7. The National Interpretation of the 1933 Famine

Abstract

By 1931, a highly ambiguous political atmosphere surrounded the policy of korenizatsiia. On the one hand, an anti-korenizatsiia hard line had crystallized during the cultural revolution and caused a momentary policy shift in Belorussia. The terror campaign against the national smenovekhovstPo intelligentsia and against select national communists continued to send compromising signals about korenizatsiia. Growing centralization was undermining linguistic korenizatsiia in Ukraine and elsewhere. There was an increasing tendency to interpret anti-Russian sentiments and conflict between titular nationals and Russians as evidence of anti-center and pro-western feelings. Perhaps most important, foreign policy concerns about cross-border ethnic ties continued to intensify after the defection of the Cornmunist Party of western Ukraine (KPZU). All of these factors combined to create a growing concern that korenizatsiia might be intensifYing rather than disarming nationalism. On the other hand, the utopian strain in the cultural revolution had strengthened the developmentalist project of nation-building in the Soviet east. It had also intensified the stigmatization oftraditional Russian culture. Finally, Stalin had publicly and decisively intervened in support of korenizatsiia, silenced its critics, and reversed the Belorussian policy change. Before Stalin would give his backing to the antikorenizatsiia hard line, a further policy shock would be required. This shock was the grain-requisitions crisis of the fall of 1932, which culminated in the Kuban affair and the decisive December 1932 anti-Ukrainization Politburo decrees. The Kuban affair had its origins in a prolonged territorial dispute between the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR. This dispute began over the delineation of the Ukrainian-RSFSR border and then persisted because of Ukraine's insistent