Stalin

Stalin’s holiday mailbag delivered increasingly dire news. “Because of the general famine, as you know, villagers have started flocking” to train stations, the Stalin loyalist Hryhory Petrovsky, in Ukraine, wrote on June 10, 1932. “In some cases, two thirds of the men had left their villages in search of bread.”²³⁸ (Yagoda reported on construction of a dacha settlement in the environs of Moscow using state funds for the grain collection commissariat.)²³⁹ Stalin held firm, proposing (June 18) the convocation of party secretaries from the main grain-growing provinces and republics to ensure “unconditional fulfillment of the plan.”²⁴⁰ He ordered up an editorial in

Pravda demonstrating “with documentation the complete victory of the collective and state farms in agriculture, since the weight of the individual farming sector this year does not even reach 20 percent” (a reference to sown acreage). He added, “It is necessary to curse rudely and sharply all the lackeys of capitalism—Mensheviks, SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries], Trotskyites, and right deviationists—stating that the attempts of the enemies of the toilers to return the USSR to the capitalist path have been decisively defeated and turned into ashes, that the USSR has irreversibly adopted the new socialist path, that the decisive victory of socialism in the USSR can be considered already finalized.”²⁴¹ The editorial duly appeared (June 26, 1932). That same day, Stalin conceded a significant reduction in grain exports for the third quarter.²⁴²

The first mass-produced Soviet heavy bomber, the four-engine TB-3, had been tested in the air, but Voroshilov reported (“Dear Koba”) that just four had been manufactured, and that even these had malfunctioning radiators.²⁴³

He also had to inform Stalin about a shocking number of crashes in training: eleven aircraft downed just between June 5 and 20, killing thirty crew members. Voroshilov asked permission to join Stalin for a few days down south (“I have not been sleeping normally for a long time”). Stalin wrote back on June 24: “The most worrisome are the crashes and the deaths of our aviators. The loss of airplanes is not as scary (the hell with them) as the loss of living people, aviators. Live human beings are the most valuable and most important thing in our entire cause, especially in aviation.”^{244, 245}

Regional party bosses gathered in Moscow on June 28, 1932, and Molotov read out Stalin’s stern letter (sent ten days earlier): “In Ukraine, despite a harvest that was not bad, a number of districts with good harvests turned out to be in a state of ruin and famine.”²⁴⁶ This was the second known documented instance when Stalin used the word “famine” (golod).²⁴⁷ Molotov and Kaganovich approved only a slight reduction in procurements.²⁴⁸

Stalin, in two telegrams (July 1 and 2, 1932), spewed venom on Ukraine’s leadership (“demobilizers”) and ordered both of his top minions to attend Ukraine’s upcoming party conference.²⁴⁹ At that gathering (July 6–9), Kosior (a USSR politburo member) pointed out that some regions were already starving, while Ukraine government head Vlas Chubar (a candidate USSR politburo member) challenged Molotov and Kaganovich to go out and see for themselves.²⁵⁰ Afterward, Kaganovich wrote to Stalin that “all members of the [Ukraine] politburo . . . spoke in favor of lowering the plan” for deliveries, but “we categorically turned aside a revision.”²⁵¹

Then, on July 24, Stalin undermined their hard work. “Our governing directive that the grain collection plan for the USSR be fulfilled unconditionally is correct,” he wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov. “But bear in mind that an exception must be made for the districts in Ukraine that have suffered especially. This is necessary not solely from the point of view of justness, but also in view of the special condition of Ukraine and its common frontier with Poland.”²⁵² The next day, he again tried to explain his turnabout, suggesting that at the time of the Ukraine party conference he had not wanted “to derail the grain procurements.” What Kaganovich and Molotov made of Stalin’s zigzagging remains unknown. Stalin was banking on the harvest, whose “prospects,” he wrote, “will become clear (they have already become clear!): they are doubtless good for the USSR as a whole.” But the harvest was being overreported, and Stalin latched on to what he wanted to hear.²⁵³