November Memories

Only in 1990 did it become known that on this date Stalin's Premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, presided in the then republic capital of Kharkiv over a meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine. Under his tutelage it adopted a resolution, probably prepared earlier in Moscow, to reinforce the "grain procurements campaign," otherwise known as the food seizures soon to condemn millions of Ukrainian peasants to death from starvation in what they call the holodomor, the Great Manmade Famine of 1932-33. The decree introduced a system of "fines in kind" for those failing to surrender the amount of grain the state demanded, usually because they simply did not have it. The decree solved the problem with Stalinist simplicity: if there's no bread, take the potatoes as a fine, and impose a supplementary meat quota of 150% of the annual norm, or, in to put it in simple words, slaughter the livestock. Farms and villages could also be blacklisted: meaning, among other things, closing all stores and removing all goods from them. All that was to be left was a seed reserve for the next planting (the seed reserve would be ordered seized on December 24, this time on the orders of Lazar Kaganovich, and maybe that date also deserves to be remembered). And within the next several months (it takes a couple of months to starve to death, a singularly unpleasant way of passing on) several million Ukrainians were dead, thanks to the solicitude of those building the bright socialist future. Those so eager to return to that future might perhaps do well to ponder these and other such anniversaries when deciding just what it is they want to go back to.