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Chapter 6THE UKRAINIANFAMINEby Lyman H. LegtersIn the mind of Stalin, the problem of theUkrainian peasants who resisted collectivizationwas linked with the problem of Ukrainiannationalism. Collectivization was imposed on theUkraine much faster than it was on other partsof the Soviet Union. The resulting hardship inthe Ukraine was deliberately intensified by apolicy of unrelenting grain procurement. It wasthis procurement policy that transformedhardship into catastrophe. Famine by itself is notgenocide, but the consequences of the policy wereknown and remedies were available. Theevidence is quite powerful that the famine couldhave been avoided, hence the argument turns onStalin's intentions.On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, EuropeanSocial Democrats, including their Russian branch, heldgenerally to two items of received doctrinal wisdomthat would bear ultimately on the calamity of the early1930s in the Ukraine. One of these was the belief thatthe rural agricultural economy, along with its associatedsocial order, was to undergo capitalist kinds of developmentas a necessary prelude to the introduction ofsocialism in the countryside. That expectation couldbe traced directly back to Marx and Engels. The otherbeliefhad been fashioned more recently in the multinationalempires of Habsburg and Romanov and taughtthat ethnic diversity, presumed to be a vestigial socialfact that would eventually disappear, might be accommodatedin a centralized political systemby permitting,perhaps even encouraging, cultural autonomy. 'In the Russian case, the first of these propositionswas confounded initially in two ways. Capitalistdevelopment had not occurred to any significant degreein rural areas, so a socialist program could only bepremature at the time of the Bolshevik seizure ofpower. And, more decisively, Lenin's revolutionarystrategy was based in part on appealing to the immediateinterests of the peasantry, and the peasants for theirpart responded by simply seizing the land, making ineffect a smallholder's revolution. Consequently, theBolsheviks in power, at least as soon as initial socializingfervor had abated, could contemplate socialism inthe countryside only as a long-term development.The matter of ethnic diversity, the nationalityproblem, was also complicated by tension between theproclaimed principle of self-determination and theThe Ukrainian Famine 107