1932 — The Holodomor begins
This alarmed the Bolshevik officials in Ukraine, who launched a campaign to halt the grain procurement campaign and to provide food aid. The Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars finally appealed for help in letters to Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov in June 1932. These letters described the conditions on the ground, requested famine relief and a reduction in the grain-procurement quota. As far as we know, Stalin did not directly reply, but in a letter to Lazar Kaganovich he expressed his dissatisfaction with Soviet Ukraine’s political leadership and reiterated his unwillingness to provide aid or to lower Ukraine’s agricultural quota. In another letter to Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin expressed his opinion that leading Ukrainian Bolsheviks were unwilling to carry out the policies of the Kremlin. He repeatedly expressed concerns about “losing” Ukraine. These fears led him to remove those “unreliable” Soviet Ukrainian leaders and to institute measures against the rise of what he saw as Ukrainian nationalism.
Repression and the “Five Ears of Grain” law
While the 1932 procurement quota for Ukraine was lower than in 1931, it was still completely unrealistic given the growing agricultural crisis. In the face of this looming disaster, the Kremlin’s response was to impose even more repressive policies to squeeze grain out of Ukraine’s countryside and to punish those individual farmers and collective farms that were unable to meet the quotas.
The most important of these was the August 1932 decree officially called the law for the “Defense of State Property Against Peasant Theft”, but which became known colloquially as the “Five Ears of Grain” law. It established that all collective farm property (including food) was state-owned, and it allowed for the forcible removal of food products from individuals. It also instituted draconian penalties, including capital punishment, for “theft from collective farms” (which could include the gleaning of even five ears of grain from already-harvested collective farm fields — from which the common name of the law derived).
In November, at Molotov’s urging, the Ukrainian Bolshevik authorities sped up court proceedings against those accused of agricultural theft or sabotage, and they authorized mobile three-man tribunals to summarily try and punish people accused of sabotage, theft, or opposition to the state’s food confiscation measures. This included lower-ranking Party members, local administrators, and collective farm leaders who resisted the quotas or who helped farmers conceal grain in order to survive the winter. Many were dismissed, imprisoned, or summarily executed.
Blacklisting
At the same time, again at Molotov’s urging, Ukrainian Bolshevik authorities instituted a policy for the “blacklisting” of entire villages that had not met their grain quotas. Recent scholarship has shown that this policy, known as “chorni doshky” (“black boards”) in Ukrainian, was much more widespread and discriminatory than previously realized.
Blacklisting would involve the closure of stores, prohibition of all trade, and the removal and/or confiscation of supplies, food, and livestock. All advances and loans (including loans of grain) were called in, and local authorities would be purged. Finally, the area surrounding the village would be physically sealed off by secret police units.
The policy of blacklisting was ostensibly to root out the (imagined) malign influence of kurkuli on collective farms. The punishment, however, was indiscriminate: everybody in the village suffered, including people like teachers or tradespeople with no direct connection to agriculture at all.
Since the official quotas were so exorbitant, virtually any agricultural enterprise could fall under the scope of the blacklisting policy. However, enforcement seems to have been selective and politically motivated. More regionally significant villages, villages that had supported the independent, non-communist Ukrainian People's Republic, or ones which had resisted grain requisitioning were singled out. Government documents from the time confirm that blacklisting was meant to serve as a warning to the surrounding region.
Linkage of collectivization failures with “nationalism”
In late November, Stalin dispatched Vsevolod Balitsky, the former head of the Ukrainian Bolshevik secret police, back to Ukraine from Moscow. He was given nearly blanket permission to use Soviet security forces in grain collection efforts and the repression of “saboteurs” and “counterrevolutionaries”. This included supposed Ukrainian “nationalists”, who the Kremlin insisted had infiltrated positions of authority and were planning rebellions. Balitsky’s forces arrested thousands of these supposed counterrevolutionaries and nationalists over the next several months. They even claimed to have prevented an uprising against Soviet rule that was intended to reestablish an independent Ukrainian state.The difficulties with collectivization and grain procurement were directly linked in Stalin's mind with Ukrainian linguistic and cultural identity. Ukrainianization for him was equivalent to "bourgeois nationalism". Therefore, in his mind it was essential to stop Ukrainianization by closing Ukrainian-language periodicals, eliminating the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and stopping Ukrainian language education in the Kuban.
