DECREE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT PROHIBITING THE DEPARTURE OF STARVING PEASANTS FROM UKRAINE AND THE KUBAN REGION

[On 22 January 1933, a secret circular was telegraphed from Moscow to Kharkiv, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, and to Rostov-on-Don, Voronezh, Stalingrad, Samara, Smolensk and Minsk - administrative centres of Russian and Belarusian regions bordering on Ukraine. The document, recently discovered in Soviet archives, shows the national character of the genocidal policy pursued by the Kremlin. The target of the induced famine was the peasantry of Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.]

The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars of the USSR have received information that in the Kuban region and Ukraine a massive departure of peasants "in search of bread" has begun into the [Russian] Central-Black Earth region, the Volga region, the Western and Moscow regions, and into Belorussia. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars of the USSR do not doubt that this departure of peasants, like the departure from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the agents of Poland, with the goal of agitation "through the peasants" in the northern regions of the USSR against the collective farms and against Soviet power as a whole. Last year the Party, Soviet and Chekist organs of Ukraine were caught napping by this counter-revolutionary trick of the enemies of Soviet power. This year we cannot allow a repetition of last year's mistake.

First. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars of the USSR order the Regional Committees of the Party, the Regional Executive Committees and the Plenipotentiary of the OGPU [political police] of the North Caucasus not to allow massive departure of peasants from the North Caucasus into other regions, or the entry into the North Caucasus from Ukraine.

Second. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars order the Central Committee of the Ukrainian SSR, as well as V. A. Balitskii [Moscow's OGPU agent in Ukraine] and [S. F.] Redens [head of the Ukrainian GPU], not to allow a massive outflow of peasants from Ukraine into other regions or the entry into Ukraine of peasants from the North Caucasus.

Third. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars order the Plenipotentiary of the OGPU of the Moscow region, Central-Black Earth region, Western region, Belarus, Lower and Middle Volga regions, to immediately arrest all "peasants" of Ukraine and the North Caucasus who have broken throught into the north and, after separating out the counter-revolutionary elements, to return the rest to their places of residence.

Fourth. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party and the Council of Commissars order Porokhov of the Transport Section of the GPU to give a similar order to the OGPU transport organs.

Chairman of the Council of Commissars of the USSR: V. M. Molotov
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Pan-Russian Communist Party: J. Stalin.