ISBN
0-919642-29-2 | 1988 | Marco
Carynnyk, Lubomyr Luciuk, Bohdan Kordan
The Foreign
Office and the Famine
British
Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933
Marco
Carynnyk was one of the star
interviewees in the
first trilingual Holodomor documentary film --
titled Neznanij Holod
in Ukrainian, The Unknown Holocaust
in English and La Famine Inconnue
in
French -- spearheaded
by Taras Hukalo
for Radio Quebec in early 1983. At that time, Dr. Carynnyk referred to
British
documents from the 1930s, which clearly showed the genocidal nature of
the
Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 and which the British Government chose not
to
disclose to the general public for fear of jeopardizing commercial
relations
with the Soviet Union.
A 493-page
book containing 85
declassified documents and
116 footnotes appeared in 1988 with the above-indicated title. The 45-page introduction,
written by Dr.
Carynnyk, skillfully summarizes the contents and implications of these
documents, as well as exposing the reader to the mindset of the authors
and
personnel of the British Foreign Office. The 76 footnotes provide
further
information on events and personalities associated with these documents
and the
Holodomor.
The
documents cover the time frame
from 28Mar1932 to
22Oct1935, which we have arbitrarily divided as follows:
A.
Carynnyk
Introduction:
B.
1932 (28 March to 06
December); Documents 1
to 19:
Part 1: Andrew Cairns
(1899 –
1958.05.15)
Part 2:
Correspondence
between Foreign Office and British Embassy in Moscow (1932)
1932 Summation by Will
Zuzak
C. 1933 (14 January
to 18
December); Documents
20 to 64:
1933 Summation by Will
Zuzak
D. 1934-1935; Documents 65 to 85:
1934-1935
Summation by Will Zuzak
We
particularly wanted to
highlight the evidence of
Andrew Cairns, who made three tours of the Soviet agricultural areas
during the
summer of 1932 and recorded very detailed observations of the
agricultural and
sociological conditions in the Soviet Union (see docs. 5, 10, 13). His comments are extremely
critical, starvation is already rampant with pot-bellied children and
people
dying in the streets, and he predicts a catastrophe for the coming
winter.
Although in
1932 the people were
still defiant and
offered passive resistance to collectivization,
the huge death toll during the winter broke their spirit,
such that by
the summer of 1933 Stalin’s terror apparatus was fully in control.
Starting with
his denouncement of Mykola Skrypnik on 10June1933, Postyshev, Stalin’s
appointed dictator of Ukraine, directed all his energies in rooting out
any
traces of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian
culture and
even the Ukrainian language. These actions clearly demonstrate the
genocidal
nature of the Holodomor.
Respectfully
submitted
Will Zuzak; 2009.03.15
A. Carynnyk
Introduction:
(page xvii to lxiv) Rather than
regurgitate Dr.
Carynnyk’s excellent analysis, we will simply excerpt certain key
passages in
his text and in the 76 references.
Although
Nikita Khrushchev never
publicly mentioned the
starvation of the peasants during collectivization [Ref. 3], according
to
Yugoslav Communist Anton Kolendic in private Khrushchev spoke of
massive deaths
in Ukraine during the Holodomor.
[Anton Kolendic, Les
derniers jours: De la mort de Staline a celle de Beria (mars-decembre
1953)
(Paris: Fayard, 1982), 161-162.]
Talking with the writer Mikhail
Sholokhov in May 1953,
Khrushchev said: “There is much that is true in your books, but
nevertheless
they do not tell the whole truth. We are still far from knowing
everything that
happened at the time of collectivization. We shall doubtless never know
how
many human lives were swallowed up in collectivization. You have only
spoken of
Ukraine, and of individual cases. I myself know of hundreds of
thousands of
cases and, I repeat, only in Ukraine. And here scholars are proving
mathematically, demographically, that close to twelve million victims
died at
that time … You ask me who is responsible? In the past we would say,
you and I,
the ‘kulaks’, the ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘imperialism’. Today I can in all
honesty say
this to you with regard to collectivization. First, Stalinist methods
of
collectivization have brought us, beyond violence and terror, only
misery and
famine in the countryside. Second, at the time, Stalin was already
dictator of
the Soviet Union. … Thus, if one must seek out the one person
responsible for
the millions of deaths and for those years of horror, it is to Stalin
that one
must turn.”
Paul
Scheffer, the Moscow
correspondent of the Berliner Taggeblatt
warned about bread
riots and food shortages since 1928 and by early 1930 was anticipating
catastrophe: “The days of famine are already sounding their approach.
The
present disorganization will not show its full effects till the coming
harvest.
It is still five months till that time, months in which hunger can only
increase.”
[Paul Scheffer, Seven
Years in Soviet Russia (London: Putnam, 1931; New York:
Macmillan, 1932)
64, 83, 294.]
In his
memoirs, Vansittart states:
“Population was reduced by the
supply of short-lived
slaves, and six million farmers were killed off to increase production.
… The
great man-made famine of 1933 was followed by a silence that Stalin
called
happiness … The Kremlin took so much food from the peasants that they
destroyed
their livestock. Between 1939 and 1933 the number of horses in Russia
dropped
from 34 to 16 millions, cows from 68 to 38, sheep and goats from 147 to
50,
pigs from 20 to 12 millions. Consequently the people also fell by
millions, and
Stalin could never admit the human cattle uselessly slaughtered. He
therefore
had to fake the census. Statistics were adopted to the leader’s whim.
When they
were too low for his taste, he killed the authors.”
[Sir Robert Gilbert Vansittart, The Mist
Procession (London: Hutchison,
1958), 457, 459.]
The author,
Marco Carynnyk ,
perceptively notes that,
while the Foreign Office was genuinely shocked and concerned by Cairn’s
reports
of famine in 1932, by the spring of 1933 their sympathy had waned and
later when
the issue of humanitarian aid arose “the Foreign Office viewed pleas
for help
as a political embarrassment and refused to take action
or even confirm that it had evidence of
famine conditions.”
“The change
of attitude was
brought about by Hitler’s
accession to power in January 1933. From then on the great question
confronting
British statesmen was what relations they ought to seek with Germany
and the
Soviet Union or, to put the question in ideological terms, how to deal
with
fascism and communism.” Whitehall had begun to think that the Soviet
Union
might even be a partner against the country that it saw as the real
threat to
Britain -- Nazi
Germany.
By July
1933 Vansittart had made
up his mind that Nazism
was more dangerous for Britain than Communism. He wrote to Sir John
Simon:
“It does not help to compare the
internal excesses of
Hitlerism with those of Bolshevism : the latter of course are vastly
greater at
present. But that is beside the point.
We cannot take the same detached and highbrow view of
Hitlerism as we
can of Bolshevism or Fascism, precisely because these are not really
and
vitally dangerous to us, and Hitlerism is
exceedingly dangerous. Fascism has never presented the least danger to
this
country, and Russia has been too incompetent a country to be really
dangerous,
even under Bolshevism. But Germany is an extremely competent country,
and she
is visibly being prepared to external aggression. I do not think that
anything
but evil and danger for the rest of the world can come out of
Hitlerism,
whichever way the dice fall in Germany.”
[Quoted in Ian Colvin, Vansittart in Office:
An Historical Survey of the
Origins of the Second
World War Based on Papers of Sir Robert Vansittart (London:
Victor
Gollancz, 1965), 26-27.]
In January
1936 Lawrence Collier
had a similar view:
“I believe that it is important
for us and for France to
cultivate good relations with the Soviet Government in view both of the
German
menace in Europe and of the Japanese menace in the Far East; and I do
not
believe that it is either possible or desirable to attempt to reverse
our
present policy by coming to an understanding with Germany at the
expense of
Russia.”
[Woodward and Butler, eds., Documents on
British Foreign Policy 15:
538.]
Carynnyk
next suggests that
economic considerations were
even more important than geopolitical considerations: “For the most
important
reason for the British government’s silence was economic: it saw the
Soviet
Union as a profitable market for the exports of its beleaguered
industries and
a source of cheap food with which to feed its disgruntled populace.”
Even in
1926, Paul Scheffer had written: “A lavish opening of Russian business
is an
absolute and unavoidable necessity for Europe --
the fact is becoming more and more apparent
every day.”
(Page xlvi)
“Of the average annual
exports of 142 million
bushels of wheat from Russia in
1908-12,
only 27.7 million had gone to Britain. In 1931-32, 51.4 million bushels
of the
total wheat exports of 65.7 million bushels went to Britain. In 1930-31
and 1932-33,
Britain imported 40% of her wheat from the USSR as compared to less
than 20% in
pre-war days. To put it a different way, in 1926 Britain’s imports of
Soviet
wheat amounted to only 1,493,728 BPD. By 1930 the value had increased
to
5,751,955 BPD, and wheat was the single largest item imported from the
Soviet
Union.”
[Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M.
Nekrich, Utopia in
Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New
York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985), 238.]
[Ref. 70]
The census taken at the
beginning of [1937],
after a minute preparation and with an army of over a million
officials, ended
in the arrest of the directors of the statistical bureau and of their
close
collaborators, the results remaining a mystery. According to W.
Krivitsky,
whose excellent confidential source of information is the G.P.U.:
‘Instead of
the 171 million inhabitants calculated for 1937, only 145 million were
found;
thus nearly 30 million people in the U.S.S.R. are missing.’”
[Boris Souvarine, Stalin:
A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Alliance Book
Corporation,
1939), 669.]
B.
1932 (28 March to 06
December); Documents 1 to
19:
Part
1: Andrew
Cairns (1899 – 1958.05.15)
[Andrew
Cairns immigrated to
Canada from Scotland as a
child with his parents; grew up on a farm in Islay, Alberta; attended
the
Universities of Alberta and Minnesota; joined the Alberta Wheat Pool in
1926
and the Canadian Wheat Pools in Winnipeg in 1927; toured Soviet
agricultural
areas in 1930; became director of the Grain Department of the Empire
Marketing
Board in London in 1931; made three tours of the grain-producing areas
in the
Soviet Union during the summer of 1932 about which he submitted reports
via the
British Embassy in Moscow to the British Foreign Office (see below).
He never
spoke publicly about his
observations,
presumably because he expected to continue his visits. Unfortunately,
the
Soviets declined to issue him a visa for 1933. However, he presumably
wrote a
report for the Empire Marketing Board in 1933:
Andrew Cairns, Agricultural
Production in Soviet Russia: A Preliminary Report as at May 1st,
1933 [London: Empire Marketing Board, 1933]
He died in
an airline crash near
New Dehli, India on
Thursday, 15May1958.]
By far the
greatest detail of the
agricultural and social
conditions in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1932 is provided by
Andrew
Cairns (docs. 2, 5 8, 10, 11, 13), who toured the grain producing
regions on
behalf of the Empire Marketing Board based in London, England.
Doc. 5:
10 May to 05
June 1932 tour of Western Siberia (Novosibirsk, Omsk), Kazakhstan,
Volga.
- During the 3 day train trip to
Novosibirsk, Cairns did
not see a single tractor working.
- amazing amount of begging for
food.
- refers many times to taking
photographs of starving
children and adults.
- very high cost of food.
Cairns met
and received much
background information from
Dr. Schiller, the Agricultural Attache of the German Embassy. Due to
severe
drought, the 1931 harvest in Western Siberia had been very poor. (In
May 1932 the
weather and agricultural land continued to be extremely dry, but Cairns
received reports that good rains finally arrived in June.) The Soviets
had
confiscated virtually all the cattle from the Kirghiz such that they
were
starving. (Schiller had not seen a single head of cattle over a 110 km
trip.)
(p38) “The
population of
Kazakhstan was 5 million, 3.5
million of which were Kirghizian, but many, many thousands of the
Kirghizians
had died of hunger and, in [Schiller’s] opinion, 1 million must die as
they
were all nomads and without their cattle (the bulk of which had been
collected
by the Government for meat), they could not live.” … “At every station
I
[Cairns] saw hundreds of them -- all
thin, cold, rag-clad, hungry and many begging for bread. … In two days
motoring
in one direction from Slavgorod I saw many small groups of Kirghizians
camping
on the prairie -- every
group beside a
horse which had died and all eating the meat for food, and drying the
skin in
the sun to make boots, etc. “
[W.Z. A CLEAR CASE OF GENOCIDE!]
(p43) “Most
of the people in his
[fat and cheerful Mayor
of Slavgorod] rayon had come from the Ukraine a long time ago, 85
percent of
the peasants were in collective farms, …”
(p47)
“… large settlement of
German Mennonites not very
far from Slavgorod …” …
“Many of
their relatives had
gone to Canada in
1929 (Professor Aughowgan, Schiller’s predecessor, had raised such a
row in the
German press in 1929 about the persecution of German colonists during
the drive
against the kulaks -- best
farmers
-- that the Russian
Government granted
visas to 5,000 of them in the Slavgorod area) and did I know anything
about
Canada?” [Cairns took a letter from one woman who had relatives in
Winnipeg.]
(p49) “Eighty five percent of the
population were
Mennonites.” … “…
the children did not
look well and a number of them, both in Siberia and the Middle Volga,
looked
very poorly, thin and very swollen tummies --
in a few groups which I photographed there were children
with enormous,
hunger-swelled stomachs.”
(p52)
“… Pavlodar
where 100 people were dying per day of hunger; during the winter and
early
spring only Kirghizians had died, but now Russians were dying too …”
(p53) “The
director told us that
last year the crop
around Omsk was worse than in the famine year of 1921.” [Privately,
Cairns is
very critical of the drive for mechanization at expense of inhabitants.
Cairns
presumably visited the state farm “Gigant" in 1930 (p57)]
(p61-69) On
the train trip from
Omsk, through Chelyabinsk
(Urals), Ufa (Bashkir Republic), Buguruslan (Middle Volga) to Samara,
Cairns
and Schiller noted the slightly improving crop conditions, the
variations in
food prices (8 roubles for a very small piece of black bread) and the
dissatisfaction of the people. The Samara authorities organized tours
for them,
gave very optimistic statics and predictions, and attempted to minimize
contact
with ordinary people. However, some brave people contradicted the
authorities
and said that workers got only 500 gm per day, family members only 250
gm, and
that they were paid only 0.27 roubles per day and not 1.65 roubles as
promised.
(p70)
Cairns and Schiller left
Samara for Moscow on
03Jun1932. East of the Volga River, the winter rye and spring sown
wheat were
good but weedy, but got progressively worse as they travelled west. No
bread
for sale, but butter and milk available. “All day long peasants spoke
of the
passive resistance they were offering.” “… passed through a section of
the
Central Black Earth district and there the amount of land idle seemed
to be
even greater than in any place we had seen during the trip, excepting
Western
Siberia.”
Doc. 10:
15 June to
30 July 1932 tour of Ukraine, Crimea and Northern Caucasus (“Drusag” in
the
Kuban)
(p105) On
train trip from Moscow
before Cairns reached
Ukraine, “the farming seemed to be done by individual peasants as the
grain was
largely confined to small strips.” In Ukraine, “the fields increased in
size
rapidly (more collectivization), but the bulk of the crops were very
poor, thin
and very weedy.” Much
land uncultivated.
“At the first large station [before Kyiv] a loaf of extremely coarse
black
bread sold for 10 roubles.” Scores of “rag-clad hungry peasants, some
begging
for bread” at each stop.
“The autumn
sown crops were
generally badly
winter-killed, spindly, weedy and short, and the spring sown crops were
choked
by weeds. But all the crops were of good colour, indicating that they
had ample
moisture. I did not see a single tractor all day.”
(p106f) On
17Jun1932, Cairns
wandered through Kyiv
looking at food prices and talking to people. Two women, gathering
tender grass
to make soup, “were
third category
workers and got only 125 roubles per month and only 200 grams of bread
per
day.” On the way back to my hotel I saw a horrible sight -- a man dying on the street.”
(p109) The
starving peasants
flocked to the cities: “…
the population of Kyiv had increased from 400 to 600 thousand in 2
years, and
the number of workers by 110 thousand.”
(p109) “In
the hotel I got my key
from a young Jewess who
said she had come there from Philadelphia for a visit in 1929 and saw
“what was
what”; so she had returned 9 months ago, given up her U.S. citizenship
and
never wished to return to America.”
(p111)
“He said he
was a second category worker and
got 180
roubles per month and 525 gms of bread per day, that first category
workers got
600 gms of bread per day and street conductors only 400 and absolutely
nothing
else. What surprised me most in Kyiv was not what the people said
(although
conditions there seemed to be worse than in any place I visited in the
next
five weeks), but that they should all --
young, middle aged and old alike --
be unanimous and that none of them seemed to care what
they said or who
heard them, even the police and G.P.U.”
(p112)
While passing a very large
military camp, “I remarked
that never in all my life had I seen so many soldiers as I had seen in
Russia.
… I thought of the hundreds and thousands of armed soldiers I had seen
in every
village, town and station I had seen, and of the large numbers I had
seen even
on farms, but I did not say anything.”
(p116) “The
communists, she [young
interpreter] said,
realized very well that the French revolution had been broken by the
peasants
and they were very much afraid the Russian peasants would break the
Russian
revolution if they were left alone as they were in NEP (when things
were very
good, and there was an abundance of food and she could take a holiday
and spend
money and not worry about tomorrow). The Party was, therefore,
determined to
change the psychology of the peasants and eventually to make good
communists of
them.”
(p118)
“Next day, June 22nd,
I was taken to
visit the Jewish National Kolhoz near Kyiv. The president was a very
cocky
young communist …” Farm sold products in the kolhoz bazaar and paid Government rent of
300 roubles per
year; workers paid
3 roubles per day,
900 roubles per year, meals for 24 kopeks per day. “I remarked that the
farm
seemed to be highly favoured and my
interpreter said: ‘Yes, of course it is, because it is populated
entirely by
Jews, and as a national minority they get many privileges,’ …” Cairns
observed:
“All you say goes to confirm my impression that you have a very fine
agreement with the
Government, and enjoy very many
privileges.”
(p120)
“I left
Kyiv early in the evening and arrived in Dniepropetrovsk late in the
afternoon
the next day of June 23rd [1932]. I got very
little sleep during the
night as at every station hundreds of peasants were fighting to get on
to or
into the roof, couplings and steps of the train.”
“I … was
surprised to see so much
good land … now lying
idle. The spring sown crops were everywhere very late and full of
weeds, but
all of good colour as the weather had been ideal. Where the land had
been
fairly well cultivated , the winter wheat was good to very good.” … “As
usual,
all day I looked for cattle, but saw only fine grass going to waste.”
(p127)
In 3 years
from 1928 to 1931, the Dnipropetrovsk oblast had lost 57% of horses,
70% of
cattle, 76% of pigs and 87% of sheep.
(p128)
During trip
from Dniepropetrovsk to Simferopil
27Jun1932, Cairns summarizes agricultural conditions in
Ukraine: “Good
winter wheat where the land was
moderately well cultivated, all spring crops late and very weedy, much
land recently
in cultivation now idle, much good grass but no livestock, practically
no hay
made, virtually no summer fallow, and everywhere a magnificent crop of
weeds.”
(p129)
Discussion
of idiocy of exporting food while people were starving.
(p130) In
Simferopil 28Jun1932,
Cairns was told that
Crimea had 750,000 people (38% Tatar); they were expecting a very good
crop of
winter wheat; had had good weather all summer but were getting too much
rain
and could not get started with the harvest; had a very good crop last
year also
and in 1930 nearly as good a crop as they expected this year. It was an
off-year for fruit in Crimea.
There was
more bread for sale than
he had seen anywhere
in Russia. “While conditions were undoubtedly bad, there was nothing
like as
much begging or obvious hunger as in the Ukraine.”
(p132)
Cairns
notes that Russians always over-estimate yield of crops by at least
25%. They
were combining wheat too early and with second growth; turning over wet
barley
to keep it from heating; shoveling wet grain onto the ground out of 6
enormous
tractor trucks; enormous pile of grain on the ground at the elevator
being
worked over to keep it from moulding.
(p134)
Chambermaid in Simferopil
hotel: “… soon the
Communists would be beaten by the peasants and then conditions would
get much
better.”
Cairns was
joined by Mr. Vyvyan of
the Embassy staff on
July 10 and by Schiller on July 11, 1932. Schiller gave a very
pessimistic
report of his “10 days trip to Kyiv and Vinnitsa (the centre of the
sugar beet
industry in the Ukraine) …” “At Vinnitsa the sugar beets were badly
infested
with caterpillars and choked with weeds.” The spring sown wheat and
oats were
badly rusted.
Vyvyan and
Cairns left Simferopil
on July 11, 1932 to
Melitopol [Zaporizhia oblast] where they “visited very fine
Czechoslovakian
kolhoz” and on July 14 to Sinelnikovo [Dnipropetrovsk oblast].
(p140) “The crops … were like
those around Melitopol
-- odd good fields
of winter wheat where
the land was well cultivated, but mostly poor and the spring crops all
very
poor and choked with weeds.”
Similar
conditions were observed
on their trip to Rostov
[Russian Federation] and visits to surrounding area.
(p141) “Although we saw many very
thin children on the
main street and in the central park, we both got the impression that
the people
were better dressed and that general conditions were better than in any
place
we had visited.” (Vyvyan flew
to Moscow
on July 17, 1932.)
(p142) On a
bus tour of American
tourists “to Verblud
-- the large
experimental State grain
farm about 70 km east of Rostov” --
talked
to two Jews from New York and Chicago, who seemed particularly
disillusioned.
(p144)At Verblud (which he had
visited in 1930), Cairns
spent an evening with a level-headed American-Canadian (McDowell), who
had
become a Russian citizen, joined the Party and became active in an
Inspection
Committee and who openly related the grave problems they were having.
“All the
spring wheat I saw was simply rotten with rust.”
(p146)
Cairns next travelled 100
km to “Gigant” (“the
greatest grain factory in the world”), where a Russian-American (in
charge of
the machine shop) showed him around. They had imported a great deal of
modern
machinery which often broke down and proved useless, such that they had
to
revert to “old fashioned Russian reapers”.
“… I had several long and
interesting conversations with
the chairman -- a
young Jew who spoke
English rather well.”
(p148)
The
Russian-American said that things were very good in 1928. “But
conditions
started to tighten in 1929, were hard in 1930, very bad in 1931, and
terrible
in the winter and spring of 1932.” … “The Party would never again make
the
people suffer as they had done, as they (the Party) had learned a
bitter
lesson.” … “The Government had sold far too much grain last autumn and
their
policy was to fulfill their contracts even at the expense of the
starving
people -- which
they did. But they would
not do it again as the people would not stand for it.”
[W.Z.
HOW WRONG HE
WAS!]
(p149)
Cairn’s (Jewish
Chairman) friend told him: In Gigant “practically all the combines were
standing still, choked full of green weeds.” …
The Party would not “export so much and might even go so
far as to
import some consumption goods.” … The Party fully realized that the
local
people had been too enthusiastic and had collected too much grain,
especially
in the Ukraine, …” … He had been in U.S. for 7 months in 1931 and was
amazed at
“how efficiently the people in U.S. factories worked.”
(p153) When
the Jewish Chairman of
the Central Executive
Control Commission asked Cairns for a frank assessment of Gigant,
Cairns
responded “that it was an enormous white elephant; that it was the
height of
stupidity to rely exclusively upon tractors and only heavy machinery on
any
farm, let alone under conditions such as existed in the North Caucasus;
and
that the farm would never pay for the capital invested in it even with
good
management, let alone with the type of management in charge at present.”
(p155f)
Cairns
left Rostov late 23 July 1932 to Kavkazkaya (near Krasnodar on Kuban
River) and
was driven 50 km to German Agricultural Concession called “Drusag”,
where
Schiller joined him.
- He was met by the director Dr.
Dittlof and his wife,
both of whom went to work at 4:30 a.m. next morning.
- “I shall always remember the
four days I spent on the
Concession and the days I spent at the Embassy as the only true treats
I had
during 4½ months in Russia.”
- Drusag was very efficiently run,
as contrasted with the
State farm across the road.
- Harvesting by horses was half as
costly as harvesting
by tractors.
- Most of Dittloff’s foremen and
many of his workers were
“kulaks” who had been dispossessed.
(p158)
Along the Kuban River, “the
only obviously happy
peasants I have seen during my travels in Russia.” (In contrast to the
miserable German colony in Western Siberia.)
(p161f)
Cairns and Schiller left
“Drusag” on 28 July
1932, through Rostov and on route to Kharkiv noted the same miserable
crop
conditions. Next day they called on Narkozem and once again were fed
questionable
statistics and optimistic projections. They conceded that collecting
the grain
quotas would be an “extremely difficult task”.
(p165)
Cairns and Schiller “paid
90 roubles each, over
and above the cost of our railroad tickets, for the privilege of riding
over
night in the international sleeper on the crack new Kharkiv-Moscow
express.”
Doc. 13:
12 to 22
August 1932 tour of the Volga region (Voronezh, capital of Central
Black Earth
region)
(p174f)
Cairns left Moscow and
arrived in Voronezh
[Russian Federation, northeast of Kharkiv] on August 13, 1932. “The
people in
the streets looked even poorer than they do in most towns of similar
size, and
the number of rag clad, pot-bellied children seemed to be as high, if
not
higher, than usual.”
(p175)
The
authorities would not let Cairns see the sugar beet farms but sent him
to the
southeast corner of the oblast. “The vice-president whom I interviewed
was an
extremely stupid young Jew (every day I am impressed by the very large
number
of Jews there must be in Russia --
there
actually seems to be enough to fill nearly all the administrative
posts, in the
Government agricultural departments at least) and I got little
information from
him.”
(p179)
On his
August 14, 1932 train trip to Kalach, Cairns noted the terrible
agricultural
conditions: weeds; stunted sunflowers choked with weeds; very late and
poor
carrots; stunted and very weedy sugar beets;
land lying idle; practically no summer fallow; hungry and
miserable
peasants; no bread in bazaars; etc.
(p180)
“Later a
table was set on a porch overlooking a small river and while we (the
young
Jewish secretary of Rispolkom, the assistant secretary of the Party and
myself)
watched nude women bathing, we were served good vegetable soup with fats and tongue,
roasted chicken, fine new mashed
potatoes soaked in butter, whole wheat bread, milk and fruit juices.”
On August
15, 1932 Cairns visited
the “Kolachevski”
sovkoz: most grain cut; sunflowers poor with weeds; etc.
(p181)
French
Communist writing for l’Humanite tried
to be positive and was “very unhappy about the rate of progress the
Communists
were making in France, but thought they were making very rapid progress
in
Germany.”
(p182f)
Because of
schedule foul up, Cairns was stranded in Talavaya for a day before
proceeding
on to Stalingrad. He relates a whole series of interesting
observations,
incidents and conversations. He refers to 30 pot-bellied children
living on
black bread and watermelon.
(p189)
Cairns
arrived by boat to Saratov late on August 19, 1932 and had next morning
had a
good discussion with Professor Tulikov, who “to my amazement, confirmed
the
worst stories I had heard from the peasants.”
(p192)
“In Saratov
I had the good fortune to meet a member of the Central Control
Commission (an
Armenian Jew who spoke English extremely well) and travelled with him
to
Moscow.” This
official “was just
returning to Moscow after a five week inspection tour of the villages
in the
Lower Volga”, who provided Cairns with good information.
- The rye crop was good, but all
the other crops were
extremely poor.
- “He had also been in the German
Republic of the Volga and
there the crops were especially bad.”
[W.Z. The
Volga German Autonomous
Soviet Socialist
Republic was created in 1924 from the German colony in the area, which
in 1897
contained some 1.8 million Germans. There were about 605,000 Germans
listed in
the 1939 census. It was formally extinguished on 07Sep1941, following
the
German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22Jun1941. The vast majority of
the
Germans were deported to Siberia and the Gulags.]
- “From all their reports the
conditions in the Ukraine
were very bad and the loss of livestock there had also been very heavy
during
the past year.”
- “The success of Torgsin was
greatly exaggerated and it
made only a few million gold dollars per year as the Russians had only
a very
limited amount of jewellery. However, in the Caucasus, where the women
had
always worn a lot of jewellery, Torgsin had been a very great success.”
(p194)
Cairns
concludes his report by making several sarcastic suggestions:
- “state that while the poor
peasants were happy a few
years ago to receive livestock and other capital stolen from the best
farmers
(called kulaks)that now the poor peasants were not only poorer but
hungry, and
it was necessary to invite the good farmers back to do some work and
raise
livestock and other sorely needed foods.”
- “that they had reluctantly found
it necessary to fire
all the Jews and other town birds managing white elephants called State
grain
and cattle factories, communes and many of the collectives, as despite
their
admirable qualifications to accept and expound the teachings of Marx
and Lenin,
unfortunately they knew little or nothing about farming.”
Doc. 2:
Enclosure of 03 May
1932 (Andrew Cairns to William Strang)
- “… information given to me by
friends and foreign
specialists.”
(p7)
Conditions in
Donetsk coal mines are appalling due to lack of food.
(p8)
“The day
clerk at the Grand Hotel tells me that the collective farms around his
home in
the Ukraine have absolutely nothing, and that there is a great deal of
“trouble” there.”
- Many American engineers are
returning home, as are
German engineers, because they are now being paid in roubles.
Doc. 8: 02
August 1932 Cables to
Empire Marketing
Board
(p99-101) These
cables are a very concise summary of Cairns’ observations described in
Documents 5, 10 and 13 above.
Doc. 11: 12
August 1932 note from
Cairns to Lloyd
(p166)
“However,
Kissin [President of Exportkhleb] admitted that exports of grain from
Russia
this year would be less than last year.”
“He said they had not been able to
sell any so far to
Germany, France or many other countries. They had sold very little to
Italy and
Greece. There only good sale so far was 100,000 tons to the United
Kingdom for
August-September shipment.”
[However, the enclosed cable
states “THEY SOLD TO AUGUST
EIGHTH THOUSAND TONS WHEAT FOR AUGUST SEPTEMBER SHIPMENT TO UNITED
KINGDOM
…”. The “eighth” is
probably a misprint
for “eighty” and 80,000 tons presumably refers to metric tonnes.]
[W.Z. By
buying the 100,000 tons
of wheat, while they
were fully aware of the famine conditions in Ukraine, the British
Government
became complicit in furthering the Holodomor.]
Part
2: Correspondence
between Foreign Office and
British Embassy in Moscow (1932)
Doc. 1: 28
March 1932; Ovey (Moscow)
to Simon
(p3)
Stories that
“traffic between the Ukraine and the consuming regions lying to the
north of it
is closely controlled, no one being allowed to bring more than 1,000
roubles
out from the Ukraine, and all grain in the possession of private
persons
entering the Ukraine being confiscated.”
Doc. 3: 20
May 1932; Ovey (Moscow)
to Simon
- Observations of Ambassador
Esmond Ovey during
05-15May1932 trip to Ukraine.
(p13)
In Odesa:
“The people seemed generally to speak the Ukrainian language. All the
papers
are in Ukrainian with the exception of a Jewish one. There are no
Russian
papers but there is a Russian and Jewish theatre. Hebrew and other
dialects are
taught in the schools.”
[W.Z. Is this the result of the
Ukrainization program
adopted during the NEP years prior to 1928?]
Doc. 4: 08
June 1932; Memorandum of
Greenway
(p23)
“… a brief
resume of our existing reports” on Financial, Economic and
Agricultural,
Internal, and Military conditions in the Soviet Union.
Doc. 6: 18
July 1932; Ovey (Moscow)
to Simon
(p79)
Simon quotes
Molotov and Kaganovich blaming the Ukrainian Bolsheviks of insufficient
leadership of collective farm organization.
Doc. 7: 01
Aug 1932; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon re Vyvyan
tour of Crimea and Ukraine
- Vyvyan joined Cairns in Crimea
on 10 July 1932. His
report repeats that of Andrew Cairns. (See doc. 10)
(p83)
“… the
movements of Ukrainian peasants to the towns or from north to south is
stopped
by withholding railway tickets.”
(p93)
May 1932
decree to allow “Collective farm trade is considered in many quarters
to be the
beginning of a wholesale reversion to NEP , and to have had already a
considerable effect in stimulating the agricultural workers.”
[W.Z. HOW WRONG VYVYAN WAS!]
(p97) “His
opinion, which he told me was widely held, was interesting, that any
concession
to the peasants is bound to affect industrial workers adversely, and
that the
government cannot afford to estrange the proletariat of the towns.”
[W.Z. THIS VIEW TURNED OUT TO BE
CORRECT!]
Doc. 9: 10
August 1932; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p102) Refers to 07Aug1932 decree
“instituting severe
sanctions for the protection against pilferage of the property of State
undertakings, collective farms and co-operatives [including crops in
the
fields] , and of goods conveyed by rail or by water.”
[W.Z. This is the infamous “five
ears of corn” decree,
allowing starving people scavenging for food on collective farmland to
be
shot.]
Doc. 12: 14
August 1932; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p170)
“Stalin’s six
points (or some of them) have already had a remarkable effect in
promoting the
growth of a new bourgeois class, …
.
Recruits to their ranks are even coming from across the Atlantic,
generally
American Jews of Russian origin.” … “As the New Economic Policy created
the
Nepmen, so the Five-Year Plan is in its turn breaking the egalitarian
structure
of Soviet society and bringing a class of non-proletarians and
ex-proletarians
into positions of privilege and authority. At the changeover from
N.E.P. to
planning, the Nepmen were destroyed.”
Doc. 14: 25
August 1932; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p195)
Strang
explains that the real target of the “five ears of corn decree” (see
Doc. 9)
are the starving peasants.
Doc. 15: 30
August 1932; Memorandum
of Walker (Moscow)
(p197)
Expands on
“five ears of corn decree” with examples of death penalties, etc.
Doc. 16: 01
October 1932; Embassy
(Moscow) to Foreign
Office
(p201)
“A large
commission, including Kodatski, the president of the Leningrad Regional
Executive Committee, and Kirov, and said to be supported by troops, has
been
sent out into the country districts to prosecute the grain collection
campaign.” “Kulagin
[G.P.U. officer] …
put on a similar commission to the Caucasus.”
Doc. 17: 31
October 1932; Strang
(Moscow) conversation
with Walter Duranty
(p202)
“… he says
that the true position is only just being realized.”
- Duranty’s observations are similar
to those of Cairns and
others over the last 6 to 9 months.
(p203)
The Central
Committee rejected return to NEP.
(p204)
“There are
millions of people in Russia, peasants, whom it is fairly safe to leave
in
want. But the industrial proletariat, about 10 per cent of the
population, must
at all costs be fed if the revolution is to be safeguarded.”
“… no sign of any actively
subversive of insurrectionary
movement.”
In the Minutes, Lawrence Collier:
“Mr. Duranty is a
somewhat shady individual, who has been accused (though not on
convincing
evidence, as far as I can tell) of being in the pay of the Soviet Govt.”
Doc. 18:
19 November 1932; Ovey (Moscow) to Simon
(p206)
“These
figures show that the plan for the month of October had been fulfilled
to the
extent of only 57 per cent, … The areas which show the worst results
are the
primary grain-producing regions such as the Ukraine and the North
Caucasus.”
- “… the press continues to be full
of lamentations about
the failure of the country to supply its due quota of grain for the
towns.”
- Ovey refers to newspaper articles
blaming kulaks and
saboteurs for failure.
Doc.
19: 06 December 1932; Strang (Moscow) to Collier
Walter Duranty bypassed the
censors and sent an article
by safe hand to Paris and on to the New York Times, which published a
series of
articles on “the serious food situation in Soviet Russia” [25, 26, 27,
28, 29,
30 November 1932].
(p209) “Shortly afterwards Duranty
was visited by
emissaries from governing circles here (not from the Censorship
Department of
the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs but from higher spheres)
who
reproached him with unfaithfulness. How could he, who had been so fair
for ten
years, choose this moment to stab them in the back, when critical
negotiations
were taking place and when prospects of recognition by the U.S.A. was
brightening? What did he mean by it, and did he not realize that the
consequences for himself might be serious. Let him take this warning.”
1932
Summation
by Will Zuzak
From the descriptions of Andrew
Cairns and others, it is
obvious that the Holodomor was well under way in Ukraine and other
parts of the
Soviet Union by the spring of 1932. The symptoms were obvious: shortage
of
food, exorbitant food prices, people begging for food everywhere,
starving pot-bellied
children everywhere, people dying of starvation.
Indeed, the
Holodomor appears to
have had its beginnings
in 1928, when the New Economic Policy (NEP) instituted by Lenin was
replaced by
Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. Many people told Cairns that things had gotten
steadily worse since 1928.
Cairns and
Schiller were amazed
that the vast majority of
people spoke critically and defiantly in front of Communists and the
GPU. They
were still hoping and expecting the “Party” to stop exporting grain, to
lower
the grain quotas on the collectives and the remaining individual
farmers, for
the Party to make peace with the peasants and revert to some form of
NEP.
It appears
that there was a
standoff mentality of “us”
against “them” -- “kto
– kovo?” (who
will destroy whom?). History
shows that
the Communists won and the millions of peasants lost.
Cairns
intimates that in 1928 many
of the poor peasants
and never-do-wells were pleased to receive the property of the good
hard-working farmers, as the so-called kulaks were dispossessed and
banished to
Siberia. They could not imagine that they themselves were earmarked for
annihilation.
Similarly,
the Communists, the
townspeople and the
“proletariat” were eager to believe that the food shortages were the
result of
kulaks hoarding grain and the actions of saboteurs, bourgeois
nationalists,
Petliurites, Pilsudski agents and other “enemies of the State”. They
had no
inkling that they, too, were destined to be devoured by the “Great
Terror”
unleashed by Stalin and his inner circle.
C. 1933 (14 January to 18
December); Documents
20 to 64:
Doc. 20: 14
January 1933; Ovey
(Moscow) to Simon
(p211)
“… the
terrorization applied in the later stages of the grain-collection
campaign
appears to have increased in severity.”
-“The contemporary incarnation of
the class enemy has been
definitely located in Soviet agriculture, and exhortations to
exterminate him,
backed by … Stalin …, form the chief slogans of the daily press.”
- Ovey refers to several Ukrainians
being tried and shot
and gives an example of “gradual party purge” in North Caucasus [Kuban
region].
(p212)
“The Ukraine
has been the most backward of all the chief grain areas, and the rate
of its
deliveries has steadily declined, only 50 per cent of the month’s plan
has been
carried out in December.”
Doc. 21: 27
February 1933; Ovey
(Moscow) to Simon
(p214) The decree of 23Sep1932
forbidding “seed loans for
either the autumn or the spring sowings” was softened on 25Feb1933 by a
decree
“that in view of the loss of a part of the harvest in the steppe zone
of the
Ukraine and in the Kuban region of the Northern Caucasus owing to
unfavourable
climatic conditions, it has been found necessary to provide seed for
those
areas from the State grain reserve, to the amount of about 20 million
poods for
the Ukraine and 15 million poods for the North Caucasus.”
(p214)
“These are,
of course, the regions where the food situation is worst and where the
most
violent measures have been taken to secure the execution of the
grain-collection plan.”
[W.Z. Stalin did not issue this
decree for humanitarian
reasons. It was to try to ensure that there was enough grain to plant
the
spring crops. Any of this “seed grain” that was used for food was to
ensure
that there were enough peasants alive on the collective farms to do the
spring
sowing.]
Doc. 22: 05
March 1933; Ovey
(Moscow) to Foreign Office
(p215)
“Conditions
in Kuban have been described to me by recent English visitor as
appalling and
as resembling an armed camp in a desert --
no work no grain no cattle no draught horses, only idle
peasants or
soldiers. Another correspondent who had visited Kuban was strongly
dissuaded
from visiting the Ukraine where conditions are apparently as bad
although
apathy is greater.”
- “ … this morning names of forty
officials arrested for
agricultural sabotage have been published in the press.”
Doc. 23: 07
March 1933; Ovey
(Moscow) to Simon
(p216)
Update on
arrests in Doc. 22; total of 70 arrested.
Doc. 24:
13 March
1933; Ovey (Moscow) to Simon
(p217)
“Mr.
Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian … having recently returned from a
trip in
the Ukraine and Kuban, tells me that the conditions, especially in the
Kuban,
would have been incredible to him if he had not seen them with his own
eyes.
That part of the country is becoming a desert, inhabited by starving
peasants
and occupied by well-fed troops.”
- Ovey
makes several other remarks
and encloses
translations of two letters from the Volga German Republic
Doc. 25:
27 March
1933; Embassy (Moscow) to Foreign Office
(p221)
References
to more letters describing terrible conditions.
(p222)
Minutes by
A. Walker 7 April: “These letters serve to confirm the articles of Mr.
Gareth
Jones at present appearing in the Daily
Press.”
Doc. 26: 09
April 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p223)
Multiple
descriptions of the terrible conditions.
(p225)
Reports
indicate that nowhere is the situation worse than in the Ukraine, where
the
only hope of the desperate population seems to lie in the rumour of a
contemplated annexationist coup on
the part of Poland.”
Doc. 27:
08 May
1933; Strang (Moscow) to Simon
(p227f)
More
information on conditions and translated bitter letters, such as:
(p230) “Socialism has produced
the deaths of tens of
millions of citizens and peasants in Russia …”
- “At the present
moment only
fascism has the right outlook on Bolshevism. Hasten to unite with the
German
fascists; that is the only remedy for Marxism.”
Doc.
28: 01 June 1933;
Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p232) More
letters and
incidents, including two students wanting British citizenship.
Doc.
29: 19 June 1933;
Embassy
(Moscow) to Foreign Office
(p236f) “…
enclosing letters from
anonymous
disaffected Soviet citizens” such
as
from “A Poor Russian Peasant” emanating from the Kyiv district:
“Are the civilized
powers really
incapable of un-masking the Jewish-Soviet machinations: to sell at a
loss to
undermine the competition of goods produced by capitalists?”
“… to buy our
goods is to
aggravate the famine … to buy our goods is to strengthen the Bolshevik
party.”
“Only Hitler knows
the truth,
what they really represent, these friends who with lies proclaim world
peace.”
(p238) “For example it is not
mentioned that in the
Ukraine millions of the population have died from hunger.”
Doc.
30: 22 June 1933;
Farrer
conversation with Leslie Pott (Leningrad)
(p241) “Mr. Pott
said that
conditions in the Soviet union
were becoming almost incredibly bad.” … “… that conditions in the
Ukraine and
South Russia were even worse.”
Doc.
31: 26 June 1933;
Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p243) Refers to 20
June 1933
decree establishing
“Procurator’s Department of the U.S.S.R.” to replace “Procurator’s
Departments of
the constituent republics of the Soviet Union”
Ivan Alexeivich
Akulov and
deputy Andrei Yanuarovich Vyshinski were subsequently appointed to this
position. [Reference to Yagoda.]
Doc.
32: 29 June 1933;
Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p246) “… rumour of
a staged
trial of Ukrainian
intellectuals … is probably based on recent press attacks upon the
All-Ukrainian Academy of Science on account of its alleged bourgeois
and
nationalist tendencies.”
“The Academy of
Science is accused
of … counter revolution and nationalism”; replace Russian word “Zavod”
with
“virobnya”, etc.
[W.Z. IS THIS NOT
AN EXAMPLE OF
RUSSIAN CHAUVINISM AGAINST ANYTHING UKRAINIAN?]
Doc.
33: 04 July 1933; Strang (Moscow) to Simon
Discussion of
decrees to enforce
Kremlin directives:
- Grain deliveries
to be “direct
function of the planned spring sowings, irrespective of whether the
planned
area was, in fact, sown or not.”
- Very detailed
analysis by
Strang.
(p250) Postyshev speech of 10
June 1933 on failings
of the Ukrainian Communist Party --
spies, Petliurists, foreign agents, bourgeois nationalist
activities,
etc. [Strang does not mention Postyshev’s attack on Mykola Skrypnik.]
Doc.
34: 10 July 1933;
Strang
(Moscow) to Simon [Skrypnik suicide]
(p253) “… the
Soviet press of 8th
July
announced the death by suicide of Nikolai Alexeivich Skrypnik, an old
Bolshevik, a member of the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist party
and
Commissar for Education of the Ukrainian Republic.” [W.Z. and
presumably an old
friend of Vladimir Lenin.]
(p254)
On 10 June
1933,
“Postyshev made a violent attack on Skrypnik as the person most
responsible for
allowing the Ukraine to become honeycombed with wrecking,
counter-revolutionary
and separatist organizations
working in the
interest of foreign capitalist circles.”
Doc.
35: 17 July 1933;
Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p255) Number of
people that died
vary up to “the
fantastic figure of 10 million”.
- Soviet protests
of German fund
for starving Germans in the Volga region.
- Fewer signs of
malnutrition in
Moscow
- Typhus epidemic
in Leningrad
and Moscow; brought in by peasants from the countryside.
Doc.
36: 23 May 1933;
Schiller
(German Moscow) via Duchess of Atholl to Anthony Eden
(p258) In spring of
1933,
Schiller made a 1200 km
tour by car of Kuban Oblast (Kropotkino, Krasnodar, Stavropol, Armavir,
Polovoye, Salska-Bieloglina). He gives a very detailed description.
- The Kuban
Cossacks were the
main target of expulsion, deportation and starvation.
- “Thus, from the
political
point of view the Cossack danger may already be considered to have been
eradicated.”
- Fears typhus
epidemic.
- “Resigned
despair and complete
apathy characterize the people rather than wrath and bitterness.”
(p263) Soviet
Government
exported 1.5 million tons of grain from last year’s crop which could
have saved
5 million lives.
(p265) In Kuban only 25% of
arable land sown by
beginning of May 1933.
(p266) “It is proposed to transfer
peasants from the
Voronezh Province to the Kuban.”
Doc 37: 19 July 1933; Bullard
(Leningrad) to Strang
(p269) Rumour that Stalin’s second
wife, Nadia
Alleluyeva, committed
suicide because Stalin wrote out an order for his wife’s arrest.
- Young Jewess student in
Leningrad spoke of dreadful
conditions of relatives in Ukraine and that Skrypnik committed killed
himself
in despair.
Doc. 38: 22
July 1933; Memorandum
by Rapp (Moscow)
(p271) Eyewitness account of
British subject about
terrible conditions building the White Sea Canal.
Doc. 39: 01
August 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon re
“Akulov”
(p274)
“Mr.
Podolski, with whom Mr. Cholerton [of Daily
Telegraph] is on terms of friendship, is a Jew, 37 years of
age, and a
member of the Communist Party since 1918.” Podolski states “that Mr.
Akulov, in
his position as Procurator of the Soviet Union, would be independent of
and
superior to the head of the O.G.P.U.” [Yagoda]
Doc. 40: 10
August 1933; Memorandum
by Walton
(p276) Rumours that Skrypnik fired
shots at Kosior and
Postyshev before committing suicide.
- Khvylovy committed suicide on 13
May 1933. Wide-spread
arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, in particular, Dr. Siak, Shumski
and
Yavorski
Doc. 41: 15
August 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p278) Foreigners’ passports
travelling by train are
retained by railway officials.
Doc. 42: 15
August 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p279)
Progress of
harvest in Ukraine criticized as most unsatisfactory.
Doc. 43: 22
August 1933; Times Report
(p283) – Restrictions on travel by
foreign correspondents.
- Criticism of the Moscow Chancery
for turning away
Soviet citizens who volunteer information about the famine.
Doc. 44: 24
August 1933; Golden
(Save the Children
Fund) to Vansittart
07
September 1933; Foreign Office to Coote
(p287) “… alarmist reports of the
situation in the
Ukraine and the North Caucasus.”
- “Save the Children Fund” preparing
to organize relief.
Doc. 45: 26
August 1933; Coote
(Moscow) to Simon
(p290) A decree published 16
August 1933 establishes an
All-Union Committee of Migration.
(p291) This decree “may be
interpreted as a sinister
admission of the depopulation resulting from this year’s famine.”
- Dr. Schiller estimates between 5
and 10 million deaths in
the present year.
Doc. 46: 29
August 1933; Coote
(Moscow) to Simon
Dr. Schiller says that famine
conditions in the Urals are
worse than elsewhere. He doesn’t want to make any further tours. Gives
reference to two books:
Otto Schiller, Die
Krise der sozialistischen Landwirtschaft in der Sowjetunion
(Berlin: Paul
Perry, 1933)
Andrew Cairns, Agricultural
Production in Soviet Russia: A Preliminary Report as at May 1st,
1933 [London: Empire Marketing Board, 1933]
Doc. 47: 11
September 1933; Coote
(Moscow) to Simon
(p297)
Very
detailed report on visit of former French Premier Eduard Herriot fro 26
August
to 09 September 1933.
- Herriot was completely fooled by
the Soviets: He stated
that the reports of famine in the Ukraine were gross libels.
(p301)
“They are
presumably aware that the present Franco-Soviet rapprochement is due
rather to
a common hatred and fear of Hitlerite Germany than to any necessarily
permanent
community of interest or natural sympathy between the two countries.”
Doc. 48: 11
September 1933; Coote
(Moscow) to Simon
(p303)
Discussion
of meat quotas.
Doc. 49: 12
September 1933; Coote
(Moscow) to Simon
(p305)
Discussion
of Soviet harvest.
(p307)
Reference
to Duranty.
Doc. 50: 26 September 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
(p309)
Tour by Mr.
W. Duranty in North Caucasus and the Ukraine
(p310)
“According
to Mr. Duranty, the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower
Volga has
decreased in the past year by 3 million, and the population of the
Ukraine by
4-5 million.
(p311)
From Rostov
to Kharkiv, Duranty noticed large quantities of grain lying in the open
air.
Conditions were worse in Kharkiv; less to eat; dearth of cattle and
poultry;
only 10% excess mortality.
- “Numerous peasants, however, who
had come into the towns
had died off like flies.”
- “On 19 and 20 July [1933], over
200,000 people were
mobilized in Kharkiv and dispatched to work in the fields.”
(p312)
“The
Ukraine had been bled white.”
- “…, Postyshev is the real force in
the Ukraine. He and
his “boys” in the political departments now run the country.”
(p313)
“Mr.
Duranty thinks it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people
may have died
directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the
past
year.”
Doc. 51: 26
September 1933; Vyvyan
conversations with
Russians
(p314f) Gruesome stories.
- Continued rumours that Skrypnik
was “the focus of an
important nationalist movement in the Ukraine.”
Doc. 52: 27
September 1933;
European Federation of
Ukrainians Abroad to Simon
(p317)
Memorandum
on the Famine in Ukraine by Dm. Andriewsky and N. Hrab.
(p319)
“The
national character of this struggle pursued by the Bolsheviks in
Ukraine,
aiming at the extermination of the Ukrainians by famine, was
note by
many foreign observers.”
(p321) British bureaucrats decide
to ignore the appeal
because “it is anti-Soviet in complexion.”
Doc. 53: 30
September 1933; Carr
(League of Nations)
to Collier
(p322)
The
Norwegian delegate to the League of Nations, Joh. Ludw. Mowinckel, as
President
of the Council, attempted to have the famine in Ukraine put on the
formal
agenda of the League of Nations, but was told to bring it up at a
private
meeting of the Council, which instructed him to tell the petitioners to
ask the
International Red Cross to approach the Soviet Union to allow
humanitarian aid.
[Of course, the Soviets refused.]
Mowinckel had received and
transmitted submissions by the
Central Ukrainian Committee for Relief to Soviet Ukraine; Head of the
Ukrainian
Mission in France; Liaison Committee of Women’s International
Organisations;
and Senator Zaloziecky and Deputy Serbeniuk (via telegram).
(p324)
“Such well-known and
respected names as that of
His Eminence Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna and the names of Ukrainian
Greek
Catholic Bishops with His Eminence Metropolitan Count Scheptytzkyj at
the head
are there to assert that this catastrophic famine, unequalled in
history, is a
true peril.”
(p328)
“The best
proof that conditions are really serious is the appeals for assistance
being
made by Ukrainians domiciled in other countries.
1. The appeal of the
Greek-Catholic Church in Polish
Ukraine signed by the Metropolitan and Bishops.
2. The appeal of “Le Comite
ukrainien de secours aux
affames de l’Ukraine et du Kouban,” Brussels.
3. In Germany a joint relief
committee has been formed by
the Red Cross, the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Mennonites and
others,
called “Bruder in Not”.”
Doc. 54:
27
October 1933; Collier interview with Malone, Mrs. Christie, Miss Nike
(p329) The Quaker Relief
Organization “hoped to enlist
the help of H.M.G. in persuading the Soviet Government to allow a
relief
mission to enter the Ukraine”.
Collier declined: “Lastly,
anything to do with Ukrainian
nationalism at the present moment was like a red flag to a bull to the
Soviet
authorities.”
(p330) “The Federation of Jewish
Relief Organisations are
now carrying out relief work, distributing relief through Torgsin.”
Doc. 55: 14
October 1933; Strang
(Moscow) to Simon
W.H. Chamberlin (Manchester
Guardian, Christian Science
Monitor) and his wife (Russian origin and fluent in Russian) made a 10
day tour
to the South Russian Grain Belt. He visited 3 areas “Drusag” in the
North
Caucasus; and Poltava and Belaya Tserkva in Ukraine. The authorities
admitted a
10% death rate, but a young girl in a Poltava village told him “that
her mother
and four brothers and sisters had died of starvation”.
(p334) Chamberlin total: 4 to 5
million in Soviet Union
of whom 2 million in Ukraine, 2 million in Kazakhstan and 0.5 million
in the
North Caucasus.
(p335) Chamberlin “found, however,
that the active
resistance of the peasants had been broken both by terror and by mass
deportations.”
- Deportations in Kuban are still
going on. “The Cossack
element has been largely eliminated.”
- “Since 1929 the Ukraine has lost
about half its
livestock.”
(p337) Note
by Shone: “Mr.
Chamberlin’s estimate 4-5
million deaths from starvation in the Union is only about half Mr.
Duranty’s”.
Note by Collier: “Mr. Chamberlin
has the reputation of
being somewhat pro-Soviet, but much less so than Mr. Duranty.”
Doc. 56: 02
October 1933; Ukrainian
National Council
in Canada to Ramsay MacDonald (PM)
(p340) “… an urgent request to
take the necessary steps
to arrange for an immediate neutral investigation of the famine
situation in
Ukraine, with a view to organizing international relief for the
stricken
population.”
[The story of Mrs. Maria Zuk , who
managed to join her
husband in Canada is very descriptive.]
(p343)
There are several
enclosures of correspondence
emanating from this request.
Doc. 57: 07 November 1933; Chilston
(Moscow) to Simon
(p348)
Moscow
reports that grain deliveries have been fulfilled in Ukraine.
Note by
Shone: “At what a cost to
the inhabitants has
this been done!”
Doc. 58: 01
December 1933; Malone
to Collier
(p350)
Malone is
trying to get information about the Ukrainian Bureau in London (40
Grosvenor
Place). He knows that they are very much opposed to the
German-Skoropadsky
movement and that they protest against the treatment of Ukrainian
minorities by
the Polish and Soviet governments.
- Malone encloses a draft
constitution of the United
British Appeal Committee for Russian Relief.
(p351)
Laurence Collier replies to
Malone: “The chief
activity of the Ukrainian Bureau, in this country at least, seems to be
the
issue of periodical bulletins in which it maintains that Poland has not
lived
up to her
engagements to grant autonomy
to Eastern Galicia and protests against the treatment of Ukrainian
minorities
by the Polish and Soviet Governments (though the protests are more
frequently
directed against the former than against the latter Government). It
does not
approve of the Skoropadsky movement, however.”
Doc. 59:
04
December 1933; Chilston (Moscow) to Simon
(p353)
Summary of
Postyshev speech on 19Nov1933, “regarding the [thorough and ruthless]
methods
adopted in the Ukraine for ensuring the success of the Bolshevik
campaign in
regard to the collective farms.”
Doc. 60: 04
December; Chilston
(Moscow) to Simon
(p355)
Summary of
resolution and Kosior speech of 22Nov1933, in which Skrypnik is
demonized and
Kosior proposes an unceasing struggle against Russian chauvinism and
Ukrainian
nationalism.
Notes by
Shone: “We have had
information to the effect
that Skrypnik was in touch with Herr Rosenberg, in connexion with plans
for
detaching the Ukraine from the Soviet Union.” [???]
Doc 61: 07
December 1933; Minutes
by Shone and
Collier
(p357)
Reference
to Herriot claims that famine stories are part of Hitler’s propaganda
for the
establishment of an independent Ukraine.
[W.Z. DID HITLER EVER PROMOTE THE
INDEPENDENCE OF
UKRAINE?]
Doc. 62: 11December
1933; Ponsonby
Moore Crosthwaite
History
of Ukraine
and Its Relations with Poland and Russia
(p358-362) This is an excellent
analysis of the
geopolitical situation of Ukrainians in 1933.
- Polish Eastern Galicia: 3 million
Ruthenes, 1 million
Poles, 500,000 Jews (before WWI).
- Soviet Ukraine: 20 million (80%
Ukrainians, 9% Russians,
5% Jews -- 1926
census).
On
09Feb1918 the Central Powers
signed a separate peace
treaty with the Ukrainian Peoples Republic at Brest-Litovsk. On
28Dec1920 a
Russo-Ukrainian treaty was signed defining the relationship between the
two
Soviet Republics.
Doc. 63: 13/15
December 1933;
Newton – Oliphant
Correspondence
(p363) The Foreign Office
discourages Lord Newton to meet
with a Ukraine committee.
Doc. 64: 18 December 1933; Chilston
(Moscow) to Simon
re Ukrainian Nationalism
(p365)
As a result
of Kosior and Postyshev speeches alleging a Ukrainian Nationalist
conspiracy,
massive arrests were made. Skrypnik is made a scapegoat and Alfred
Rosenberg is
mentioned.
Notes by
Shone and Collier
downplay the possibility of
such a conspiracy in Ukraine, although they recognize the “apparent
futility of
the Ukrainian nationalist organisations abroad.”
1933
Summation
by Will Zuzak
As the year commences, Foreign
Office personnel note in
almost horrified disbelief as Stalin pursues his genocidal policies in
Ukraine,
the Kuban and other grain-growing areas of the Soviet Union. By the
summer of
1933, it is obvious to everyone that many millions have died by
starvation.
The
Communists won and millions of
peasants lost their
lives. Any active or passive resistance, any defiance was replaced by
submission and apathy. The countryside was so depopulated, that
townspeople had
to be mobilized by the hundreds of thousands to “bring in the harvest”.
The
denunciation of Ukrainization
and massive arrests of Ukrainian
intellectuals (and even members of the Communist Party of Ukraine),
indicates
that the Holodomor was, indeed, directed against the Ukrainian nation
and
culture. The constant references to bourgeois nationalists,
Petliurites,
Pilsudsky agents, etc. support this conclusion.
D. 1934-1935; Documents 65 to 85:
Doc. 65: February 1934; Malone to
Labour Party re
German-Ukrainian Relations
(p370-379) This is another
excellent article on the
geopolitical realities in Ukraine. (See also Doc. 62.)
- Ridicules the idea that
ex-hetman Skoropadsky has any
significant support in Ukraine or abroad.
- More than 300,000 German
colonists lived in south of
Ukraine.
- Both Austria and Russia covet
Galicia.
- “Both in Germany and Austria the
“Union for the
Delivery of the Ukraine” was created , and this Union undertook the
training of
more than 200,000 prisoners of war, who were destined as the basis of a
Ukrainian army.” [during WWI]
- Reference to [Alfred] Rosenberg
plan.
- Malone outlines the turmoil in
Ukraine after the
07Nov1917 “Kerensky” Revolution: Ukrainian Central Rada, Bolsheviks,
German
help, Skoropadsky dictatorship, Petliura.
- The German Rapallo policy (with
Soviet Union) and
Poland – Soviet Union non-aggression pact disappointed Ukrainians in
both Poland
and Soviet Union.
- “The German policy of
colonization towards the East is
well known and was set out in Hitler’s autobiography Mein
Kampf and Rosenberg’s booklet Der
Zukunftsweg einer Deutschen Aussenpolitik.”
- Reference to Ukrainian Military
Organization (U.W.O.)
under E. Konowalec and R. Jary.
- Reference to European
Nationalities Congress under Dr.
Ewald Ammende and Cardinal Innitzer, Chief Rabbi of Vienna, etc.
- Discussion of German-Polish
Pact, Polish-Russian Pact
and their impact on Ukraine.
(p378) “As
for Great Britain, she
can certainly never
allow for one moment a German industrial sphere stretching from the
Saar to the
Caucasus and including, as it would, the newly developed industrial
districts of
Dniepropetrovsk. At the same time we have to face the evidence that
there is a
growing Ukrainian independence movement probably stronger than ever
before.
This is due partly to the Soviet Ukrainization policy from 1923 to
1929, during
which time Ukrainian culture and language developed until this policy
was
reversed in 1930 and replaced by a policy of centralization from Moscow
and
liquidations of Ukrainian organizations, and partly due to the
starvation which
has been experienced in many districts of Ukraine. Any hostility on the
part of
Great Britain would only be playing into the hands of Germany and
increase the
German-Nazi influence.”
Doc. 66:
02 April
1934; Chilston report on Soviet Union in 1933
Annual
Report on
Russia for 1933
(p380) Discussion
of 1932 decree introducing compulsory passports, whose object was to
keep
“undesirables” from key districts.
- Redistribution of population in
the countryside.
(p382) “On
the 4th
July [1933] M. Nikolai
Alexeivich Skrypnik, an old Bolshevik, a member of the Central
Committee of the
All-Union Communist party, a member of the Politburo of the Ukrainian
Communist
party and Commissar for Education of the Ukrainian Republic, was
attacked in a
speech by M. Postyshev as being the one person most responsible for
allowing
the Ukraine to become honeycombed with wrecking, counter-revolutionary
and
separatist organizations working in the interest of foreign capitalist
circles.
Four days afterwards he committed suicide.”
[W.Z. In Doc. 34, Strang refers to
“my dispatch No. 371
of the 4th July” in which he describes the 10
June 1933 violent
attack on Skrypnik by Postyshev. Perhaps Chilston mixed up the dates.]
(p383) “In
most countries the
terrible famine of the
spring would have caused sanguinary riots, if not revolution; in the
Ukraine
the people died without a murmur.”
Doc. 67: 16
May 1934; Collier
interviews Ethel
Christie
(p384)
Quaker
Organization was sending parcels to individuals in Ukraine via Torgsin.
- Christie stated that the famine
in Ukraine this year
was almost as bad as last year.
- She wanted advice on the Ammende
project.
Doc. 68: 17
May 1934; Collier
interview with Ammende
and Dietloff
(p387)
Dietloff
gave a very dismal description of the situation in the Soviet Union:
- “colossal reduction in the
agricultural population
throughout the south of Russia … deliberate policy … ordered all
“useless
mouths” to leave the villages … deporting them to Siberia or simply
driving
them out into the wilderness to starve.”
(p388) “…
he illustrated his
statements by some gruesome
photographs.”
Ammende was
lobbying the British
for his “humanitarian
campaign” and suggested that admission of the Soviet Union to the
League of
Nations should be conditional on humanitarian aid to starving.
Doc. 69: 15
June 1934; Chilston
(Moscow) to Simon
(p391) Trials in Kyiv of 29
employees for speculation in
essential consumption goods. [food]
- Anti-semitic overtones;
[ref. 91] article by David Zaslavski (of Jewish origin
himself)
identified the accused as Jews by employing an arsenal of anti-semitic
stereotypes.
Doc. 70: 18
June 1934; Garbett
(Punjab) to Vansittart
(p393) “… determined effort is
being made to subvert the
peasants of the Punjab.”
- Appropriate documents were sent
to Garbett (in India)
to expose the true situation in the Soviet Union.
Doc. 71:
02 July
1934; Foreign Office to Smithers (House of Commons)
Although “we have a certain amount
of information about
famine conditions in the south of Russia” … “We do not want to make it
public ,
however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our
relations with them
would be prejudiced.”
Doc. 72: 02
July 1934; Duchess of
Atholl to Simon
(p399) Lady Atholl presents
information from Dr. Dietloff
and Malcolm Muggeridge (when he was at “Drusag” last year). Dietloff
replies at
length to 16 questions.
(p407)
Disastrous famine of 1933 …
“with its toll of ten
million lives”.
Note by Vyvyan: “Mr. Muggeridge,
to whom the Duchess
refers, tells me that … he has no doubt that Dr. Ammende … is financed
as an
agitator by the German Ministry of Propaganda.”
Doc. 73: 16
July 1934; Smithers to
Simon
Confirmatory
Evidence of the Existence of Famine in the Soviet Union
Particularly
in
Ukraine and the North Caucasus
(p411) Source of evidence:
Reliable newspaper
correspondents; Refugees; The Soviet Press and official Soviet
statements;
Photographs taken by foreigners; 15
Relief Organizations and Committees.
- The serious famine of 1933 left
conditions in such a
bad state that it leads “to the conclusion that famine must be worse in
1934
than in 1933.”
(p412)
Quotes of Malcolm
Muggeridge, Manchester Guardian,
25 to 29Mar1933
- Confirmation by Gareth Jones
(Evening Standard,
31Mar1933)
- Daily Telegraph, 25, 28 and
30Aug1933
- Canadian Gazette, 07Sep1933,
Humphrey Mitchell M.P.
- Toronto Star, 31Jul1933, M.H.
Halton
- Adolph Ehrt, Bruder
in Not! Dokumente der Hungersnot unter den deutschen Volksgenossen in
Russland
(Berlin: Bruder in Not, 1934) [with photographs]
- Czas Czernowitz, 19Aug1933
- Berlingske Tidende (Denmark),
24Aug1933
- Le Matin, 29Aug1933; Mrs. Martha
Stebalo
- Dilo (Lviv), 03Dec1933
- Answers, 24Feb1934 and
03Mar1934; Whiting Williams
- Christian Science Monitor,
29May1934; W.H. Chamberlin
(p415) Mr.
Whiting Williams and
Mr. Otto Wienerberger, an
Austrian engineer, took photographs of dead people in Kharkiv streets,
innumerable
bread and milk queues, and mass graveyards for the victims of the
famine.
Reference
98 on p460 by Marco
Carynnyk:
“Otto Wienerberger’s photographs
are probably the ones
reproduced in Ewald Ammende, Muss
Russland hungern? Menschen- und Volkerschicksale in der Sowjetunion
(Vienna: Wilhelm Braumuller, 1935). The book included 21 photographs
which
Ammende said had been taken by an Austrian engineer in Kharkiv in the
summer of
1933. They are for the most part shots of streets and show shops that
did not
exist before the 1930s. Unless evidence to the contrary is presented,
these
twenty-one pictures may be accepted as genuine and authentic. When
Ammende’s
book was translated into English as Human
Life in Russia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936.
Reprint. Cleveland:
John T. Zubal, 1984), however, only twelve of these pictures were
reprinted,
and fourteen others were added. Ammende asserted that the second group
of
pictures had been taken in the summer of 1933 by the manager of a
German
agricultural concession in the North Caucasus (Fritz Dittloff?), but it
can be
shown that most of them were taken during the famine of 1921-1922.
Nevertheless, they have often been inadvertently reproduced as evidence
of the
famine of 1932-1933.”
[W.Z. In
the Introduction to the
English-language version
of the book, Lord Dickinson (1936) states: “Dr.
Ammende has died, a victim of his own unceasing activity.” The
Preface by
Ammende is dated November 1935. It would be interesting to correlate
the date
and cause of death with the date of the final editing and publication
of the
book.]
(p415)
Further Evidence
Concerning Famine Conditions in 1934 are:
- Letters and reports from
organizations such as:
European Central Office for Church Aid; Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, Berlin;
Bruder-in
Not; British Subjects in Russia Relief Association; Federation of Jewish Relief
Organizations; Society of
Friends; Russian Assistance Fund.
- Visti (Kharkiv), 09Apr1934
- Daily Telegraph, 23May1934
- Times (London), 28/29May1934,
28June1934
- Visti (Kharkiv) 22Jun1934
- Berliner Tageblatt, 04Jul1934
- Visti (Kharkiv), 03Jul1934
[W.Z. The
seat of the Government
of Ukraine was
transferred from Kharkiv to Kyiv sometimes between 03 and 16Jul1934]
Doc. 74: 25
July 1934; Vyvyan to
Charnwood (House of
Lords)
(p418) Notes on how to reply to
Lord Charnwood’s question
about the famine “in these delicate circumstances”.
Note by
Lawrence Collier on
06Jul1934: “I fear there is
reason to believe that, when they found there was a shortage, they
deliberately
reduced the population in the country districts & otherwise
starved them to
feed the towns (see [Document 68]).”
Doc. 75: 25
August 1934, 08
September 1934; Duchess of
Atholl correspondence with Simon
(p422) Lady Atholl asks “if it
would be possible to make
our consent to Russia’s entry into the League conditional on the Soviet
Government taking steps to mitigate the famine.”
(p423)
“Hitler’s declared aim of
securing expansion in
Eastern Europe and Russia must have a much greater chance of success
than it
otherwise would, with Russian agriculture largely in ruins and Russian
peasants
dying by the million, and it seems to me that for this reason, the
Soviet
Government might be willing to allow help to be sent.”
Vyvyan
discourages this approach
and Sir John Simon
replies to Lady Atholl accordingly.
Doc. 76: 08
September 1934;
Chilston (Moscow) to Simon
(p425) In the past six months the
USSR has exported
472,068 tons of grain, 123,000 tons to the United Kingdom plus large
quantities
of butter, eggs, poultry, bacon and fish.
- Chilston discourages relief work.
Note by Lawrence Collier: “This is
an odd dispatch. Does
Lord Chilston really think that there is now no famine, or no prospect
of
famine, in the Soviet Union, because grain is being exported?”
Doc. 77: 11
September 1934; Charles
(Moscow) to Vyvyan
(p427) L.E. Hubbard Conversation
with Walter Duranty
- Duranty described his interview
with Stalin on
Christmas Day, 1933.
Note in
margin: “I think he
[Duranty] is a conscious
humbug & always was.”
Doc. 78: 31
December 1934; Chilston
(Moscow) to Simon
(p429) Chilston discusses
nationalist tendencies in
Ukraine and measures to combat them.
Doc. 79: 06,
14 February 1935;
Rushbrooke (Baptist
World Alliance) to Simon to Chilston
- Times, 05Feb1935, “Fear of
Famine in Russia”
- Meeting with Ammende
representing Cardinal Innitzer,
Continental Protestants, Jews, etc.
- Ask Rushbrooke asks, Simon
writes Chilston who
downplays possibility of famine in 1934-35, although independent
farmers (20%)
are still being squeezed.
- 1934 harvest was worse than in
1933.
Doc. 80: 20
February 1935, 08 March
1935; Chilston to
Simon to Rushbrooke
(p435) Although the 1934 crop was
about the same as 1933,
it was unlikely there would be famine.
Note by
R.L. Speaight: “… the
Soviet Govt are no longer
deliberately allowing peasants to starve (in order to force them into
collective farms) as there is little doubt that they did in 1933. … we
have had
a dispatch from Moscow showing that even the individual farmers are now
being
induced to collectivize themselves by kindness rather than by
brutality.”
Doc. 81: 09,
11 March 1935;
Rushbrooke to Simon
(p437) Negative response to relief
effort; would not even
ask Eden to bring up subject of famine during Soviet-Anglo security
meeting.
Doc. 82: 01,
11 April 1935;
Smithers to War Office to
Foreign Office
Letter by Smithers suggest deaths:
“The number was given
to me as 15,000,000.”
(p441) Reply that this was the
largest number they have
seen; the 1932-1933 numbers vary from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000.
(p442) “… we are confident that
there is no systematic
registration of deaths from starvation.”
Doc. 83: 24
June 1935; Memorandum
by Lawrence Collier
(p443) General wind-down of the
famine and humanitarian
aid.
Doc. 84: 12
August 1935; Chilston
(Moscow) to Hoare
(p447) Report by Mr. C.A.S. Hawker
from Australia on
agricultural conditions in the Soviet Union, which also involved air
flights
over affected famine areas.
[W.Z. Chilston appears to be
pro-Bolshevik, and not
sympathetic to the farmers.]
Doc. 85:
22 October
1935; Charles (Moscow) to Hoare
(p451) Former Petliura officer and
his lieutenant who
travelled as itinerant musicians shot for inciting peasants against the
regime.
- Arrest of another
“counter-revolutionary” in Kharkiv.
1934-1935
Summation by Will Zuzak
This time period is the aftermath
of the Holodomor.
Stalin and his henchmen have completed their dirty deed and now
concentrate on
rooting out any traces of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian
nationalism,
Ukrainian culture and even the Ukrainian language. These actions
clearly
demonstrate the genocidal nature of the Holodomor.
Any
humanitarian aid is rejected
by the Soviets and
efforts to arouse world public opinion is discouraged by the British
Government. The Duchess of Atholl was one of the first prominent people
to express concern (doc. 36) and propose humanitarian aid. This was
followed by Dr. Ewald Ammende, Cardinal Innitzer (with Metropolitan
Andrei Sheptytsky; doc. 53) and a large number of organizations and
individuals.
Although
the British abandon
Ukraine to its sad fate,
nevertheless, they were well informed on Ukraine-German relations and
Ukrainian
nationalism. In particular, the analyses of Ponsonby Moore Crosthwaite
(doc.
62) and Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Strange Malone (doc. 65) are
particularly
insightful. Also, Lord Chilston (docs. 64 and 66) seems to be well
informed on
the situation.
Little did
the British Foreign
Office personnel realize
that Stalin, having starved out the peasants, would next turn on the
townspeople and old Communists. Yezhovschyna was yet to come!