Karman wrote:
As for this discussion. Those who say that Stalin meant to destroy the Ukrainian peasants always ignore the fact that at the date of Golodomor the collectivization in Ukraine was complete and one can say that the class of independent Ukrainian farmers was already destroyed in the course of kollectivisation. The Great Famine stroke the new class of kolkhoze members Stalin wanted to establish.
What Karman is ignoring, like all the publicists who concentrate only on the technical details of the size of the harvest in 1932 and the aggregate amount of food available for the population, is the fact that at the time the famine was occurring, Stalin had started the process of purging the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR of nationally-minded ethnic Ukrainian elements, and of wiping out most of the ethnic Ukrainian intelligentsia.
A strike against the Ukrainian peasantry, even though it was already collectivised, would assist his aim of crushing any autonomist movements in Ukraine by keeping the peasantry so preoccupied with sheer physical survival that it would not have either the strength or time to support such movements.
I believe it improbable that Stalin pre-planned the famine. I think it more likely that there was a genuine food shortage resulting from a reduction in the size of the harvest. But the course of events, when compared with the famine of the early 1920s, when the Bolshevik regime sought food aid from outside, from the United States and Norway, give strong grounds for the judgement that the Soviet Government intrumentalised whatever food shortage actually existed to create famine conditions among actual or potential oppositionist groups, including the Ukrainian SSR and in the North Caucasus region which had a large ethnic Ukrainian population and which had been claimed by Ukrainian nationalists as territory that should belong to an independent Ukrainian state.
At the time of the occurrence of the famine, the Red Army was organised along ethnic lines, with separate Ukrainian units headed by ethnic Ukrainian officers trained in new military academies established in the Ukrainian SSR, using Ukrainian. That ethnically-based organisation had been introduced during the period of "Ukrainisation" in the 1920s, when there had been a move to give a measure of autonomy to the various minority nationalities of the Soviet Union.
Stalin may have feared an uprising by Ukrainian units in response to his move against the ethnic Ukrainian leadership and intelligentsia. As it was, there was a mutiny by one of the Ukrainian units. The isolation of Ukraine by the closure of its borders to the RSFSR and Belorussia may have been part of a move to suppress any opposition to the crushing of the Ukrainian leadership, rather than specifically a measure to exacerbate the famine by preventing food getting into Ukraine. Whatever the case may be, the isolation certainly had that effect.
There is definitely a connection between Stalin's "de-ukrainisation" of the power structure in the Ukrainian SSR. As I have said previously, it may well be that Stalin did not pre-plan the famine or engineer the aggregate food shortage, but he certainly used the food shortage as a weapon by targeting its effects against ethnic Ukrainians.
The fact that the famine was used as a weapon against ethnic Ukrainians is demonstrated celarly by the 1939 census data, which show that the number of ethnic Ukrainians decreased by several millions, while the total population of the USSR increased, as did the ethnic Russian and ethnic Belorussian populations.
An even clearer demonstration of the effects of the famine on ethnic Ukrainians is given by a comparison of the ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Jewish populations. In the early 1930s well over half the Jewish population of the USSR lived on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, primarily in the towns and cities. Despite that, the census data show that the Jewish population was not affected by the famine at all, since its size did not decline, unlike the ethnic Ukrainian population which showed a large decrease. That comparison indicates the extent of the ethnic targeting of the effects of whatever food shortage existed in reality.
Here is a table showing the decline in the size of the ethnic Ukrainian population:
The magnitude of the demographic catastrophe suffered by the Ukrainians is all the more sharply brought into focus when we compare Soviet population figures from 1926 and 1939 for the three East Slavic nations and the USSR as a whole:
......................1926 population....... 1939 population.........% change
USSR...............147,027,900.............. 170,557,100.............. +15.7
Russians........... 77,791,100.............. 99,591,500.............. +28.0
Byelorussians..... 4,738,900................ 5,275,400.............. +11.3
Ukrainians........ 31,195,000.............. 28,111,000.............. -9.9 _90_
Comparison with the Byelorussians is particularly significant, since their purely political fate was very similar to that of the Ukrainians, they faced the same pressures to assimilate themselves to Russian nationality, but they did not go through the famine. Indeed, we have seen that until the famine the natural population growth for Ukrainians, although gradually declining, was significantly higher than the actual rate of Byelorussian population growth for the period.
The source of the table is here:
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/078320.shtml
Note that the article given at the above source was originally a paper presented at a confernece in Tel Aviv in June 1982, so the more relevant compariosn with the Jewish population of the USSR was omitted, for obvious reasons.
