of grain. The horses made two trips, covered over 100 km; the chairman did not agree to send them on a third flight: “Let's kill the horses!” He was forced to submit, and soon 24 horses fell. The chairman was put on trial for refusing to recognize the collective farm grooms as guilty of the death of the horses (they say they were poorly fed), as he was advised by the commissioner. Violence was also used in the execution of the plan to fill the public barns with seeds. Local activists often went from house to house looking for bread; everything they found was taken away.

The organizers of the procurements explained to the peasants that the grain would go to the working class and the Red Army, but persistent rumors circulated in the village that in fact the grain was being taken away in order to take it abroad. It was then that sad ditties, sayings appeared in the village: “Rye, wheat were sent abroad, and the gypsy swan was sent to collective farmers for food”, “Shingles, bard, corn - to the Soviet Union, and rye, wheat were sent abroad”, “Our burner bread-bearer - she gave bread, she was hungry. Grain procurement and the onset of famine, many peasants associated with the names of Stalin and Kalinin. “In 1932, Stalin made a backfill, which is why the famine set in,” they said in the villages. In ditties, the singing of which was threatened with imprisonment, the words sounded: “When Lenin was alive, we were fed. When Stalin entered, we were starved.”

In 1933, there were rumors in the Volga village that a “Stalinist pumping of gold” was being carried out: a hunger strike was made in order to take away gold, silver, and other valuables from the population through the shops of Torgsin for a pittance, in exchange for food. The peasants explained the organization of the famine with the help of grain procurements by the desire of Kalinin to punish them for their unwillingness to work conscientiously on collective farms, to accustom the peasants to collective farms. In Saratov and Penza villages in 1933, there was a rumor that, like the famous trainer Durov, who accustomed animals to obedience by hunger, Kalinin decided to accustom the peasants to collective farms by hunger: they would endure hunger, which means they would get used to collective farms, they would work better and appreciate collective farm life.

During the grain procurements of 1932, which doomed the village to starvation, there was no open mass resistance of the peasants. Most of the respondents explained this by fear of the authorities and the belief that the state would help the village. Yet there were exceptions. In the village The Red Key of the Rtishchevsky district, testifies S.N. Fedotov (lives in the city of Rtishchevo, Saratov region), having learned about the decision to take out seed bread, almost the entire village gathered at the barn where it was stored; the peasants broke the castle and divided the grain among themselves. In with. Potma of the same district (said I. T. Artyushin, who lives in the city of Rtishchevo), a mass demonstration of peasants took place, which was suppressed by the police.

The main forms of protest of the peasants against forced grain procurements were covert actions: attacks on the "red carts" that exported grain from the villages, theft of bread from these carts, and the dismantling of bridges. Individual peasants openly expressed dissatisfaction with the grain procurement organizers; repressive measures were applied to them (testimony of M. A. Fedotov from the working settlement of Novye Burasy, S. M. Berdenkov from the village of Trubechino, Turkovsky district, A. G. Semikin from the working settlement of Turki, Saratov region).

Thus, the data of archival documents and interviews of eyewitnesses of the events testify: forced grain procurements in 1932 left the Volga village without bread and became the main cause of the tragedy that broke out there in 1933. The massive famine caused by grain procurements carried out in violation of the law and morality, which claimed tens of thousands of peasant lives and undermined the health of the survivors, is one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism, its organized inhuman action.

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Notes

1. See, for example, I. E. ZELENIN, On Some “Blank Spots” in the Final Stage of Continuous Collectivization. - History of the USSR, 1989, No. 2, p. 16-17; Problems of oral history in the USSR (abstracts of the scientific conference November 28-29, 1989 in Kirov). Kirov. 1990, p. 18-22.

2. Archive of the registry office of the Petrovsky district executive committee of the Saratov region, act books on death in the Kozhevinsky village council for 1931-1933.

3. Archive of the registry office of the Novoburassky district executive committee of the Saratov region, an act book on death in the Novo-Alekseevsky village council for 1933.

4. Lenin and Stalin on labor. M. 1941, p. 547, 548, 554, 555.

5. Central State Archive of the National Economy (TSGANKh) of the USSR, f. 8040, op. 8, d. 5, ll. 479, 486.

6. Archive of the registry office of the Arkadak district executive committee of the Saratov region, act books on death in the Sergievsky village council for 1932-1933.

7. Archive of the registry office of the Rtishchevsky district executive committee of the Saratov region, books of civil status records on birth in Pervomaisky village council for 1927-1934.

8. CONQUEST R. The Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet collectivization and terror by famine. London. 1988, p. 409, 410.

9. TsGANKH USSR, f. 8040, op. 8, d. 5, ll. 479-481, 483, 485, 486, 488.

10. Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU (TsPA IML), f. 112, op. 34, d. 19, l. 20.

11. Questions of History, 1988, No. 12, p. 176-177.

12. Dry winds, their origin and struggle with them. M. 1957, p. 33; Droughts in the USSR, their origin, frequency and impact on the harvest. L. 1958, p. 38.45.50.166-169; KABANOV P. G. Droughts in the Saratov region. Saratov. 1958, p. 2; The climate of the southeast of the European part of the USSR. Saratov. 1961, p. 125; KABANOV P. G., KASGROV V. G. Droughts in the Volga region. In the book: Scientific works of the Research Institute of Agriculture of the South-East. Issue. 31. [Saratov]. 1972, p. 137; Agriculture of the USSR. Yearbook. 1935. M. 1936, p. 270-271.

13. Agriculture of the USSR. Yearbook. 1935, p. 270-271.

14. CPA IML, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2550, ll. 29v., 305; house 3757, l. 161; house 3767, l. 184; 3768, ll. 70, 92; house 3781, l. 150; house 3782, l. eleven; Volzhskaya commune, 12-14. XI. 1932; Povolzhskaya Pravda, 15.29. X. 1932; Saratov worker, 2.1. 1933; Wrestling, 30.XI. 1932.

15. See History of the USSR, 1989, No. 2, p. 16-17.

16. CPA IML, f. 17, op. 21, house 3769, l. 9; 3768, ll. 139.153.

17. Ibid., d. 3768, ll. 118 rev., 129.130 rev., 148.153.

18. Ibid., d. 3769, l. 9.

19. Ibid., d. 3768, ll. 139.153.