Inhabitants of blacklisted villages were meant to hand over their savings too. Collecting these sums had long been a problem: in his diary for December 1932, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s close associate in Ukraine, noted that the individual farmers in Ukraine had been fined 7.8 million rubles, but that only 1.9 million had been collected. Vlas Chubar had weakly argued that this was because they had “nothing to sell.”31 But in the autumn of 1932 auctions of furniture and other goods were arranged so that peasants could pay these sums: “When a peasant paid the tax, then another, bigger tax was put
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