Do not answer a fool because of his foolishness, lest you become like him; But answer the fool because of his foolishness, so that he does not become a wise man in his own eyes.
The Book of Proverbs 26: 4, 26: 5
History and Science. Not so long ago, on the pages of "VO" in the comments, a dispute broke out about whether one of the commentators was right to write that from the famine of 1932-1933. killed millions of Soviet citizens. As is often the case on "VO", unfortunately, doubts about the veracity of the phrase about millions were expressed in an extremely rude manner - "shit." Well, since we do not choose people here and work with what we have, let's forget for a while about the lack of culture of some of our fellow citizens and look at the problem of “millions” in essence.
I'll make a reservation right away that I have not personally dealt with this topic, I am not interested in it. The knowledge that Wikipedia has in this case is enough. However, in the comments, an interesting conversation came with a certain Vladimir U, who, admitting in principle that there was famine and the horrors of hunger took place (well, of course, Sholokhov himself wrote about this to Stalin, you can't argue with that!), Categorically spoke out, firstly, against "millions", and secondly, against the figures given in Wikipedia. The reason, however, is clear: they say, Wikipedia sometimes cites inaccurate materials (and yes, it happens), and it also cites data from Ukrainian historians, and they are biased, they introduced the concept of "Holodomor" and in general … "they are bad." In the sense engaged!
Well, what kind of historians are “good”, are there any reliable sources on this topic, and how was it studied in our country? That is, without a doubt, it was studied! And for sure documents related to the "hungry topic" are available in archives such as the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Russian Civil Aviation and the Federal Security Service (FSB). In the last one, I immediately wrote, explaining what is needed, why and why. But the answer that came from the archive turned out to be somewhat discouraging: wait 30 days, and then we will answer you. That is, of course, you can wait. But we all know that an egg is dear for Easter. Therefore, I thought: while the court and the case, you can look for other sources of information on this topic.
And it turned out that there are not just a lot of them, but a lot, and that we have been dealing with this topic for a long time. Which, however, is not surprising at all. A collection of documents “Famine in the USSR. 1929-1934.
Organizers and participants of the project:
Federal Archival Agency.
State Archives of the Russian Federation.
RGAE.
RGASPI.
Federal Archival Agency.
State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF).
Russian State Archives of Economics (RGAE).
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI).
Central archive of the Federal Security Service (CA FSB of Russia).
The Federal Archival Agency presents a collection of documents found in the Russian federal archives: the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (formerly the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU), the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Economics, as well as in the Central Archive of the Federal security services of the Russian Federation.
It came out quite a long time ago: "Famine in the USSR."
On December 24, 2013 the Federal Archival Agency announced that the publication of the third volume of the documentary series “Famine in the USSR. 1929-1934 (Hunger in the USSR. 1929-1934: In 3 volumes. T. 3. Summer 1933 - 1934. M.: MFD, 2013.- 960 p.), This international project of Rosarkhiv was completed, and published a short article about the project of its scientific adviser - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor V. V. Kondrashin.
The full version of this text is on this page.
There is also such a collection of documents by year and month:
Collection of documents GARF, RGAE, RGASPI, CA FSB of Russia on the topic "Hunger in the USSR. 1930-1934."
Content:
1) Documents 1930
January
April
May
June
September
December
2) Documents of 1931
July
September
October
3) Documents of 1932
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
October
November
December
4) Documents of 1933
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
5) Documents of 1934
January
February
March
June
It turned out that Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor V. V. Kondrashin is my colleague at Penza State University, we just worked in different departments and, in general, did not intersect much. It turned out that he is the author of many studies on this topic. Actually, this is his topic, in 2010 he traveled to Ukraine and took part in its discussion with Ukrainian historians. You can read about how it was and what he told them then here.
That is, today there is a solid documentary base that allows you to study this issue and work on its basis. There are letters from Kosior to Stalin and letters from Stalin to Kosior, there are reports from Kaganovich and a mass of reports to the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) about the famine, as well as reports from the Chekists about what is happening in the starving regions. If desired, everyone can find it all.
What, in general, not everyone can find, is a dissertation on this topic, in which, along with all others, data on the number of victims is present. Here are some of these dissertations, the content of which can be judged by their titles.
However, although the abstracts of these works are downloaded free of charge, you should pay 500 rubles for getting the work itself, that is, the amount for an uninterested citizen of the Russian Federation is unthinkable. And again, I could, for example, get the job of Kolomiets for free, but … now it is simply impossible.
On the other hand, why read Ph. D. dissertations and rummage through the little things, even interesting ones, when there is already a large number of generalizing monographs by reputable authors, written with the involvement of all those documents, which were discussed above? With the example of dissertations for the degree of candidate of historical sciences, I just wanted to emphasize that we have more than sufficient basis for more serious research, that is, archival data both at the level of central archives and local ones, on the basis of which such studies are precisely are held.
Well, the works of famous professional historians - here they are.
What are the documents presented by the authors of these studies? Let's see at least a few.
From the special certificate of the Secret Political Department of the OGPU on cases of famine in the Far Eastern Territory and the Ural Region, April 3, 1933, number 277. Top secret.
“In the Sunala collective farm“Kultura”a number of starving families of collective farmers eat cats and dogs. In the agricultural artel named after Kalinin's collective farmers go to the cattle cemetery of the village of Lugovoy, pull out the fallen horses from the pits and eat them … On the basis of difficulties among some of the collective farmers, there are sharp negative sentiments: ? And, probably, you will have to crush the children and decide your own life, because it’s hard to die of starvation”. “Did I think I worked until I couldn’t fall - skinned, naked, barefoot, so that now I could sit without bread and swell with hunger, because I have 7 of them. And everyone sits and shouts: "Give me some bread," but how can a mother bear it? I will go to bed under the tractor, I cannot bear this suffering …"
(Head of the SPO OGPU G. Molchanov.
Assistant to the head of the OGPU SPO Lyushkov.)
Source: CA FSB RF. F. 2. Op. 11. D. 42. L. 113−116.
Specifically about the role of Stalin:
January 1932 I. V. Stalin and V. M. Molotov in a telegram to S. V. Kosior and members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine:
“We consider the situation with grain procurements in Ukraine alarming. On the basis of the data available in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the workers of Ukraine spontaneously focus on the failure to fulfill the plan of 70-80 million poods. We consider such a prospect to be absolutely unacceptable and intolerable. We consider it a shame that this year, with a higher level of collectivization and a larger number of state farms, as of January 1 of this year, Ukraine has procured 20 million poods. less than last year. Who is to blame here: the highest level of collectivization or the lowest level of procurement management? We consider it necessary for your immediate arrival in Kharkiv and for you to take the whole business of grain procurement into your own hands. The plan must be carried out completely and unconditionally. The decision of the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) (October 1931) must be carried out."
(Stalin. Molotov.)
After this telegram, violence and excesses in grain procurement intensified. General searches were carried out at collective farmers and individual farmers, and if bread was found, all property was taken away. Beating of peasants began to be widely practiced, often with mutilation, illegal arrests, etc.
In order to prevent peasants distraught with hunger from breaking through to cities where a small bread ration (300-400 g) was given, the OGPU was instructed to establish cordons on roads, railway stations and prevent the movement of the hungry.
Directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On preventing the mass departure of starving peasants" on January 22, 1933 (winter 1932-1933, the peak of mortality from hunger):
“The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR received information that in the Kuban and Ukraine a mass departure of peasants“for bread”began in the Central Black Earth Region, on the Volga, Moscow Region, Western Region, Belarus. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR do not doubt that this departure of the peasants, like the departure from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of the Soviet regime, the Social Revolutionaries and agents of Poland with the aim of agitating "through the peasants" to the northern regions of the USSR against collective farms and in general against Soviet power. Last year, the party, Soviet and KGB organs of Ukraine missed this counter-revolutionary venture of the enemies of Soviet power. This year, a repetition of last year's mistake cannot be allowed. First. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR instruct the Territorial, Territorial Executive Committees and PP of the OGPU of the North Caucasus to prevent the mass departure of peasants from the North Caucasus to other regions and entry into their territory from Ukraine. Second. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars instruct the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) U, Ukrsovnarkom, Balitsky and Redens not to allow mass exodus of peasants from Ukraine to other regions and entry into the region from the North Caucasus. Third. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars instruct the PP of the OGPU of the Moscow Region, the Central Chernobyl Region, the Western Region, Belarus, the Lower Volga to arrest the "peasants" of Ukraine and the North Caucasus who made their way to the north and, after the counter-revolutionary elements are selected, to place the rest in their places of residence … Fourth. The Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR instruct the GPU Maintenance Prokhorov to give appropriate instructions to the GPU Maintenance System."
(Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR V. Molotov.
Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) I. Stalin.)
Archive of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 11. D. 45. L. 109.1934.
1934 Special report of the OGPU PP in Gorky about the mendicant element in the Omutninsky region. April 30, 1934 Source: Soviet village through the eyes of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. 1918-1939. Documents and materials. In 4 volumes / T. 3. Book. 2. p. 566-567 Archive: CA FSB RF. F. 3. Op. 1. D. 747. L. 195-196. Script. No. 213:
“The influx of the mendicant element from the Udmurt Region and the Komi-Permyak District is increasing in the Omutninsky District. There are many women with young children among the beggars. In the working settlement of the Leskovsky plant, there have recently been 200 people. beggars who arrived from the Kudymkarsky region of the Komi-Permyatsky district. They are not accepted for work without documents. They go in groups to their homes and ask for bread. They stop in workers' settlements, villages, talk about the famine in their districts, the collapse of collective farms, etc. In the house of the worker of the Leskovsky plant Filippov, a beggar Mozunin who arrived from the Komi-Permyak district told: “We came here 300 miles away, in our area there is a terrible famine. In 1933 we had a bad harvest, but the grain procurements were fully recovered from us. In the fall, we ate the same straw, birch sawdust, and various grasses. The people began to die from such nutrition. In our village Tidilivo, 20 families survived only in 8 houses, the rest all died without exception. In the village of Otopkovo, out of 50 farms, 4 farms remained alive. The dead are in the houses, there is even no one to clean them. All our collective farms have disintegrated. The land remained uncultivated”… We inform the regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the regional executive committee about the emergence of a mendicant element in the Omutninsky region. We have taken measures to confiscate the beggars, who are active in agitation and are engaged in embezzlement."
(Head of SPO PP OGPU GK Graz.)
1935. Communication from the NKVD in the Voronezh region. about food difficulties. June 5, 1935 Source: Soviet village through the eyes of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. 1918-1939. Documents and materials. In 4 volumes / T. 4. pp. 107-108 Archive: CA FSB of Russia. F. 3. Op. 2. D. 1088. L. 368. Original. No. 29:
“To the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Comrade Yagoda.
Recently, some collective farms of the Mordovian region are experiencing serious food difficulties. A particularly difficult situation has arisen in the collective farms. Kosyreva, Krasnaya Zvezda, Wave of the Revolution, Red Plowman … Some collective farmers who do not have bread are engaged in begging. Antikolkhoz sentiments are noted among some of the collective farmers, and the tendencies to leave the collective farm and move to cities and industrial centers have intensified. Collective farmers experiencing food difficulties are not provided with any help on the spot."
(Head of the secretary-political department of the GUGB G. Molchanov.)
All this is good, of course, without a doubt, some of our readers will say, but where are the numbers? Where are the numbers ?! The same ones that talk about those who died of hunger … However, there are numbers, and even a lot, to choose from, who likes what!
Author / Year / Number of victims, million people:
F. Lorimer / 1946/4, 8
B. Urlanis / 1974/2, 7
S. Wheatcroft / 1981/3, 4
B. Anderson and B. Silver / 1985 / 2-3
R. Conquest / 1986/8
S. Maksudov / 2007 / 2-2, 5
V. Tsaplin / 1989/3, 8
E. Andreev et al. / 1993/7, 3
N. Ivnitsky / 1995/7, 5
State Duma of the Russian Federation / 2008/7
O. Rudnitsky and A. Savchuk / 2013/8, 7
As you can see, all numbers are different. Moreover, historians began to count the human lives lost due to hunger back in 1946, first foreign, and then ours. And the minimum number turned out to be 2 million, and the maximum - 8. However, in our country there is a state body consisting of people who were elected to it by our citizens - this is the State Duma. And she also took care of the issue of the number of victims of hunger in our country. The following document was drawn up:
STATE DUMA OF THE FEDERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION OF THE FIFTH CONVOCATION
STATEMENT dated April 2, 2008
IN MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE HUNGER OF THE 30S ON THE TERRITORY OF THE USSR
The State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation shares with the peoples of the former USSR the grief over the 75th anniversary of the terrible tragedy - the famine of the 1930s, which engulfed a significant part of the territory of the Soviet Union.
Archival documents studied by modern historians reveal not only the scale of the tragedy, but also its causes. The following tasks were solved by extraordinary methods: to destroy the small owners, to carry out the forcible collectivization of agriculture and to push the peasants out of the village in order to get an army of workers for the accelerated industrialization of the country.
As a result of the famine caused by forced collectivization, many regions of the RSFSR suffered (the Volga region, the Central Black Earth region, the North Caucasus, the Urals, Crimea, part of Western Siberia), Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. From hunger and diseases associated with malnutrition, about 7 million people died there in 1932-1933.
The peoples of the USSR paid a huge price for industrialization, for the gigantic economic breakthrough that took place in those years. Dnipro HPP, Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk metallurgical plants, metallurgical giants of Ukraine Zaparozhstal, Azovstal, Krivorozhstal, large coal mines in Donbass, Kuzbass, Karaganda, Kharkov Tractor Plant, Moscow and Gorky automobile factories - more than 1,500 industrial enterprises in total, many of which still provide for the economic development of independent states in the space of the former USSR.
In an effort to resolve the issues of food supply to the rapidly growing industrial centers at any cost, the leadership of the USSR and the Union republics applied repressive measures to ensure grain procurements, which significantly aggravated the grave consequences of the 1932 crop failure. However, there is no historical evidence that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were millions of citizens of the USSR, representatives of various peoples and nationalities living mainly in the agricultural regions of the country. This tragedy does not and cannot have internationally established signs of genocide and should not be the subject of contemporary political speculation.
The State Duma reaffirms its adherence to the provisions of the joint statement of the delegations of a number of UN member states, adopted at the 58th session of the UN General Assembly in 2003, which expresses sympathy for the millions of victims of the tragedy, regardless of their nationality.
The deputies of the State Duma, paying tribute to the memory of the victims of the famine of the 30s on the territory of the USSR, strongly condemn the regime that neglected people's lives in order to achieve economic and political goals, and declare the unacceptability of any attempts to revive totalitarian regimes in the states that were previously part of the USSR disregarding the rights and lives of their citizens.
You can treat the state power in your country as you like, but what you can't do is ignore it. And until proven otherwise, you should rely on the numbers that it provides. Believe them or not is already a question of the professional competence of every citizen, and it is clear that the opinion of a doctor of historical sciences, who has studied this problem for many years, has much more weight than the opinion of a stubborn amateur.
In any case, even if we take the very minimum number of deaths, and this is 2 (2-3) - 2, 7 million, it will be obvious that this is not a few thousand and not one million, but everything that is more than one, this is “a lot”, and, therefore, our reader and commentator under the nickname Olgovich did not “shrug off”, but gave the pure truth in his commentary, even if we count only by this minimum!
P. S. Well, when in 30 days the answer comes from the FSB archive and if it is interesting enough, then it will be possible to write one more article … Already on the materials sent!
