Excerpts from the book Red Famine–Blacklists

In November and December 1932, as the significance of the new "unconditional" requisition orders was sinking in, the Ukrainian Communist Party enlarged and formalized the republic's system of blacklists. The term "blacklist" (chorna doshka, which translates more literally as "black board") was not new. From their very earliest days in power, the Bolsheviks had grappled with the problem of low productivity. Since neither bosses nor workers in state companies had any market incentives to work hard or well, the State created elaborate schemes of reward and punishment. Among other things, many factories began to place the names of their most successful workers on "red boards," and those of the least successful workers on "black boards." In March 1920, Stalin himself gave a speech in Donbas and referred specifically to the need to "favour one group over another" and to reward "red medals" to the work brigade leaders, "as in a military operation." At the same time, those comrades who were avoiding work must be "pulled by the hair": "For them we need black boards." During the civil war, in 1919—21, the Bolsheviks had placed whole villages on blacklists if they failed to fulfil grain requisition requirements.

In 1932 the blacklist returned as a tool for the reinforcement of grain procurement policy. Although they were used to some degree in all the other grain-producing regions of the USSR, blacklists were applied earlier, more widely and more rigorously in Ukraine. From the beginning of that year, provincial and local authorities bad begun to blacklist collective farms, cooperatives and even whole villages that had failed to meet their grain quotas, and to subject them to a range of punishments and sanctions. In late summer local leaders expanded the blacklists. In November the practice became ubiquitous, spreading to include villages and collective farms in almost every district of Ukraine.

All across the republic, the names of blacklisted villages appeared in newspapers, along with the percentage of the grain quota they had achieved. One such article, for example, simply entitled "The Black List," appeared in the Poltava province in September 1932, with a black border around it. The list contained seven villages, each of which had produced between 10.7 per cent and 14.2 per cent of the yearly plan.

Source: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) by Anne Applebaum.