The subjugation of peasants by Moscow during Ukraine's collectivization marked the first step toward the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

The nearly unquestionable leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, declared 1929 as the year of the "great turning point." By this time, representatives of the old Leninist guard had been "cleaned out" or relegated to secondary positions. Almost all of them would ultimately be eliminated during the years 1937-1938 in the course of the "Great Terror." The period of various "deviations" and "oppositions" ended with their defeat in the late 1920s. Anyone who uttered even a word against the party's general line and the "Leader of all peoples" found themselves under the watchful eye of the secret police and was doomed to end up, at best, in the camps of Siberia and the Far East.

The Destruction of Ukrainian Science and Culture

Administrative personnel, mostly comprising pre-revolutionary scientific and technical intelligentsia, came under attack from the authorities starting in 1928: high-profile show trials took place – the "Shakhty Case," the trial of the Industrial Party, which resulted in the conviction of 65 engineers and technicians from the Donetsk Basin. These cases fueled hysteria and terror, ostensibly justifying the need to continue the class struggle in a state surrounded by enemies. In Ukraine, this struggle had its own specificity, manifesting as a confrontation between the Moscow center and the nationally oriented intelligentsia, who had felt the breath of freedom during the policy of Ukrainization/indigenization from the mid-1920s onward.

In this context, in March-April 1930, a grand trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) – a fabricated anti-Soviet organization – took place at the Kharkiv Opera House (until 1934, this city was the capital of Soviet Ukraine). The goal of the trial was to discredit figures of Ukrainian culture – the main driving force behind Ukrainization, thereby leading to its rollback and the intensification of the Russification process in the republic. A true pogrom of Ukrainian science and culture occurred.

Interestingly, Moscow's policy was initially supported by the very proponents of Ukrainization in party and educational authorities, known as national communists. However, the Kremlin did not trust their loyalty to communist ideals, and thus they were soon, during the height of the Holodomor of 1932-1933, either eliminated or sent to camps, where they would ultimately meet their end during the "Great Terror."

"Rich Ukraine is ours: the Moscow proletariat will not go hungry"

…The so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in the spring of 1921 at the X Congress of the RCP(b), was merely a temporary liberalization following the harsh policies of "war communism" during the bloody civil war across the former Russian Empire, which specifically incited mass resistance among the peasantry in Ukraine. By 1928, the economic situation had drastically changed. The need for massive capital investments in the development of heavy industry and the military-industrial complex in the USSR (much of which had to be purchased with currency from capitalist states) compelled its leadership to seek new reserves. It turned out that the most crucial source for obtaining the necessary funds was trade in bread and grain with those very "cursed capitalists." Stalin recognized that the solution to the crisis lay in the collectivization of agriculture. This could only be implemented under strict state control using methods reminiscent of the "war communism" era, which by then had already faded into oblivion.

Ukraine and Kuban's role as the breadbasket of the entire state was well known. The People's Commissar for Land Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Alexander Shlikhter, noted as early as 1927 the importance of "rich" Ukraine for the livelihood of the entire Soviet Union: "We aim to allocate one hundred million poods of bread to distribute it through forced quotas across the provinces and districts. One hundred million for starving Russia, which again faces the threat of a new enemy invasion from the West. This one hundred million is a colossal figure… Rich Ukraine, bread-producing Ukraine – ours: the Moscow proletariat will not go hungry."

Thus, to save the "starving Moscow proletariat," the Bolsheviks needed to effectively "clean out" the Ukrainian countryside, which had resisted collectivization from the very beginning. This was a peculiar form of "pacification" of the peasants, akin to that carried out by the Polish authorities in Galicia in 1930. By the early 1930s, it took on horrific forms; a new wave of repressions began, of course, under the guise of fighting against Ukrainian nationalists, "Petliurists." Soviet occupiers openly plundered and humiliated the peasants during the procurement of not only bread but also meat, potatoes, eggs, wool, and other agricultural products.

From Total Collectivization to Terror by Famine

However, the process of collectivizing peasant farms and establishing collective farms progressed very slowly. The international situation also changed: in Western countries, the so-called Great Depression began after the stock market crash at the end of October 1929. This affected the entire global economy to varying degrees, leading to a sharp decline in prices for bread and grain – the USSR's primary export product. In November of the same year, a plenum of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) adopted a course towards total collectivization. On January 6, 1930, a decree from the Central Committee of the VKP(b) was issued "On the Rates of Collectivization and Measures to Assist State Support for Collective Farm Construction."

The "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" justified the policy of extermination of the kulaks as a class. In Ukraine, as in Kazakhstan, the Central Black Earth region of Russia, Siberia, and the Urals, it was planned to complete collectivization by the spring of 1932. From that point on, step by step, organized by the communist authorities, the terror of famine began in Ukrainian lands and in Kuban, which was predominantly inhabited by Ukrainians, a terror that would come to be known as the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

At the end of January 1930, it was announced that the policy of "limiting" the kulaks would shift to the brutal liquidation of the kulaks "as a class." The so-called kulaks (often comprising "middle peasants" and even poor villagers) had their residential and agricultural buildings, means of production, enterprises, and cooperatives for processing raw materials, as well as any livestock, confiscated. To ensure control over the decisions of party and economic bodies, workers-communists, known as "twenty-five thousanders," were sent to the villages; in Ukraine, these were mainly ethnic Russians. Many became chairmen of newly created collective farms, despite lacking any farming skills and merely executing the strict directives and orders of the party.

Some kulak households were entirely confiscated, the head of the family was subject to arrest and trial; family members were exiled to the north and east of the USSR. These repressions resulted in the deportation of more than 150 thousand peasants within the first months of "total collectivization."

It is important to remember that in Ukraine, the positions of prosperous peasants and "middle peasants" were particularly strong. Often, these same "middle peasants" and even poor villagers were indiscriminately labeled as "sub-kulaks" due to their unwillingness to voluntarily join collective farms. By 1932, approximately 200 thousand households had been liquidated or, more precisely, expropriated, and the majority of peasants were forced to join collective farms.

It was in Ukraine and Kuban that the most active resistance to collectivization occurred. "By the spring of 1930, a wave of peasant uprisings swept through the Ukrainian village. In March 1930 alone, authorities recorded 1700 peasant uprisings and protests. Rebels killed dozens of Soviet administrators and activists, while several hundred more were attacked and subjected to physical violence. In the Ukrainian regions bordering Poland, entire villages rose up and headed for the border to escape the horrors of Stalin's collectivization," wrote Harvard University history professor Serhiy Plokhiy in his book "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine from the Scythian Wars to Independence." The total number of rebels was estimated to range from 30 to 50 thousand people.

The authorities actively employed the army and OGPU units in their struggle against the peasants. Following Stalin's article "The Dizziness of Success" (published on March 2, 1930, in the newspaper "Pravda"), in which he suspended violent collectivization, the situation changed drastically for several months, and a significant portion of the land was returned to the peasants. However, this was a tactical retreat, and in the autumn of the same year, the assault on the countryside resumed, meeting primarily passive forms of resistance – such as the refusal to grow more grain and the slaughter of livestock; tens of thousands of peasants fled to the industrial