German and Polish diplomats informed their superiors of the suffering and death of the German and Polish minorities in Soviet Ukraine. The German consul in Kharkiv wrote that “almost every time I venture into the streets I see people collapsing from hunger.” Polish diplomats faced long lines of starving people desperate for a visa. One of them reported: “Frequently the clients, grown men, cry as they tell of wives and children starving to death or bursting from hunger.” As these diplomats knew, many peasants in Soviet Ukraine, not only Poles and Germans, hoped for an invasion from abroad to release them from their agony. Until the middle of 1932, their greatest hope was Poland. Stalin’s propaganda had been telling them for five years that Poland was planning to invade and annex Ukraine. When the famine began, many Ukrainian peasants hoped that this propaganda was true. As one Polish spy reported, they clung to the hope that “Poland or for that matter any other state would come and liberate them from misery and oppression.”93
When Poland and the Soviet Union signed their nonaggression pact in July 1932, that hope was dashed. Thenceforth the peasants could only hope for a German attack. Eight years later, those who survived would be in a position to compare Soviet to German rule.
The basic facts of mass hunger and death, although sometimes reported in the European and American press, never took on the clarity of an undisputed event. Almost no one claimed that Stalin meant to starve Ukrainians to death; even Adolf Hitler preferred to blame the Marxist system. It was controversial to note that starvation was taking place at all. Gareth Jones did so in a handful of newspaper articles; it seems that he was the only one to do so in English under his own name. When Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna tried to appeal for food aid for the starving in summer and autumn 1933, Soviet authorities rebuffed him nastily, saying that the Soviet Union had neither cardinals nor cannibals—a statement that was only half true.94
Though the journalists knew less than the diplomats, most of them understood that millions were dying from hunger. The influential Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, did his best to undermine Jones’s accurate reporting. Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, called Jones’s account of the famine a “big scare story.” Duranty’s claim that there was “no actual starvation” but only “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition” echoed Soviet usages and pushed euphemism into mendacity. This was an Orwellian distinction; and indeed George Orwell himself regarded the Ukrainian famine of 1933 as a central example of a black truth that artists of language had covered with bright colors. Duranty knew that millions of people had starved to death. Yet he maintained in his journalism that the hunger served a higher purpose. Duranty thought that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Aside from Jones, the only journalist to file serious reports in English was Malcolm Muggeridge, writing anonymously for the Manchester Guardian. He wrote that the famine was “one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe that it happened.”95
In fairness, even the people with the most obvious interest in events in Soviet Ukraine, the Ukrainians living beyond the border of the Soviet Union, needed months to understand the extent of the famine. Some five million Ukrainians lived in neighboring Poland, and their political leaders worked hard to draw international attention to the mass starvation in the Soviet Union. And yet even they grasped the extent of the tragedy only in May 1933, by which time most of the victims were already dead. Throughout the following summer and autumn, Ukrainian newspapers in Poland covered the famine, and Ukrainian politicians in Poland organized marches and protests. The leader of the Ukrainian feminist organization tried to organized an international boycott of Soviet goods by appealing to the women of the world. Several attempts were made to reach Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president of the United States.96
None of this made any difference. The laws of the international market ensured that the grain taken from Soviet Ukraine would feed others. Roosevelt, preoccupied above all by the position of the American worker during the Great Depression, wished to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The telegrams from Ukrainian activists reached him in autumn 1933, just as his personal initiative in US-Soviet relations was bearing fruit. The United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933.
The main result of the summer campaign of Ukrainians in Poland was skillful Soviet counterpropaganda. On 27 August 1933, the French politician Édouard Herriot arrived in Kiev, on an official invitation. The leader of the Radical Party, Herriot had been French prime minister three times, most recently in 1932. He was a corpulent man of known physical appetites, who compared his own body shape to that of a woman pregnant with twins. At the receptions in the Soviet Union, Herriot was kept away from the German and the Polish diplomats, who might have spoiled the fun with an untoward word about starvation.97
The day before Herriot was to visit the city, Kiev had been closed, and its population ordered to clean and decorate. The shop windows, empty all year, were now suddenly filled with food. The food was for display, not for sale, for the eyes of a single foreigner. The police, wearing fresh new uniforms, had to disperse the gaping crowds. Everyone who lived or worked along Herriot’s planned route was forced to go through a dress rehearsal of the visit, demonstrating that they knew where to stand and what to wear. Herriot was driven down Kiev’s incomparable broad avenue, Khreshchatyk. It pulsed with the traffic of automobiles—which had been gathered from several cities and were now driven by party activists to create the appearance of bustle and prosperity. A woman on the street muttered that “perhaps this bourgeois will tell the world what is happening here.” She was to be disappointed. Herriot instead expressed his astonishment that the Soviet Union had managed so beautifully to honor both “the socialist spirit” and “Ukrainian national feeling.”98
On 30 August 1933, Herriot visited the Feliks Dzierżyński Children’s Commune in Kharkiv, a school named after the founder of the Soviet secret police. At this time, children were still starving to death in the Kharkiv region. The children he saw were gathered from among the healthiest and fittest. Most likely they wore clothes that they had been loaned that morning. The picture, of course, was not entirely false: the Soviets had built schools for Ukrainian children, and were on the way to eliminating illiteracy. Children who were alive at the end of 1933 would very likely become adults who could read. This is what Herriot was meant to see. What, the Frenchman asked, entirely without irony, had the students eaten for lunch? It was a question, posed casually, on which the image of the Soviet Union depended. Vasily Grossman would repeat the scene in both of his great novels. As Grossman would recall, the children had been prepared for this question, and gave a suitable answer. Herriot believed what he saw and heard. He journeyed onward to Moscow, where he was fed caviar in a palace.99
The collective farms of Soviet Ukraine, Herriot told the French upon his return, were well-ordered gardens. The official Soviet party newspaper, Pravda, was pleased to report Herriot’s remarks. The story was over. Or, perhaps, the story was elsewhere.
CHAPTER 2
CLASS TERROR
Stalin’s second revolution in the Soviet Union, his collectivization and the famine it brought, was overshadowed by Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Many Europeans, distressed by the nazification of Germany, looked hopefully to Moscow for an ally. Gareth Jones was one of the few to observe the two systems in early 1933, as both Hitler and Stalin were consolidating power. On 25 February 1933, he flew with Adolf Hitler from Berlin to Frankfurt, as the first journalist to travel by air with the new German chancellor. “If this aeroplane should crash,” he wrote, “the whole history of Europe would be changed.” Jones had read Mein Kampf, and he grasped Hitler’s ambitions: the domination of Germany, the colonization of eastern Europe, the elimination of the Jews. Hitler, already chancellor, had dissolved the Reichstag and was in the midst of an electoral campaign, aiming to gain a
greater mandate for himself and a stronger presence for his party in the German parliament. Jones saw how Germans reacted to their new chancellor, first in Berlin and then at a rally in Frankfurt. He felt the “pure primitive worship.”1
When Jones made for Moscow he was traveling from, as he put it, “a land where dictatorship has just begun” to “the dictatorship of the working class.” Jones understood an important difference between the two regimes. Hitler’s rise meant the beginning of a new regime in Germany. Stalin, meanwhile, was securing his hold on a one-party state with a powerful police apparatus capable of massive and coordinated violence. His policy of collectivization had required the shooting of tens of thousands of citizens and the deportations of hundreds of thousands, and had brought millions more to the brink of death by starvation—as Jones would see and report. Later in the 1930s, Stalin would order the shooting of hundreds of thousands more Soviet citizens, in campaigns organized by social class and ethnic nation. All of this was well beyond Hitler’s capabilities in the 1930s, and probably beyond his intentions.2
For some of the Germans and other Europeans who favored Hitler and his enterprise, the cruelty of Soviet policy seemed to be an argument for National Socialism. In his stirring campaign speeches, Hitler portrayed communists and the Soviet state as the great enemies of Germany and Europe. During the very first crisis of his young chancellorship, he exploited fears of communism to gather more power to himself and his office. On 27 February 1933, two days after Hitler and Jones had landed in Frankfurt, a lone Dutchman set fire to the German parliament building. Though the arsonist was caught in the act and confessed, Hitler immediately seized the occasion to demonize opposition to his new government. Working himself up into a theatrical display of rage, he shouted that “anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.” Hitler blamed the Reichstag fire on German communists who, he claimed, were planning further terrorist attacks.3
For Hitler, the timing of the Reichstag fire could not have been better. As head of government, he could move against his political opponents; as a candidate running for election, he could turn fear to his advantage. On 28 February 1933 a decree suspended the rights of all German citizens, allowing their “preventive detainment.” In an atmosphere of insecurity, the Nazis decisively won the elections on 5 March, with 43.9 percent of the vote and 288 seats in the Reichstag. In the weeks and months that followed, Hitler used German police and Nazi paramilitaries to crush the two parties he grouped together as “Marxists”: the communists and the social democrats. Hitler’s close ally Heinrich Himmler established the first Nazi concentration camp, at Dachau, on 20 March. Himmler’s SS, a paramilitary that had arisen as Hitler’s bodyguard, provided the staff. Although the concentration camp was not a new institution, Himmler’s SS meant to use it for intimidation and terror. As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: “Any of the comrades who can’t see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we’ll have to feed.”4
After his electoral victory, Hitler the chancellor quickly became Hitler the dictator. On 23 March 1933, with the first prisoners already incarcerated at Dachau, the new parliament passed an enabling act, which allowed Hitler to rule Germany by decree without reference to either the president or the parliament. This act would be renewed and would remain in force so long as Hitler lived. Gareth Jones returned to Berlin from the Soviet Union on 29 March 1933, a month after he had left Germany for the Soviet Union, and gave a press conference about the starvation in Soviet Ukraine. The worst political famine in history seemed like a minor news item compared to the establishment of a new dictatorship in the German capital. Indeed, the suffering in the Soviet Union had already become, during Jones’s absence, part of the story of Hitler’s rise to power.5
Hitler had used the Ukrainian famine in his election campaign, making the event a matter of furious ideological politics before it was established as historical fact. As he raged against the “Marxists,” Hitler used the starvation in Ukraine as an indictment of Marxism in practice. To a gathering at the Berlin Sportpalast on 2 March 1933, Hitler proclaimed that “millions of people are starving in a country that could be a breadbasket for a whole world.” With a single word (Marxists) Hitler united the mass death in the Soviet Union with the German social democrats, the bulwark of the Weimar Republic. It was easier for most to reject (or accept) his entire perspective than it was to disentangle the true from the false. For people lacking close familiarity with Soviet politics, which meant almost everyone, to accept Hitler’s assessment of the famine was to take a step toward accepting his condemnation of left-wing politics, which in his rhetoric was mixed with the rejection of democracy as such.6
Stalin’s own policies made it easier for Hitler to make this case, because they offered a similarly binary view of the political world. Stalin, his attention focused on collectivization and famine, had unwittingly performed much of the ideological work that helped Hitler come to power. When Stalin had begun to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union, the Communist International had instructed fraternal communist parties to follow the line of “class against class.” Communists were to maintain their ideological purity, and avoid alliances with social democrats. Only communists had a legitimate role to play in human progress, and others who claimed to speak for the oppressed were frauds and “social fascists.” They were to be grouped together with every party to their right, including the Nazis. In Germany, communists were to regard the social democrats, not the Nazis, as the main enemy.
In the second half of 1932 and the first months of 1933, during the long moment of Stalin’s provocation of catastrophe, it would have been difficult for him to abandon the international line of “class against class.” The class struggle against the kulak, after all, was the official explanation of the horrible suffering and mass death within the Soviet Union. In German domestic politics, this line prevented the German left from cooperating against Hitler. The crucial months for the famine, however, were also critical time for the future of Germany. The insistence of German communists on the need for immediate class revolution gained the Nazis votes from the middle classes. It also ensured that clerks and the self-employed voted Nazi rather than social democratic. Even so, the communists and the social democrats together had more popular support than the Nazis; but Stalin’s line ensured that they could not work together. In all of these ways, Stalin’s uncompromising stand in foreign policy during collectivization and famine in the Soviet Union helped Hitler win the elections of both July 1932 and March 1933.7
Whereas the true consequences of Stalin’s economic policies had been hidden from foreign reporters, Hitler deliberately drew attention to the policies of redistribution that were among his first policies as dictator. At the very moment that starvation in the Soviet Union was peaking, the German state began to steal from its Jewish citizens. After the Nazis’ electoral victory of 5 March 1933, they organized an economic boycott of Jewish businesses throughout Germany. Like collectivization, the boycotts indicated which sector of society would lose the most in coming social and economic transformations: not the peasants, as in the USSR, but the Jews. The boycotts, although carefully managed by Nazi leaders and Nazi paramilitaries, were presented as a result of the “spontaneous anger” of the people at Jewish exploitation.8
In this respect Hitler’s policies resembled Stalin’s. The Soviet leader presented the disarray in the Soviet countryside, and then dekulakization, as the result of an authentic class war. The political conclusion was the same in Berlin and Moscow: the state would have to step in to make sure that the necessary redistribution was relatively peaceful. Whereas Stalin had achieved by 1933 the authority and gathered the coercive power to force through collectivization on a massive scale, Hitler had to move far more slowly. The boycott had only a limited effect; the main consequence was the emigration of some 37,000 German Jews in 1933. It would be five more years before substantial transfers of property from Jews to non-Jewish Germans—which the Nazis called
“Aryanization”—took place.9
The Soviet Union began from a position of international isolation, and with the help of many sympathizers abroad was able with some success to control its image. By many, Stalin was given the benefit of the doubt, even as his policies moved from shooting to deportation to starvation. Hitler, on the other hand, had to reckon with international opinion, which included voices of criticism and outrage. Germany in 1933 was full of international journalists and other travelers, and Hitler needed peace and trade for the next few years. So even as he called an end to the boycott, Hitler used unfavorable attention in the foreign press to build up a rationale for the more radical policies to come. The Nazis presented European and American newspapers as controlled by Jews, and any foreign criticism as part of the international Jewish conspiracy against the German people.10
An important legacy of the March 1933 boycotts was thus rhetorical. Hitler introduced an argument that he would never cease to use, even much later, when his armies had conquered much of Europe and his institutions were killing millions of Jews. No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims.
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