In the spring of 1932 a few high-ranking Ukrainian communists finally gathered the courage to call for a drastic change of direction. In February, Hryhorii Petrovskyi—an “Old Bolshevik,” a party member since before the revolution, member of the Ukrainian Politburo and chairman of Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet—wrote a short letter to his colleagues. He did not name scapegoats, and did not seek to explain away shortages as “temporary” or imaginary. Instead, he observed the lack of food in “not only villages but also working-class towns” all across Ukraine, in Kyiv and Vinnytsia provinces as well as
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