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Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 7:56 AM Subject: Ukrainian famine Dear Professor Tauger, I read your analysis of the Ukrainian famine with great interest, and I find it very credible. It is justified to point out, like Mr. Gerk did, that the Soviet state indeed took a large amount of grain from the rural population, and thus made an already bad situation even worse. (My research in Hungarian Foreign Ministry archives has thrown light to a very similar case in North Korea in 1955. There a combination of wartime destruction, bad weather, forced collectivization and high compulsory deliveries led to a serious famine that necessitated emergency grain shipments from the USSR and China.) It is also true that the USSR continued to export grain at the expense of domestic consumption (partly in order to offset the sharp drop in world grain prices in 1931). Nevertheless, the level of grain exports dropped substantially around 1932 or '33, indicating a bad, rather than a good harvest. This supports your view. Another point is that the famine struck, by and large, the traditional areas of grain export, that is, not only Ukraine but the Kuban and other (often Russian-populated) regions too. These regions were the best grain-producing areas of the country, areas where the regime considered collectivization a higher priority than in, say, Belorussia. There were three categories according to the emphasis the regime placed on the pace of collectivization, and while Ukraine was classified in the first category, Belorussia, an agricultural backwater, belonged to the third. Since in 1937-38 the Great Terror decimated the Belorussian intelligentsia and party elite in a not less destructive way as it happened in Ukraine, one may conclude that Stalin disliked Belorusian nationalism to the same extent as he hated Ukrainian nationalism (though he must have considered the second more dangerous). Thus, the absence of a famine in Belorussia in 1932-33 indicates that the Ukrainian famine was not a planned anti-Ukrainian genocide. Best regards, Balazs Szalontai History Department Central European University Budapest (Hungary)
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