The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Stalin’s August 1932 letter to Kaganovich included a detailed plan for avoiding the “loss” of Ukraine. He suggested replacing the current leaders of the Ukrainian party and government, as well as the leadership of the secret police, with new cadres. “We should set ourselves the goal of turning Ukraine into a real fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” he wrote. In November, Stalin sent a plenipotentiary to Ukraine to take over the secret police apparatus. In December, he turned a Politburo meeting on grain procurement into a platform to attack the Ukrainian party leadership for not only failing to fulfill quotas but also distorting the party line on Ukrainization. “The Central Committee and the Soviet of People’s Commissars note,” stated the resolution prepared on Stalin’s orders, “that instead of correct Bolshevik conduct of nationality policy in a number of districts of Ukraine, Ukrainization was conducted mechanically, without taking account of the concrete particulars of each district, without careful selection of Ukrainian Bolshevik cadres, which made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, Petliurites, and others to create their legal covers, their counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

  The Politburo resolution spelled the end of Ukrainization in regions of the North Caucasus and the Far East settled by Ukrainians. It also served as the basis for an attack on the Ukrainization policy and its cadres in Ukraine itself, leading to the dismissal or arrest of thousands of party functionaries and the suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk, the people’s commissar of education and main promoter of Ukrainization at the state level. Stalin blamed Ukrainian nationalists at home and abroad for causing the Ukrainian peasantry to sabotage party policy and hide grain from the state, thereby undermining the industrialization campaign. The attack on the Ukrainian peasantry went hand in hand with the attack on Ukrainian culture. The famine that was beginning in Ukraine when the Politburo issued its resolution on procurements and Ukrainization resulted not only from Stalin’s policy toward the peasantry and the party apparatus but also from his shift of nationality policy that equated resistance to the grain requisitions with nationalism.

  In December 1932, Stalin sent Kaganovich and the head of the Soviet government, Viacheslav Molotov, to Ukraine to ensure that the unrealistic grain-procurement quotas would be met. Led by Moscow plenipotentiaries and terrorized by the GPU, Ukrainian party cadres took all they could from the starving and, in many cases, dying peasantry. The authorities punished those villages that failed to fulfill their quotas by cutting off supplies of basic goods, including matches and kerosene, and confiscating not only grain but also livestock and anything else that could be used as food. The first deaths caused by the new famine were reported in December 1932; by March 1933, death from starvation was a mass phenomenon. The party bosses, now alarmed, bombarded Kharkiv and Moscow with requests for assistance. It came in insufficient quantities, too late to save millions of starving peasants. Most of the victims died in late spring and early summer, when food supplies ran out completely. Many died because they ate grass or early vegetables—their stomachs could not digest raw foodstuffs after months of starvation.

  Hardest hit were the Ukrainian parklands in the Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts that had suffered from famine earlier in the spring—too weak to do proper sowing, the peasants there had little in the way of supplies and were the first to die. By the end of 1933, the Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts had each lost up to a million inhabitants. The major grain-producing oblasts in the Ukrainian steppes, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, both lost in excess of 300,000 people. Less affected was the industrial Donbas, where 175,000 people died of hunger in 1933. The steppe areas suffered less from the famine than did the parklands because they had not experienced famine the previous year; also, if things got really bad, the peasants could find refuge at the construction sites of Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and the Donbas. Besides, in the spring of 1933 the Moscow government was much more willing to supply relief grain to the south than to central Ukraine: Moscow needed more grain, and keeping people alive in the major grain-producing areas to harvest crops was the only way to get it. Others could be left to die, and they did. Altogether, close to 4 million people perished in Ukraine as a result of the famine, more than decimating the country—every eighth person succumbed to hunger between 1932 and 1934.

  The famine produced a different Soviet Ukraine. Stalin managed to keep it in his embrace by purging the party and government apparatus of those who would not go against their own people and take the last food supplies from the starving: of more than five hundred secretaries of district party committees, more than half lost their positions in the first half of 1933, many of them arrested and exiled. The rest would toe the party line no matter what. Those were the cadres Stalin wanted to keep, at least for the time being. He also got a new “socialist” peasantry. Those who survived the famine had learned their lesson: they could survive only by joining the party-controlled collective farms, which were taxed at a lower rate and, in the spring of 1933, were the only farms to receive government relief. The collectivization of the absolute majority of households and land, now an accomplished fact, dramatically changed the economy, social structure, and politics of the Ukrainian village.

  Was the Great Ukrainian Famine (in Ukrainian, the Holodomor) a premeditated act of genocide against Ukraine and its people? In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as such. A number of parliaments and governments around the world passed similar resolutions, while the Russian government launched an international campaign to undermine the Ukrainian claim. Political controversy and scholarly debate on the nature of the Ukrainian famine continue to this day, turning largely on the definition of the term “genocide.” But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932–1933 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also affected the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin’s decision to terminate the Ukrainization policy and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.

  Stalin used the Great Famine to turn Ukraine into an “exemplary Soviet republic,” as he called it in his letter to Kaganovich. The transfer of the capital in 1934 from Kharkiv to Kyiv, whose intelligentsia, decimated by purges, no longer presented a challenge to the Soviet regime in Ukraine, completed the transformation of the autonomous and often independently minded republic into a mere province of the Soviet Union.

  As the master of the Kremlin had wanted, Ukraine became a model of Soviet industrialization and collectivization. By the end of the 1930s, the industrial output of Ukraine exceeded that of 1913 eightfold, an achievement only slightly less impressive than that of the union’s largest republic—Russia. The agricultural sector was fully collectivized, with 98 percent of all households and 99.9 percent of all arable land listed as collective property. The problem was that impeccable collectivization statistics belied agriculture’s dismal performance. In 1940, Ukraine produced 26.4 million tons of grain, only 3.3 million more than in 1913, posting an increase in agricultural production that amounted to less than 13 percent. The village, devastated by the Great Famine and collectivization, could not keep pace with the rapidly growing industrial city. Although Ukraine underwent rapid industrialization and modernization, it paid a tremendous price for that “leap forward.” Between 1926 and 1937, the population of Soviet Ukraine fell from 29 to 26.5 million, rising to slightly more than 28 million in 1939.

  Many Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds perished in the Great Purge—the multiple waves of arrest, execution, and exile that engulfed the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1940, taking their greatest toll in 1937. As many as 270,000 people were arrested in Ukraine in 1937 and 1938, and close to half of them were executed. The Great Purge had the same objectiv
e as many of Stalin’s other policies of the 1930s—to ensure the survival of the regime and Stalin’s position as its supreme leader. Those of his former allies and enemies who still survived, including Lev Kamenev, Georgii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, he had shot. In Ukraine, the same fate befell the leaders of the party, state, and secret police apparatus who had shown their loyalty to Stalin during the Great Famine. The regime wanted docile new cadres unaware of the crimes of the past who would serve the leader faithfully. Aside from party cadres, the terror hit former members of non-Bolshevik parties and national minorities hardest. Ukraine, as a border republic with numerous minorities whose loyalty the regime questioned, again came under severe scrutiny. Ethnic Poles and Germans topped the hierarchy of enemies. Poles accounted for close to 20 percent of those arrested, and Germans for about 10 percent. The USSR targeted both groups, whose portion of the overall population did not exceed 1.5 percent, as potential spies and “fifth columnists” of its main adversaries at the time, Poland and Germany.

  In 1938, Stalin sent his new lieutenant, Nikita Khrushchev, to Ukraine to carry out the last repressive measures and prepare the republic for what he believed to be a coming war. Khrushchev’s task was the same as that of his predecessors: to turn Ukraine into a socialist fortress. “Comrades,” declared Khrushchev to delegates at the Ukrainian party congress in June 1938, “we shall bend every effort to ensure that the task and directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and Comrade Stalin—to make Ukraine a fortress impregnable to enemies—is fulfilled with honor.” The next few years would test the strength of the Ukrainian redoubt.

  In October 1938, the government of the rump Czechoslovakia (then being dismembered by Adolf Hitler) appointed a Ukrainian activist, the Reverend Avhustyn Voloshyn, to lead the government of autonomous Transcarpathia, renamed from Subcarpathian Rus’ to Carpatho-Ukraine. The decision followed the transfer of the Hungarian-populated regions of Transcarpathia, along with its two main urban centers, Uzhhorod and Mukacheve, to Hungary. The new government replaced a short-lived administration of Russophile orientation and adopted Ukrainian as the official language. It also created its own paramilitary units to resist Hungarian and Polish militias. Called the Carpathian Sich—a reference to the Sich Riflemen of Galicia and Sich Cossacks of Dnieper Ukraine—those units largely consisted of young members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who came from Poland to fight for the cause of Ukrainian statehood.

  The year 1939 began with rumors in European foreign ministries that Hitler planned to use Carpatho-Ukraine as a springboard to attack Soviet Ukraine and “reunite” all ethnic Ukrainian territories. In January, Hitler offered the visiting Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, an exchange of Danzig and the Polish corridor to the Baltic Sea for new territories in Ukraine to be acquired as a result of the German invasion of the USSR. Beck declined the offer. Irrespective of Beck’s position, Hitler decided not to play the Ukrainian card against Stalin, at least not immediately. When his troops moved into Prague in March 1939 to end the existence of Czechoslovakia, Hitler decided against the creation of an independent Ukrainian state and gave Transcarpathia to his ally, Hungary. The government of autonomous Transcarpathia met this decision with surprise and disappointment.

  On March 15, the day Hitler’s forces moved into Prague, the parliament of Carpatho-Ukraine proclaimed the independence of its land. The new country chose blue and yellow as the colors of its national flag and adopted the Ukrainian national anthem, “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.” The declaration of independence did not stop the Hungarian army, which moved into the region without encountering resistance from Czechoslovak forces. The only troops fighting the advancing Hungarians were members of the Carpathian Sich units. “At a time when eight million Czechs submitted to the rule of the German state without offering the least resistance, thousands of Ukrainians came out against a Hungarian army of several thousand,” wrote a Ukrainian reporter at the time. Altogether the Carpathian Sich had about 2,000 fighters. As the forces were unequal, Ukrainian resistance was soon crushed. The government of the Reverend Voloshyn left the country, and Hungarian soldiers or Polish border guards captured many surviving members of the OUN on their way back to Galicia. This was the first baptism of fire for the nationalist fighters: more would come.

  Stalin was sufficiently worried by the developments in Transcarpathia to ridicule the idea of German support for Ukrainian independence in a speech to a party congress in Moscow in March 1939. The existence of significant Ukrainian territories outside the Soviet Union that could be used by Hitler to challenge Stalin’s control over Soviet Ukraine became a major concern of his “fortress builders” on the eve of World War II. The defensive bulwark seemed to have developed a large crack—the threat of Ukrainian irredentism.

  chapter 22

  Hitler’s Lebensraum

  Adolf Hitler presented his views on the future of the world in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the book he dictated in the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria during his incarceration for his role in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. In his prison cell, the former Habsburg subject pledged to fight against the so-called Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world and propounded the creation of a German empire that would provide the Aryan race with Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe. Hitler spent only a year in prison. From 1933, when he became chancellor of Germany and his Nazi Party came to power, he had enough resources to begin implementing his plans. Hitler’s ideas, spelled out for the first time in 1923, had a profound impact on the world, but in few places was their impact as destructive and their consequence as tragic as in Ukraine—the centerpiece of Hitler’s vision of Lebensraum.

  The idea of Lebensraum for the Germans was not Hitler’s creation. First formulated before World War I, it envisioned the acquisition of German territory all over the world. Germany’s defeat in the war made colonial expansion across the British-controlled seaways all but impossible, and Hitler saw room for growth in eastern Europe alone. “It would have been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of possessions abroad,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), which included the recognition of a Ukraine independent of Russia and occupied by German and Austrian troops, provided one model for German eastward expansion. But Hitler had little appetite for nation building in the east. His goal was different: to wipe out the existing population all the way to the Volga and settle the fertile lands of eastern Europe—Ukraine in particular—with German colonists. “Too much importance cannot be placed on the need to adopt a policy that will make it possible to maintain a healthy peasant class as the basis of the national community,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “Many of our present evils have their origin exclusively in the disproportion between the urban and rural portions of the population.”

  Hitler’s rural utopia for the Germans required not only the acquisition of new territory but also its deurbanization and depopulation. His vision for eastern Europe differed greatly from the one introduced by the Bolsheviks and promoted by Joseph Stalin. Both dictators were prepared to use brute force to build their utopias, and both needed Ukrainian territory, soil, and agriculture to achieve their goals, but they had dissimilar attitudes toward the cities and the population at large. Ukraine would learn what that meant in practice and assess the degree of difference between the two regimes during its three-year occupation by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. With its pre-1914 reputation as the breadbasket of Europe and one of the highest concentrations of Jews on the continent, Ukraine would become both a prime object of German expansionism and one of the Nazis’ main victims. Between 1939 and 1945 it would lose almost 7 million citizens (close to 1 million of them Jewish), or more than 16 percent of its prewar population. Only Belarus and Poland—two other countries within the sphere of Hitler’s Lebensraum—sustained higher proportional losses.

  In M
ein Kampf, Hitler envisioned an alliance with Britain to defeat France and a pact with Russia to annihilate Poland. Ultimately, Russia— or, rather, the Soviet Union—was supposed to provide Hitler with what he wanted: land for settlement and a wealth of natural resources that would turn Germany into a continental empire whose links with its colonies the British navy could not disrupt. The alliance with Britain never materialized, but by the fall of 1939 Hitler had indeed accomplished an accord with the Soviet Union and the annihilation of Poland.

  When World War II began with a German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin had already agreed on a partition of the Polish lands on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed less than ten days earlier. As Stalin delayed Soviet entrance into the war, concerned about the reaction of Britain and France as well as the ongoing Soviet-Japanese conflict in Mongolia, German diplomats used the Ukrainian card to speed up the Soviet attack on Poland. They claimed that if the USSR continued to delay its invasion, Germany would have no choice but to create separate states in the territories assigned to the Soviet Union. The formation of a German-backed Ukrainian state in Galicia and Volhynia was the last thing Stalin wanted to see in that area. When he finally sent his troops across the Polish border, they marched under the pretext of defending the “fraternal” Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.

  By early October 1939, the Polish army had ceased to exist, destroyed by the attacks of the two powerful neighbors. The Soviets captured but then released most of its rank-and-file soldiers. The officers, however, met a different fate. The USSR detained close to 15,000 of them in three detention camps, one in Ukraine and two in Russia. In the spring of 1940, most of them would perish in Katyn Forest near Smolensk and other sites of mass murder. Initially, however, few people, especially among the non-Poles, suspected the Soviets of evil intentions. The Red Army, which was no match for the Germans in mechanization, demonstrated its superiority to the Polish troops in the quality of its armaments, which included new tanks, aircraft, and modern guns—all products of Stalin’s industrialization effort. But to the surprise of many, the Soviet officers and soldiers were often badly dressed, poorly fed, and shocked by the relative abundance of food and goods in the Polish shops. The locals found Soviet officers ideologically indoctrinated, uncultured, and unsophisticated. For years, they would tell and retell stories about the wives of Red Army officers who allegedly attended theaters in nightgowns, believing them to be evening dresses. But the non-Polish citizens of the former Polish state were prepared to live with the well-armed and uncultured “liberators” as long as they promised to improve their lives, and for a while it seemed that they would.