by Philipp Blom
During the nineteenth century, most of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, while the western part, Ruthenia, was ruled by the Habsburgs. The harsh tsarist policies of Russification, which all but outlawed the national language and repressed all stirrings of a distinctive culture, led to the displacement of many Ukrainian nationalist intellectuals and to an atmosphere of constant unrest. Possessing its own church, language, and history, Ukraine was almost like the Russian heartland of the so-called Golden Circle, but never quite.
Following the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the country was fought over, often savagely, by rival communist, White, and Ukrainian nationalist forces, and between February 1918 and June 1920 the capital, Kiev, changed hands no fewer than seven times. Finally, in March 1921, Ukraine became a Soviet Socialist Republic.
Initially the new rulers in Moscow were uncertain what to do with the troublesome republic. The Ukrainians were known to be intransigent, fiercely attached to their own ways, and unwilling to submit to Soviet rule. The Bolshevik leadership had responded with a policy of caution, reversing the harsh implementation of Russian language and culture and even allowing a national cultural movement to develop. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church had seceded from the Patriarch in Moscow, and in 1923 Stalin had given a thundering speech against Russian arrogance and in favor of a measure of cultural independence of the non-Russian Soviet republics. For the first time ever, a Ukrainian nation began to grow out of the destruction of war and revolution.
In spite of pressure to develop industrial cities such as Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk and in spite of a continuing movement into the cities that saw the proportion of villagers and farmers decrease from 81 to 66 percent of the population within a decade, the country dwellers were no more resentful of the new regime than they had been of previous ones. Even if they remained wary of the representatives of Russian power and not many were interested in communism, they welcomed the fact that their new masters seemed to rule with a light touch.
A Massive Slaughter
THE TROUBLE HAD STARTED with the first Five-Year Plan, introduced by Stalin in 1928. To aid rapid industrialization, the plan demanded a large-scale collectivization of means of production, which included farming lands, tools, and farm animals, to increase production and free the suffering mass of poor peasants from hunger and oppression. In theory, this plan was as beautiful as it was necessary. To Soviet ideologues the muzhiks, backward peasants, were forever caught between subservience to their masters or to the church, on one hand, and the greedily oppressive kulaks, on the other. The kulaks were the main ideological enemies in this recasting of the rural economy. The word kulak can be translated as “grasping fist,” and it was used to designate wealthy farmers who were said to exploit the peasants and who enriched themselves by holding back grain for their own profit while the poorest were starving.
The Bolshevik vision of muzhiks and rural misery was no mere propaganda, and Miron Dolot’s account of idyllic village life certainly needs some redress. Even if Ukraine had the best soil in the Soviet empire, agricultural practices were indeed woefully inefficient, yields were lower than in western European countries with more advanced techniques, most people were poor, and literacy among the rural population, especially women, was low. Most peasant families occupied one dark and frequently dirty room, illuminated only by small windows and the flame of the candle burning in front of the iconostase in one corner. Alcoholism was endemic, brawls in the village square were frequent and usually brutal, domestic violence was rife and seen as part of life, and the women, like the children, lived practically in bondage to their men, who alone could decide all important questions. While there never was a fixed social category of kulaks, authority was frequently exercised by wealthier farmers over poorer ones, and many of them undoubtedly profited from lending money to indebted peasants unable to feed their hungry children.
The Bolsheviks had sworn to change all this. Instead of the backwardness, inefficiency, and injustice of traditional farming, scientific, socialist agricultural production would combine resources in huge collectives, transforming servile, ignorant country folk into proper agricultural proletarians and producing enough grain to feed the vast acceleration of industry the Soviet leadership had projected as part of its Five-Year Plan.
The first attempts to implement this policy were met with resistance, which embittered Moscow. Communism was blunted in the countryside, and Stalin and his close ally Lazar Kaganovich found the Bolshevik solution: they designated a guilty party and then set about eliminating it. The problem, it was thought, was the wealthy peasants, who resisted socialism in order to perpetuate their nefarious power. The Soviet leadership was therefore convinced that the only possible answer to this was to liquidate the kulaks as a class.
As collectivization was frustrated at every turn, the secret police and army units from other regions of the Soviet Union were sent in to enforce the plan. Miron Dolot remembers a meeting convened by Party officials shortly after a propaganda detachment had already visited the village and destroyed its church: “In the middle of the square was the raised platform. . . . Around the platform stood armed sentries. From the ruins of the church, the machine gun faced us. Heavily armed soldiers walked around the square. And in the middle of the square, the farmers stood, huddled together, silent but restless, for it was very cold.”4
Any farmer who was thought to be a kulak (an ill-defined term, which in practice could mean nothing more than that someone had more than one cow, or used the labor of farm hands, or had a better roof on his house than others) was seized and deported. Some one hundred thousand families were transported to Siberia or to other regions during the early 1930s; some of them were on the trains of misery arriving in Magnitogorsk. Many more were arrested and simply executed. Denunciations by jealous neighbors were a daily occurrence. The Bread Procurement Commission began making its dreaded rounds, pressuring farmers to join the collective by impounding their grain for the state.
In Miron’s village, the chairman of the commission was a known drunk and troublemaker from the village who had joined the Party in 1919 and was now master over life and death. In one incident, he came to the house of Miron’s family at midnight and “on official business,” dead drunk and accompanied by other members of the commission. When Miron’s mother slapped him in the face after he had attempted to grope her, he tried to shoot her but hit the holy icon in the corner of the house instead. One of the brothers tried to wrestle the gun out of his hand as he took aim again. The lad was arrested for “assaulting a Party official” and later sentenced to hard labor. Two years later his remaining family would learn that he had died from exhaustion while being made to work on a canal project.
As the year 1932 turned to winter the repression against alleged “kulaks,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and “saboteurs” intensified. Several of Miron’s uncles were arrested. One of them died in his own house from kicks to the head; another one was taken from his house and sent to Siberia without even a coat. Village elders, wealthier peasants, and anyone who had in the past aroused the displeasure of the chief of the commission were herded together in the village square, where a table with a bright red tablecloth had been set up in the snow. On the table stood a telephone, and behind the table the Party commissar sat in judgment. When the relatives of the families arrested began to move against the guards, a machine gun fired into the crowd, killing three. Then sleighs carried those who were convicted—all of the accused—to the railway station.
“As one sleigh moved to join a column, a young man sprang from it and raced toward another sleigh in which his helpless and weeping wife and children were riding,” the young observer remembered. “The father obviously wanted to be with his family, but he did not reach them. Comrade Pashchenko, the chairman of the village soviet who was supervising the whole action, raised his revolver and calmly fired. The young father dropped dead into the snow, and the sleigh carrying his widow and orphans moved on.”5
A
fter the arrests, wrote Miron, “our lives became harsh and grim.” While only a few farmers were living well enough even to be accused of being kulaks, all of them were subject to the new policy of collectivization and working on large kolkhoz farms. Peasants not wanting to give up their farms to the collective were summoned by the commission of the next village and then the next, each time entailing a forced march through the snow at night in order to arrive in time for the morning interrogation. The summonses continued to arrive until the exhausted and humiliated victims would finally resign themselves to their fate. After all her grain had been taken from her, and after many weeks of systematic harassment, Miron’s mother also gave up and signed the application: “Whereas the collective farm has advantages over individual farming; and whereas it is the only way to secure a prosperous and happy life, I voluntarily request the collective farm’s management to accept me as a member of your collective farm.”6
But not all farmers submitted to the pressure of the commissars and the army soldiers billeted in their houses. Ordered to give up their tools and deliver their animals to the local kolkhoz, they initially refused, then hid or destroyed their plows rather than see them taken away, and slaughtered their animals, rendering the courtyards and meadows red with the blood of tens of millions of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, and geese. The animals handed over to the collective often fared little better. The farm workers were sloppy and forgot to feed them and otherwise look after them, the procurement of feed was unreliable, and diseases and malnutrition were rife among the livestock. In many collectives the horses were simply turned loose into the woods, as the kolkhoz leaderships confidently expected the imminent delivery of tractors.
On the collective farms, a life of fear and suspicion descended on the new recruits. “We were always suspected of treason. Even sadness or happiness were causes for suspicion. Sadness was thought of as an indication of dissatisfaction with our life, while happiness, regardless of how sporadic, spontaneous, or fleeting, was considered to be a dangerous phenomenon that could destroy our devotion to the communist cause,” Miron recounted.7 At the same time, the resistance continued. Communist officials were beaten to death under cover of night and their bloodied corpses were found lying in the gutter in the morning, sometimes with defiant messages pinned to their chest. In response, more farmers would be arrested and sent to forced labor camps. Those attempting to resist or flee were shot immediately. In 1932, as Ukraine was threatening to sink into anarchy and the much-prized breadbasket of the nation was producing less grain, Stalin’s response had been coolly punitive. In the troublesome province, where agriculture had already been severely compromised by the deportation and execution of part of the farming population and by the destruction of livestock and machinery, he upped the quota of grain to be delivered to the central government from 30 percent to 44 percent of the harvest, a number deliberately set far above anything achievable. “This was the memorable spring of 1932 when the famine broke out and the first deaths from hunger began to occur,” recalled Miron. “I remember the endless procession of beggars on roads and paths, going from house to house. They were in different stages of starvation, dirty and ragged. With outstretched hands, they begged for food, any food: a potato, a beet, or at least a kernel of corn.”8
The tender dictator: Joseph Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana.
In order to fulfill the all-important quota, further impossible demands were heaped upon the farmers. One of the men in Miron’s village received a demand for five hundred kilograms of wheat, which he fulfilled. Immediately the authorities demanded an additional one thousand kilograms from him, an order he could meet only by selling most of his possessions. The next demand was for two thousand kilograms, and this time he could no longer comply. Accused of being a kulak and a traitor, he was arrested and deported together with his family. The farm was confiscated and turned into the local soviet’s headquarters. The farmer and his family were never heard from again.
The harvest quota was set according to unrealistically high estimates, and the demanded 44 percent of a hypothetical normal harvest exceeded the entire production of 1932, a year dogged not only by the disruption of harvesting practices but also by persistent bad weather. To expedite the campaign and fulfill the official quotas, some one hundred thousand young Bolshevik functionaries were sent to Ukraine to supervise the harvest work, but most of them were students and other city dwellers who had never even seen a plow. They had no idea when to harvest or how to organize the work, and their orders and punitive measures only made things worse. The harvested grain was kept in depots guarded by watchtowers. Anyone attempting to approach without authorization was shot.
Local Party officials were merciless in their execution of the orders from Moscow. Search parties armed with long pikes went from farm to farm, looking everywhere for grain. Once they had looked in the pantry and the storage rooms they would rip apart beds and cradles, break into locked chests, and hack into wooden walls and floors in their search for hiding places, leaving behind devastation and misery. Before long, the farmers had to take to foraging for food in the woods or already harvested fields: “Crowds of starving wretches could be seen scattered all over the potato fields. They were looking for potatoes left over from last year’s harvest.”9
When there was nothing left at all, those with sufficient strength would walk to the cities to find work there, but they only found the street army of the starving. At first they had something to sell—clothes and household items, heirlooms and embroidered linen—but when their possessions were used up they faced starvation once again. It was illegal to give work to anyone from the countryside, and so the emaciated frames of the desperate would haunt streets and squares, rummaging in the rubbish or begging from people with nothing left to give. In the end, people simply became used to their desperate begging.
The situation in the villages had become desperate, remembered Miron: “One could see strange funeral processions: children pulling homemade handwagons with the bodies of their dead parents in them or the parents carting the bodies of their children. There were no coffins; no burial ceremonies performed by priests.”10
Execution by Hunger
THE CAMPAIGN TO BREAK the population of Ukraine by hunger was organized on a grand scale. Villagers had to obtain passports to leave their villages and the collective farms they were working on, but these documents were never issued. Streets throughout the countryside were guarded by military roadblocks, and the borders were practically closed. Grain continued to leave the republic, and the countryside was turned into “one vast Belsen,” as Robert Conquest writes.
“Faced with starvation, the villagers tried everything possible to save themselves and their families,” Miron recounted. “Some of them started eating dogs and cats. Others went hunting for birds: crows, magpies, swallows, sparrows, storks, and even nightingales. One could see starving villagers searching in the bushes along the river for birds’ nests. . . . They even ate weeds, the leaves and bark of trees, insects, frogs, and snails.”11
Stalin saw the plight of the villagers and reacted promptly. A new quota demanded that the skins of cats and dogs be delivered to the state, and young communist activists took it upon themselves to slaughter all remaining dogs and cats they could find, leaving the villagers only the surviving scrawny rats to eat. Once they were done, the enthusiastic volunteers went on to kill the nightingales and other birds.
As autumn turned into grainless winter, desperate villagers began to pillage graveyards and churches for gold and other valuables that could be used to buy food in city stores, in which every imaginable delicacy appeared to be available. People were even assaulted and killed for their gold teeth. The countryside was buried under a thick blanket of snow, and Miron noticed that there were no tracks in it, meaning that few animals were left in the wild. Foraging for food, he came to a neighboring village in which the hearths had fallen cold and the limbs of the starved protruded darkly from the all-covering white. Most of
the frozen bodies were found by the roadside, as they had obviously used their last strength trying to leave the village and reach the nearest city. Those who made it there were regularly rounded up by local militias, taken to a nearby field, and simply abandoned to the frost.
A victim of Stalin’s artificial famine.
Trying to sell a gold amulet his mother had hidden until then, Miron went to the town of Torgsin, where many others were already assembled, suspended between a desperate hope of life and a resigned anticipation of death. “Emaciated and skeletonlike, or with swollen, puffed-up bodies, human beings stood around in the streets, leaned against the telephone poles and walls, or lay on the sidewalks and in the street gutters. They were patiently waiting for some merciful shoppers to share a pittance of their purchases with them. . . . Here and there among the crowds we could see the rigid bodies of the dead, but nobody paid any attention to them.”12
With the proceeds from the amulet, eighteen rubles, Miron and his mother stood in line for an hour before it was their turn to enter one of the famed shops. “What a sight it was,” he wrote. “I could not believe my eyes; it was like a dream. Here was everything we needed and more. There were things we had never even heard of or seen in our lives. There were even groceries known to me only from books I had read. All the items were tastefully arranged and exhibited in cases under glass. Looking at these splendid assortments of foods, I began to feel dizzy.”13
Miron and his mother smuggled home the food they had been able to buy, a small reprieve from starvation. Others, who lacked these last resources or who were simply unlucky, were reduced to cannibalism. A man killed his wife with an axe to make soup out of her, small children were smothered and consumed, and the bodies of those who had recently died (and had often been preserved by frost) were frequently attacked with butcher knives to carve out some flesh. The practice became so widespread that a directive from Moscow demanded that the local Party print and distribute hundreds of posters with the slogan EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM. During the famine, more than twenty-five hundred Ukrainian peasants were convicted of cannibalism by Soviet courts. Faced with such horrors, even loyal Party members who had helped implement this policy with the best intentions were driven to suicide.
