Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Poland, and the Soviet Union, 1932–1933

All countries under scrutiny had diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union when the famine occurred, though with different intensities and outlooks. Early on, since the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, Germany had established intense collaboration in the political, economic, and military field with the Soviet Union. Such relations still existed when the collectivization was launched, though they were undergoing their first signs of strain. The National Socialists’ rise to power in January 1933 would change this situation, resulting in increasing tension between Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet, only with a great deal of hindsight can we regard the year 1933 as a watershed in foreign relations. In the first period of its rule, the Nazi leadership was considerably restrained in declaring and pursuing its foreign policy goals. Therefore, many still had hope that traditionally oriented circles might mitigate it and that, therefore, Rapallo could be saved. The ratification of the Berlin Treaty in May 1933 seemed to point in this direction. Therefore, the famine occurred in a period of great uncertainty as to the state and the future of German–Soviet relations (McMurry Reference McMurry1979; Slutsch and Tischler Reference Slutsch and Tischler2013).

In 1932–1933, Italy was heading toward a consolidation of its ties with the USSR. Though ruled by parties with opposing ideologies, from their very start in 1924 relations between Italy and the Soviet Union were inspired by political pragmatism. Against this backdrop, the Treaty of Friendship, Non-Aggression and Neutrality signed on September 2, 1933 inaugurated a period of good relations that was to last until the Ethiopian War and the German–Italian alliance, when they underwent severe strains (Clarke Reference Clarke1989).

Not unlike Italy, Great Britain was consolidating its relations with the Soviet Union, after the severance of diplomatic relations between 1927 and 1929. Despite the “temporary setback” (Haslam Reference Haslam1983, 107–112) of Anglo–Soviet trade relations in 1932 and the Metro-Vickers affair of 1933, British–Soviet relations were heading toward normalization, spurred also by Hitler’s rise to power, which brought a source of unrest to European policy (Salzmann Reference Salzmann2003, 155–168). Among British officials, however, there were mixed feelings about the future of British–Soviet relations. “None of the British elite liked Soviet Russia,” summarizes Kathe Neilson, “however, this did not mean that none of them was willing to co-operate with it” (Nielson Reference Neilson2006, 40).

Compared to the other three countries, the Second Polish Republic had the most troubled relationship with the Soviet Union since the signing of the Treaty of Riga in 1921. However, as an effect of German rising nationalism and the fears of Nazi access to power, Poland felt compelled to stabilize its relations with the Soviets by signing a non-aggression pact in July 1932 (Haslam Reference Haslam1983, 104). According to Hans Roos, the pact opened an “enormous breach in the Rapallo policy” (Roos Reference Roos1957) to which Hitler’s accession to power was to put a final end, but, together with the 1934 pact with Germany, it ushered in a period of relative stabilization in Poland’s foreign policy relations.

Neither Italy nor Great Britain was directly confronted with the Great Famine through a large influx of refugees. This aspect marks a considerable difference between their experiences of the Great Famine and that of countries directly bordering the Soviet Union, like Poland and Romania, for which the famine resulted immediately in the need to care for the refugees, often co-nationals, crossing the border to escape starvation.Footnote ⁶ Although not directly bordering the Soviet Union, the Weimar Republic as well had to deal with a large amount of immigration of both German citizens and ethnic Germans forced by collectivization and famine to leave the Soviet Union (Ottmer Reference Oltmer and Oltmer2015).

These aspects are relevant in order to understand the amount and quality of intelligence from the Soviet Union available to diplomats of the four countries. It can be assumed with a fair amount of certainty that Germany and Poland were better informed about Soviet internal developments than all other powers (Mick Reference Mick1995; Müller Reference Müller1983). At the time of the famine, Germany had seven diplomatic missions in the Soviet Union, three of which were located in Ukraine (Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Tbilisi, Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kiew). Information delivered by local consulates to Moscow and to Berlin was gathered, as in the case of most diplomatic proxies, through an analysis of the local press and local informants. However, a consistent part of the informants of the German diplomatic corps were ethnic Germans or German citizens.

As noted by J. Bruski, Poland’s intelligence from the Soviet Union was second only to that reaching the Germans. Given the key role of the Soviet Union in the foreign policy of the Second Polish Republic and the thorny Ukrainian issue, it is hardly surprising that Poland appointed very qualified personnel to its diplomatic missions in the USSR. Polish representatives in Moscow who held the post during the famine years—Stanisław Patek until 1932 and Juliusz Łukasiewicz from 1933—were diplomats experienced in Soviet affairs.Footnote ⁷ A considerable flow of information about the famine was delivered by the commercial and the military attaché in Moscow, the latter post held by Jan Kowalewski until 1933, and by two consulates in Ukraine, in Kyiv and Kharkiv, that drew information from the numerous petitions sent to them by the local population, by traveling, and by scrutinizing a large amount of local press (Bruski Reference Bruski, Noack, Janssen and Comerford2012, 217).Footnote ⁸ Moreover, Polish intelligence officers in Ukraine reported extensively on the famine (Snyder Reference Snyder2005, 109).

Like Germany and Poland, Italy had consular representations in Ukraine—one in Kharkiv, which in 1934 was transferred to Kyiv, and one in Odessa—and in the Caucasus. The small Italian community living scattered in Caucasus, with the most sizeable being in Vladikavkaz and Verbludogorskaja, played a role similar to the ethnic Germans in establishing a bridge between the consul and the local society. Consulates had a relative freedom of movement if compared to the situation of the Italian Embassy in Moscow, which Giorgio Petracchi has characterized as an “Italian island” that was for the most part segregated from the surrounding society (Petracchi Reference Petracchi1993, 310). Italian engineers working in the USSR were several hundred in 1930, but in 1933 most of them had left the country (Petracchi Reference Petracchi1993, 303). In comparison to Germany, Italian consuls had a lower capacity to gather intelligence from the countryside, since they had only limited direct access to the peasantry.

British reporting on Soviet internal affairs was mostly based on information gleaned by the diplomatic corps of the two proxies of Moscow and Leningrad, as no personnel was posted in peripheral areas. Historians agree in characterizing the British diplomatic corps’ expertise on the Soviet Union as fairly dismal. Keith Nielson argues that whereas up to 1914 St Petersburg was one of the three most important posts in British diplomatic service, after the Bolshevik revolution, “Moscow was no longer a focal point for British diplomacy.” “Therefore,” he notes, “the expertise about Russia that had been painfully built up within the diplomatic service before 1917 had attenuated, due both to the radical change of regimes in that country and to the intermittent nature of Anglo-Soviet relations” (Nielson Reference Neilson2006, 24). In particular, the British diplomats who returned to the Soviet Union in 1929, after the break of diplomatic relations in 1927, found it difficult to make sense of the great changes that occurred during their absence. Most of the connections with Soviet citizens that existed before the rupture could not be reestablished by the new diplomatic corps, as its members were, with almost no exception, new to the reality of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁹ Sir Edmond Ovey, who, after holding minor posts in other countries, was ambassador between 1929 and 1933, regarded the Soviet Union as a “puzzling world”—an attitude strengthened by the fact that he, like most of his staff members, spoke no Russian (Neilson Reference Neilson2006, 25).

Making Sense of the Famine: The Role of the Peasantry

It would be misleading to expect foreign diplomats to provide a thoroughly consistent explanation of the Great Famine. Nevertheless, a synoptic analysis of the diplomatic dispatches of the four countries allows us to discern a number of common patterns and major differences between them. A common feature of Italian, German, and Polish diplomatic reports is that they clearly understood the crucial role played by the conflict between the collectivizing state and the peasants—the former carrying out modernization at breakneck speed and the latter resisting this process regarded as a second serfdomFootnote ¹⁰—in the outbreak of the famine. One can characterize this view as a conflict-based conceptualization of the famine, as, like modern scholarship,Footnote ¹¹ it regards the state–peasant conflict as one of the famine’s basic factors.

In June 1933, when the famine had already claimed a large number of victims, Italian Ambassador Bernardo Attolico, mapping out the geographical distribution of the famine, distinguished between three types of famine-hit areas: the first were areas of “deep impoverishment,” the second were areas of real famine, and the third included regions such as the Don, Kuban, and Northern Caucasus, where an “organized famine” was afoot. According to Attolico, in the areas of the second type, the famine was the result of a “lack of interest on the part of the peasants to till a land that is no longer their own and of their opposition to surrendering the fruits of their labor to the state.” In these areas, the state faced a “silent and invisible opposition that might be completely tamed and defeated only with the coming of new generations educated to the communist spirit” (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, 117). It was only in the third area that, according to Attolico, a real peasant resistance, along with the defection of large sections of communist cadres, had taken place. To crush this form of resistance, the Soviet government had “rationally” employed death by starvation as a repressive means. In a similar way, Sergio Gradenigo, Italian consul in Kharkiv, devoted lengthy passages of his reports to a description of the attitude of the peasants toward the state. He reported on the violent clash between the peasants and the workers sent by the Soviet authorities to the countryside to conduct harvesting in the summer of 1933 (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, 202–203).

A similar tone is to be found in the German reports. For instance, the annual report of the German Embassy in Moscow drafted by Herbert von Dirksen in January 1933 underlined that the famine was “an enormous and complex process” that needed to be explained with reference to many factors, namely the spread of parasites, adverse weather, failure of mechanization, lack of draught force and skilled personnel, poor transportation, bureaucracy, and the need for the Soviet state to build up supply stocks for the army in Manchuria. Yet, he argued, the state–peasant conflict was its true rationale:

Likewise, Polish diplomats saw in the resistance of the peasants to forced collectivization a key causal factor of the famine (Bruski Reference Bruski2008, XXII).Footnote ¹⁴ In a report from September 1932, the Polish Consul in Kyiv, besides stressing the role of economic and technical factors, pointed out that, in the Kyiv, Vinnitsa, and Odessa areas, great damage to crop harvest was caused by passive resistance on the part of the peasants. The following sentences summed up what the consul believed to be the motivation of the Ukrainian peasants:

In contrast, British sources contain only scant reference to peasant resistance and for the most part at a relatively late date.Footnote ¹⁵ The attitude of the peasants toward the Soviet state and the conflicts arising from forced collectivization and crop collection were the subject of many British reports.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, peasants’ resistance was never regarded as a key factor in the whole process. Compared with Italian, Polish, and German reports, British reporting on collectivization displays a “curiously bloodless texture” (Hughes Reference Hughes1997, 241). Amply described in many dispatches, collectivization was considered merely from an economic point of view, without paying much attention to the political and human dimensions of it. Although peasant resistance does not go completely unmentioned in these reports,Footnote ¹⁷ the emphasis is rather on the economic irrationality of the collective economic system as unable to motivate the economic subjects to produce (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 199). In this regard, a report by Third Secretary of the Embassy J. M. K. Vyvyan recounting his travels to Crimea and Ukraine in the summer of 1932 is particularly interesting. Vyvyan visited a number of farms and, although he was able to have contacts with locals, who expressed their views in a fearless and outspoken manner, he did not get a clear picture of the situation in the countryside. Significantly, his report dwelt on economic issues with only passing references to the conditions of the peasants. In a conversation with a fellow traveler on a plane back to Moscow, he remarked that “it was a pity the children were fed so extensively on bread,” which his fellow denied by stressing that not even bread was available to them, allotments amounting only “to 150 gr. a day for a whole family” (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 96).Footnote ¹⁸

This difference between Italian, German, or Polish reports, on one hand, and British reports, on the other hand, can be explained by the lack of local British consulates outside the main cities that would have been able to witness directly what was occurring in the countryside.Footnote ¹⁹ It is noteworthy that Italian, German, and Polish diplomats had been reporting on early peasant uprisings deriving from opposition to collectivization.Footnote ²⁰

A further reason for this difference is the cultural background of the diplomatic personnel. Since Italy and Germany were countries of late industrialization, the Italian and German elites had developed a stronger perceptiveness for agrarian issues and for the contradiction between the cities, as the centers of modernization, and the peasant world.Footnote ²¹ The same applies even more to Poland, which, in the interwar period, still had a largely agricultural economy, not having experienced “anything like an industrial revolution on the scale of the advanced western countries” (Stachura Reference Stachura1998, 42). From its very foundation, the Second Polish Republic faced the urgent need to modernize the backward and overpopulated agricultural sector by means of land reform (Landau-Tomaszewski Reference Landau and Tomaszewski1985, 39).Footnote ²² As in many Eastern and Southeastern European countries between the two world wars, in Poland peasants were a political collective subject represented by parties and movements. One of the central tenets of Eastern European agrarianism in the interwar period was that “the responsibility for land and society could only be fully assumed by an independent man who owned the land that he tilled. The idea of private ownership was thus essential to Eastern European agrarianism” (Eellend Reference Eellend and Wawrzeniuk2008, 45).

A common trait of Italian and German documents is the presence of negative stereotypes toward the peasantry, which was regarded as a hindrance to modernization. Although, as noted above, peasants were regarded as a collective subject, they were not considered a historic subject, meaning a subject capable of moving history forward, but rather as an impediment to the course of social development.Footnote ²³ The Italian consul in Novorossijsk, for instance, provided an expressive picture of this view. “Feeling that he has been condemned a priori to the maximum sentence,” he wrote, “the peasant awaits his turn with fatalism, in doing so, aided by his indolent and passive mentality…. The peasant believes in nothing, works the least and in the worst possible way, steals as soon as he can, hides and destroys his produce instead of surrendering it spontaneously” (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, d. 32, 159–160). Likewise, in an earlier report, Attolico wrote:

In German sources there are many such statements. For instance, the German consul in Kharkiv wrote in December 1933 that one of the causes of the famine was that the Soviet leadership had overlooked the fact that “according to Stalin’s words ‘the men decide over the thing’ and the question whether the 22 million Ukrainian peasants would follow him and they would show understanding and collaboration for the new collective economic form instead of their deeply rooted individualistic ideology.”Footnote ²⁴ Von Dirksen’s successor, Ambassador Rudolf Nadolny, went so far as to see in Soviet collectivization the only way to “lead the enormous gray mass of the Russian people out of the rigidity of stagnation and put it into progressive motion towards a higher degree of development.”Footnote ²⁵

Making Sense of the Famine: The Role of Intentions

A further recurring topic in foreign reports is the role played by intentionality in the outbreak of the famine. This issue has sparked a heated debate among modern scholars, with a faction supporting the view that the Soviet leadership purportedly unleashed the famine and another seeing it has the undesired outcome of collectivization.Footnote ²⁶ While contemporary observers generally did not see a clear-cut trade-off between these two explanations,Footnote ²⁷ there are notable differences in prioritizing one over the other. Italian sources display the most pronounced tendency toward intentionalism, especially the reports written by the Italian consul in Kharkiv Sergio Gradenigo. On May 31, 1933, Gradenigo wrote for example: “There are no doubts, in fact, that this hunger derives mainly from a famine organized and designed with the intention to ‘teach the peasant a lesson’ ” (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, 168). In a later report, Gradenigo held that the distribution of the famine proved the existence of a clear policy designed to prevent the economic hardships from unleashing a popular rebellion. Fearing revolts in the cities, the Soviet government, in Gradenigo’s view, had “put the main burden of the famine (for the most part intentionally engendered) on the shoulders of the Ukrainian peasants” (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, 184).

In comparison to the Italian reports, German sources provide a more nuanced interpretation. In most documents, German observers held the view that the Soviet government, while not purposely causing the famine, had exploited it in order to crush the peasants’ resistance. Looking retrospectively at the famine, for example, the German consul in Kharkiv noted in 1935 that “taxation of the independent peasants, pressure put on them by other means to force peasants to abide to collectivization, famine of the years 1932–33, that has been exploited [ausgenutzt] to induce the peasants to subdue to the Soviet policy, have reached their goal turning the peasants into a ‘docile instrument.’”Footnote ²⁸ Consistent with the conflict-based view described above, most German diplomats, both in the capital and in the Ukrainian consulates, saw the 1932–1933 crisis as a struggle that the government had won by employing any means at its disposal, including the famine. In December 1933 the German consul in Kharkiv wrote:

German consuls provided critical insights into the way grain procurement was employed by the Soviet authorities to exert pressure on the individual peasants to force them to join the collectives. A 1933 report by the German consul in Kharkiv about the conditions of the ethnic Germans, based on information provided by the Germans themselves, strikes modern readers for its capacity to grasp the interplay between central decision making and local authorities.

German reports also detailed how relief in the form of sowing seeds or food to the regions hit by the famine was used as a means to impose the will of the power center on the reluctant peripheries. Otto Schiller, after traveling across Ukraine in the summer of 1933, noted that the Soviet authorities had understood how to use hunger as a means to force people to work, thus overcoming the shortage of manpower produced by the famine. In his opinion, the state used a very brutal but effective measure, by stripping the village of every last bit of grain, taking back from the kolkhoz peasants even the already distributed cereals, and to let these same cereals go back to the village in the form of sowing aid or hunger aid: “In this way, the peasant is kept under the continuous and direct threat of hunger death and he can escape it only through his work in the kolkhoz for which he receives in the evening a spare ration barely sufficient to keep him alive.”Footnote ³¹

A similar understanding of the Soviet government’s strategy to conduct the harvest of summer 1933 can be found in Polish reports. For example, a report of the Polish consul in Kyiv of November 1933 noted:

As noted by Jan Bruski, Polish representatives in the Soviet Union had different opinions on whether the famine had been intentionally unleashed or not. Stanisław Sośnicki, of the consul in Kyiv, considered the famine to be a consequence of the doctrinarian policy pursued by the Bolsheviks, whereas Jan Karszo-Siedlewski, observing that hunger was limited to the territory of Ukraine, stressed the intentional factor by noting that the “policy of the central government towards Ukraine was much more ruthless and predatory than towards neighboring provinces of the RSFSR, with the exception of the Northern Caucasus” (Bruski Reference Bruski, Noack, Janssen and Comerford2012, 223; the entire document in Bruski Reference Bruski2008, 295).

In British reports, one can hardly find any such assessment of the causes of the famine. Famine and fear are referred to in a report as “the principal allies of the Soviet power” (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 25), and there is a clear perception that the Soviet government tackled the catastrophe arising out its own irrational economic policy by putting the blame on the kulak element and trying to tighten their grip on the countryside by means of increased repression (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 196, 243–245). In British reports, however, the stress is rather on the irrationality of the communist system that had wreaked the agricultural produce, thereby cynically regarding the death of millions of people as “the normal casualties of a nation-wide operation in class warfare (a class war to end classes)” (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 257).

German sources stand out for a further element. Almost obsessively, German reports addressed the issue of whether the famine would lead the Soviet system to collapse or if, on the contrary, internal stability would prevail.Footnote ³² This insistence can be explained by the state of German–Soviet relations in 1933. In the first years of Nazi rule, many officials of the German Foreign Office, especially the “Russia experts” (Sütterlin Reference Sütterlin1994), were particularly concerned with keeping the Rapallo policy alive, as they believed that the National Socialist policy might be tamed and forced to abide in continuity with the previous foreign policy. Therefore, German diplomats keenly sought to give Berlin a reassuring picture of the internal stability of the Soviet Union, stressing that the party power had not been consistently undermined by the famine. Thus they endeavored to convince the new rulers that the Soviet Union was a factor to be reckoned with in the following years. For example, a German report from Odessa drafted at the end of 1934 describes the terrible conditions of the population. The German consul concluded:

Making Sense of the Famine: The Role of the National Question

Many contemporary non-Soviet observers acknowledged the existence of a link between the turn in the Soviet nationality policy and the famine.Footnote ³⁴ Again, there are differences in the way diplomatic reports dealt with this issue. Italian diplomats gave particular emphasis to this aspect, expressing the view that the Soviet government had purposely used the famine to prevent the rise of a national consciousness. Gradenigo wrote in May 1933 that the deliberate unleashing of the famine had been motivated, among other reasons, by “the more or less openly acknowledged necessity or concern to denationalize the regions where the Ukrainian and German consciousness was awakening, threatening future political difficulties, and that, for the sake of the Empire’s unity, should be preferably inhabited for the most part by Russians” (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1991, 169).

Similar to the question about intentionality, also on the national issue, the view of the German diplomats was less straightforward than that of the Italians. While they acknowledged that the Soviet authorities had coupled the procurement campaign of 1933 with a struggle against separatist movements, they rather believed that the state had staged a witch hunt campaign against separatist tendencies in order to crush any resistance to its policy. Thus, German consuls expressed the belief that the nationalist movement was rather a bogus threat than an actual danger. This view fits with their general disregard of the role of nationalities in the internal developments of the Soviet Union and, in particular, of the Ukrainians, whom they regarded as displaying only a weak national identity. “All in all, however,” wrote the German consul in Odessa in December 1933, “it is clear that the national consciousness in Russian Ukraine is still poorly developed and that the number of its spokesmen is still small. Ukraine, not considering Eastern Galicia, find itself approximately where the Slovenes or the Slovaks were one generation ago.”Footnote ³⁵ To be sure, German dispatches observed a surge of nationalism in Ukraine in 1933. Yet they considered it to be only a disguised form of the opposition by local elites and peasants to the agricultural policy of Moscow. The “real national endeavors were secondary and in the first place were merely a means to an end not an end in itself. The aim was namely only to improve the situation in the country,” wrote the German Consul in Kharkiv in July 1934.Footnote ³⁶ It is noteworthy that this view did not apply only to the Ukrainians but also to the Germans. Otto Schiller devoted an entire memorandum to investigating the issue of whether the famine targeted specific national groups, concluding that a comparison between mortality rates among different national groups in Ukraine did not show the existence of a national bias. German colonists had been less severely hit by the famine than Russian and Ukrainian peasants, but this was due only to the fact that prior to the famine they had accumulated relatively consistent wealth, which had allowed them to survive in greater number. “The suffering of the German peasants,” he concluded in his report, “has been caused by the Soviet agricultural policy. This however is directed against the peasantry of the Soviet Union as a whole, with no regard for national differences as far as these are not linked with social and economic differences.”Footnote ³⁷

Apart from the above explanations, the preponderance of this view in German reports can also to be explained as part of the attempts of the German diplomats to keep the Rapallo policy alive.Footnote ³⁸ By foregrounding elements of stability in the country, Germans diplomats tried to convey to Berlin the impression that the Soviet Union was not heading toward collapse. In particular, these reports were intended to restrain the influence on German foreign policy of Alfred Rosenberg, who in early writings had outlined his intention to pursue a policy of fragmentation of the USSR along national lines. When the Nazis came to power, many German diplomats feared that the Nazi government would start a campaign in support of the oppressed non-Russian nationalities.Footnote ³⁹

Similar concerns were not unknown to the Italian diplomats. According to Giorgio Petracchi, whereas the Italian consuls in Ukraine expected a popular uprising spurred by a revival of Ukrainian nationalism, Ambassador Attolico in Moscow defused this idea by pointing to the strong hold the Bolsheviks had on the strings of power (Petracchi Reference Petracchi, Rosa and Lomastro2004, 278).Footnote ⁴⁰ Similar to the German diplomats, Attolico believed that the Ukrainian national movement had no real foothold in Soviet Ukraine, which convinced Mussolini that it was inconvenient for Italy to support the international campaign against the famine.

Polish representatives closely followed the Soviet nationalities policy from its very inception in 1925. They were particularly concerned by what T. Martin has called the “Piedmont Principle,” or the Soviet attempt to appeal to ethnic minorities living within the borders of neighboring countries (Martin Reference Martin2001, 8–9).Footnote ⁴¹ Not surprisingly they were particularly attentive to the turn against nationalities in 1933, not least because it targeted Poles among others (Bruski Reference Bruski2008, 251–276, 304–305, 307–310, 315–323, 323–327, 433–435).Footnote ⁴² Like the Germans, Polish diplomats often expressed the belief that the struggle against separatism was a weapon brandished by the Soviet government to break the peasant resistance rather than a goal in itself, as the Vice-Consul in Kyiv wrote in September 1933:

British reports are particularly silent on the national issue, despite the fact that British reports seem to lend more credibility to Soviet claims that a real attempt to detach Ukraine from the Soviet Union was taking place.Footnote ⁴⁴ A memorandum by Sir Moore Crosthwaite, contained a lengthy appraisal of the Ukrainian question. The document dwelt consistently on the prospect of a German–Polish agreement on the Polish corridor, for which, or so the British believed, Poland would be compensated by annexing parts of Ukraine or through the creation of an independent Ukraine under her control. Most likely the memorandum was drafted in view of the German–Polish approach that led to the non-aggression pact of January 1934. The drafter considered unlikely the possibility that Ukrainians might be able to reach independence on the ground that “the peasants, though many, are divided, and there is an important element in the towns whose existence depends on the continuance of the present link with Moscow” (Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan Reference Carynnyk, Luciuk and Kordan1988, 361).