1921

1921 7 February
Lenin signs the decree “On the Creation of a State Fund of Valuables for Foreign Trade.” Within the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade an organ was being created to carry out the “selection, classification, evaluation, and registration of artistic and antiquarian-historical items that may be used for exporting, as well as luxury items.” This directive did not mention a single word about a decree issued by this commissariat on 19 September 1918, entitled “Concerning the Ban on the Export and Sale Abroad of Items of Particularly Artistic Significance.”
11 February
Lenin signs the decree of the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR about the founding in Moscow and Petrograd of institutes for the training of professors for the teaching of Marxist philosophy in institutes of higher learning.
7 March
The Bolshevik government approves a decision concerning the obligatory teaching of “historical materialism” in all higher institutes of learning.
8 March
While the armies of Gen. Mikhail Tukhachevsky are beginning to crush the Kronstadt Uprising of sailors and workers, the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) Party [RCP(b)] convenes in Moscow. It approves a decision to switch from the policy of “War Communism” to the New Economic Policy (NEP).
14 May
Based on a proposal by Lenin, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) passes a resolution entitled “About the Expansion of Rights of the VCheKa concerning the Application of the Highest Degree of Punishment.”
22 June
A group of civic activists proclaim their intention to create an All-Russian Civic Committee to help the starving. The goal is to collect money, food, and medicines in the West. For the first time the Bolsheviks sanction the creation of an independent civic organization, which includes writers, academicians, several former members of the Provisional Government, and theatrical activists. However, the VCheKa receives crucial instructions. The committee exists for barely a month before its members are arrested, subjected to searches, deported first from Moscow and later from the country. Many are saved from death by the intervention of the Norwegian scientist, diplomat, and humanist Fritjof Nansen. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky leaves the committee three days before it is disbanded. It is believed that he was warned.
22 June
The 3rd Congress of the Comintern convenes in Moscow. After failed attempts to organize a revolution in Germany, the Baltic countries, and Poland, at the congress the Communists led by Lenin remove the slogan of world revolution. A new economic policy is being introduced, and the Bolsheviks need to learn how to trade with the West. The left-wing Comintern parties German, Dutch, and several othersjoin the Russian left opposition, accusing Lenin's followers of betraying the ideals of world revolution and selling out Russia to the capitalists.
August
The Bolsheviks smash the detachments of Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno.
August
During discussions of the question “About the Campaign Concerning the Struggle with the Famine,” the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U approves a decision “to indicate to the gubernial committees that during the course of the campaign it is crucial to distinguish between the call to struggle with the famine in Russia from the struggle with the poor harvest in Ukraine, where aid to raions (counties) that have suffered from the bad harvest can be entirely given by gubernial or district means.”
4-29 November
The second winter expedition of the UNR army led by Yurii Tiutiunnyk. On 23 November, 359 members of this expedition are shot near the village of Bazar.

The drought in the southern regi-ons of Ukraine in 1921 was as severe as in the Trans-Volga region, and a timely redistribution of the harvest to benefit the southern gubernias could have prevented the famine. However, Lenin's government was troubled primarily by the situation in the Russian cities of Moscow and Petrograd, and the Donbas region of Ukraine. In implementing the Moscow center's directive, in July 1921 the CCCP (b)U ordered the local authorities “to apply superhuman efforts to increasing food provisioning and implementing the orders issued by the People's Commissariat of Food Provisioning even at the cost of satisfying local needs.” The consequences of these inhumane directives were soon felt: between December 1921 and May 1922 in the steppe gubernias of Ukraine alone the number of starving people rose from 1.2 million to 3.8 million people. The total number of people affected in all Ukrainian gubernias was approximately 5.6 million, comprising 25 percent of the population of Ukraine. In 1922, 70 percent of all infants died in Ukraine.

A catastrophic drought, combined with the poor harvest of 1921, exacerbated the grain situ-ation in the most important grain-producing areas of Russia, the Trans-Volga region, and southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian SSR harvested only 30 percent of the 1916 harvest. The drought was worsened by the dire consequences of war: first WWI and then the Civil War. Agriculture suffered from the Bolshevik system of food distribution in 1919-1920, which resulted in a decrease of arable areas in the gubernias, compared with a good harvest.

The Soviet government had no desire to circulate information about the starving Ukrainian peasants. Newspapers were forbidden to write about the famine. Only in early 1922, when starving peasants in the south were beginning to die in the famine, was Ukraine allowed to conclude an agreement with the American Relief Administration (ARA), similar to the one that Russia had signed nine months earlier, in August 1921. In May 1922 the head of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee Hryhorii Petrovsky requested his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kalinin to stop the exportation of food from the Ukrainian SSR, since “in Russia the crisis has turned the corner. In Ukraine it is the contrary. The horrors of the sale of human meat in Kherson are becoming more widespread…As of 1 April there are three million starving people. Aidgenerally one-eighth of a pound of breadis being distributed only to 15 percent…” One week later, in a letter to Kalinin, Petrovsky writes: “From the beginning of the campaign Ukraine, possessing its own Trans-Volga region, sent 960 train cars of food to the starving gubernias of the RSFSR, which are attached to it [Ukraine], i.e., four times more than to its own starving gubernias…”