Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
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By itself, the bad weather would certainly have caused hardship, as bad weather had in the past. But when combined with the confiscatory food collection policies, the absence of able-bodied men and the acres of unsown land, it proved catastrophic. The twenty most productive agricultural provinces in imperial Russia had annually produced 20 million tonnes of grain before the revolution. In 1920 they produced just 8.45 million tonnes, and by 1921 they were down to 2.9 million.18 In the Stavropol province of the Northern Caucasus, almost the entire crop disappeared.19 In southern Ukraine the drop was especially dramatic. In 1921 the amount of grain harvested in the province of Odessa dropped to 12.9 per cent of previous levels. The southeastern provinces of Katerynoslav, Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv produced between 3.7 per cent and 5.1 per cent of their normal crop. In other words, some 95 per cent of the normal harvest had failed to materialize.20
Historically, both Russian and Ukrainian peasants had survived periodic bad weather and frequent droughts through the careful preservation and storage of surplus grain. But in the spring of 1921 there was no surplus grain: it had all been confiscated. Instead, food shortages quickly resulted in famine in the Russian Volga provinces – the wide swath of territory along the middle and lower part of the Volga River – in the Urals and southern Ukraine. As the peasants grew hungry, many left home in search of food. More than 440,000 refugees fled the Volga region alone, some mistakenly making their way to Ukraine. Poorly informed officials even deliberately directed orphans from starving Russia towards Ukraine, but when they arrived they found no orphanages and no food.21
Just as they would a decade later, peasants began to eat dogs, rats and insects; they boiled grass and leaves; there were incidents of cannibalism.22 A group of refugees who managed to board a train to Riga from Saratov, a Volga river port at the heart of the famine district, described life in the city:
Old garbage carts collected the dead daily as they used to collect garbage … we saw many cases of bubonic plague in the streets. This never was mentioned by the Soviet press, the officials attempting to keep knowledge of this plague from the public …
The Soviet government reports the peasants are abandoning their children. This is not true. It is correct that some parents turn over their children to the state, which promises to care for them and does not. Others throw their children into the Volga, preferring to see them drown rather than be brought up in the communist faith, which they believe is an anti-Christ doctrine.23
Just as they would a decade later, starving people sought to escape the barren countryside and instead gathered within makeshift refugee camps in cities and around train stations, living in discarded boxcars and ‘huddled together in compact masses like a seal colony, mothers and young close together’.24 An American journalist, F. A. Mackenzie, described the scene at Samara station:
Here were lads, gaunt and tall, thin beyond any conception a Westerner can have of thinness, covered with rags and dirt. Here were old women, some of them sitting half-conscious on the ground, dazed by their hunger, their misery and their misfortune … Here were pallid mothers seeking to feed dying babies from their milkless breasts. Were a new Dante to come among us, he could write a new Inferno after visiting one of these railway stations.25
But in one extremely important sense this first Soviet famine did differ from the famine that was to follow a decade later: in 1921 mass hunger was not kept secret. More importantly, the regime tried to help the starving. Pravda itself announced the existence of famine when on 21 June it declared that 25 million people were going hungry in the Soviet Union. Soon after, the regime sanctioned the creation of an ‘All-Russian Famine Committee’ made up of non-Bolshevik political and cultural figures. Local self-help committees were created to assist the starving.26 International appeals for aid followed, most prominently from the writer Maxim Gorky, who led a campaign addressed ‘To All Honest People’, in the name of all that was best in Russian culture. ‘Gloomy days have come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka,’ he wrote, and called for contributions. Gorky’s list of Russian luminaries conspicuously left out the names of Lenin and Trotsky.27 Extraordinarily – given how paranoid they would become about the diaspora in the years that followed – the Ukrainian Communist Party even discussed asking for help from Ukrainians who had emigrated to Canada and the United States.28
This public, international appeal for help, the only one of its kind in Soviet history, produced fast results. Several relief organizations, including the International Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC, or simply ‘Joint’), would eventually contribute to the relief effort, as would the Nansen Mission, a European effort put together by the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. But the most important source of immediate aid was the American Relief Administration (ARA), which was already operating in Europe in the spring of 1921. Founded by future president Herbert Hoover, the ARA had successfully distributed more than $1 billion in food and medical relief across Europe in the nine months following the 1918 armistice.29 Upon hearing Gorky’s appeal, Hoover, an astute student of Bolshevik ideology, leapt at the opportunity to expand his aid network into Russia.
Before entering the country, he demanded the release of all Americans held in Soviet prisons, as well as immunity from prosecution for all Americans working for the ARA. Hoover worried that ARA personnel had to control the process or aid would be stolen. He also worried, not without cause, that Americans in Russia could be accused of espionage (and they were indeed collecting information, sending it home and using diplomatic mail to do so).30 Lenin fumed and called Hoover ‘impudent and a liar’ for making such demands and raged against the ‘rank duplicity’ of ‘America, Hoover and the League of Nations Council’. He declared that ‘Hoover must be punished, he must be slapped in the face publicly, for all the world to see’, an astonishing statement given how much aid he was about to receive. But the scale of the famine was such that Lenin eventually yielded.31
In September 1921 an advance party of ARA relief workers reached the city of Kazan on the Volga, where they found poverty of a kind they had never seen before, even in ravaged Europe. On the streets they met ‘pitiful-looking figures dressed in rags and begging for a piece of bread in the name of Christ’. In the orphanages they found ‘emaciated little skeletons, whose gaunt faces and toothpick legs … testified to the truth of the report that they were dying off daily by the dozen’.32 By the summer of 1922 the Americans were feeding 11 million people every day and delivering care packages to hundreds of thousands. To stop epidemics they provided $8 million worth of medicine as well.33 Once their efforts were underway, the independent Russian famine relief committee was quietly dissolved: Lenin didn’t want any Russian organization not directly run by the Communist Party to gain credibility by participating in the distribution of food. But the American aid project, amplified by contributions from other foreign organizations, was allowed to go ahead, saving millions of lives.
Yet even within this ostensibly outward-looking, genuine and robust response, there were some discordant notes. Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership – just as it would a decade later – never relinquished its desire for hard currency. Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery. By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread and foreign aid was still coming in.34 This was no secret: Hoover fulminated against the cynicism of a government that knew people were starving, and yet exported food in order to ‘secure machinery and materials for the economic improvement of the survivors’.35 A few months afterwards the ARA left Russia for precisely this reason.
As it would a decade later, the authorities’ reaction to the famine also differed between Russia and Ukraine. Like their Russian colleagues, the Ukrainian communists set up a famine committee. But the purpose of the committ
ee was not, at first, to help Ukrainians.36 In its September 1921 resolution ‘on the campaign against hunger’, the Politburo noted that many districts in northern Ukraine could be ‘fully provided by their provincial and county funds’. It therefore instructed the Ukrainian famine committee to direct any surplus Ukrainian grain – and there was some, in the northern parts of the republic not affected by the famine – to the starving Russian provinces of Tsaritsyn, Uralsk, Saratov and Simbirsk, not to the starving people of southern Ukraine.37 At about the same time Lenin wrote to Rakovsky, then still the leader of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, to remind him that he was expecting food and cattle from Kyiv and Kharkiv to be sent to Russia too.38
By late autumn 1921, with food shortages worsening, Lenin’s tactics sharpened. Although he had already halted food collections in the worst-affected parts of Russia, the Soviet leader ordered even more pressure to be put on peasants in better-off provinces; Ukraine, despite the disaster in its southern and eastern provinces, was deemed to be one. Lenin sent frequent requests to Kharkiv for more grain.39 He also suggested new tactics: those who refused to turn over grain should face fines and prison – or worse.
In November, Lenin specifically ordered ‘harsh revolutionary methods’, including the taking of hostages, to be used against peasants who refused to hand over their grain. This form of blackmail, used with such powerful effect against the Jews during the civil war and the pogroms, was now deployed to facilitate collection of this precious commodity. Lenin gave the grain collection teams and komnezamy a clear order: ‘In every village take between 15 and 20 hostages, and, in case of unmet quotas, put them all up against the wall.’ If that tactic failed, hostages were to be shot as ‘enemies of the state’.40 Pressure from above was accompanied by propaganda below. In the Mykolaiv province of southern Ukraine, where famine was already beginning to bite, posters exhorted ‘Workers of Mykolaiv, help the starving of the Volga.’41
The men of the ARA also noticed Lenin’s different treatment of Ukraine and Russia, and recorded it in their notes and memoirs. Initially, the authorities in Moscow did not tell the Americans about food shortages in Ukraine at all. The organization instead learned of the famine in southern Ukraine from the Joint Distribution Committee, which received reports of mass starvation there and passed them on to the ARA and others.
More peculiarly, the ARA’s first requests for permission to visit Ukraine were turned down on the grounds that northwestern Ukraine was still producing plenty of grain and the republic had no need of special help. When two ARA officials finally managed to travel to Kharkiv in November 1921, they were met with a cool welcome. Mykola Skrypnyk, at that time the Ukrainian Commissar of Internal Affairs, received the Americans and told them they could not operate in the republic because Ukraine, unlike Russia, did not have an agreement with the ARA. The men were ‘partly amused, partly irritated’, and insisted that they were interested in famine relief, not politics. Skrypnyk responded that Ukraine was a sovereign state, and not part of Russia: ‘you are mixing in politics when you differentiate between the two republics; when you treat with one, and refuse to do so with the other, when you regard one as a sovereign state and the other as a subject state.’42 Given that Ukraine was at that time contributing to the relief of the Soviet famine, was subject to Soviet laws and confiscatory Soviet agricultural policy, Skrypnyk’s insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty in the matter of famine relief was absurd.
Only when starvation in the southern provinces of Ukraine was so widespread that it could not be ignored did the Moscow party bosses and their Ukrainian colleagues relent. In January 1922 the Ukrainian Politburo finally agreed to work with the ARA, as well as with other European and American famine relief organizations. Feelings of trust were still lacking: the Politburo empowered Comrades Rakovsky and Vasilii Mantsev to negotiate with foreign donors, but also to ‘take measures’ against relief organizations that might turn out to be covers for espionage.43 Years later Soviet citizens who had worked for the ARA became objects of suspicion: in 1935 an Odessa woman was sentenced as a counter-revolutionary, in part because she had worked with the Americans who sought to relieve the famine in her city.44 Despite the general ill will, ARA soup kitchens nevertheless began to operate across southern and eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea in the winter and spring of 1922.45 The Ukrainian Red Cross contributed to the effort too, as did the Joint Distribution Committee, which provided food and other aid to victims of the pogroms.46
Inevitably, all the foreign organizations operated under restrictions. The Nansen Mission was forced to work through Soviet institutions instead of using its own personnel. The Joint Distribution Committee did send its own employees, but all of them had to promise to ‘refrain from expressions of opinion on national or international politics’ and ‘do nothing that shall in the slightest way aid or abet any section or element of people over and above any other section or element’.47 Anti-semitism hampered the Committee’s relief programme; posters, leaflets and other objects bearing its logo were often quickly removed or confiscated by the authorities. The ARA was sometimes banned from particular places with little advance notice. At one point its officials were told to keep away from the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, probably because partisans were still operating there. Soviet authorities feared the influence of Americans in territory that was not quite pacified.48
Eventually, aid reached Ukraine, food became more available, and death rates slowed. By the end of 1923 the crisis seemed to be under control. But the delay in the delivery of aid had caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Many wondered, both at the time and later, why it had happened. The ARA’s members discussed it among themselves and wrote about it years later. Most believed that the initial Soviet opposition to their relief programme in Ukraine was politically inspired. Southern Ukraine, one of the worst-hit regions in the whole of the USSR, had also been a Makhno and Cossack stronghold. Perhaps Soviet authorities were ‘willing to let the Ukraine suffer, rather than take the chance of new uprisings which might follow foreign contact’, the Americans mused.49 Aware that they were perceived as spies, the Americans also thought that the regime expected them to act as provocateurs. They may well have been right.
More recently, some Ukrainian scholars have offered an even more pointed political explanation: perhaps the Soviet authorities actually used the famine instrumentally, as they would in 1932, to put an end to the Ukrainian peasant rebellion.50 This thesis cannot be proven: there is no evidence of a premeditated plan to starve the Ukrainian peasants in 1920–1. At the same time, it is true that if Moscow had indeed been using its agricultural policy to put down rebellion, it could hardly have done so more efficiently. The grain requisition system broke up communities, severed relationships, and forced peasants to leave home in search of food. Starvation weakened and demoralized those who remained, forcing them to abandon the armed struggle.51 Even at the time, many noted that conditions were particularly bad in Huliaipole, the home province of Makhno. The territories where he held power in the south were among the most devastated, first by the crop failure and then by the lack of famine relief.52
Certainly the regime did use the famine – as it would a decade later – to strike hard at the Ukrainian religious hierarchy. In the name of famine relief, the state forced Ukrainian churches to give gold objects, icons and other valuables to the state. But behind the scenes, party leaders, including Skrypnyk, who led the collection drive, hoped that they could use the policy to create tensions between the newly formed Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and its main rival, which was still loyal to the Moscow patriarchate. Over many weeks the Ukrainian Politburo discussed these Church ‘donations’, inquired after them, and interested itself in their sale abroad.53 In 1922, Lenin, who was then already ill, sent a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, who preceded Stalin in the leadership of the Communist Party secretariat. The letter, arguing that the famine offered a unique opportunity to seize Church property, was to be passed on to party members. The
Church’s sacrifice of valuable objects could, Lenin wrote, have an important political impact:
Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of [reactionary] clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force.54
This, Lenin explained, was a time to teach the peasants, the clergy and other political opponents a ‘lesson’, so that ‘for the coming decades they will not dare think about any resistance’.55
But the extent of the famine did frighten the Bolsheviks. Food shortages might possibly have helped to end peasant rebellions in Ukraine, but elsewhere they fuelled them. In the Russian province of Tambov, food requisitioning sparked the Antonov rebellion, one of the most serious anti-Bolshevik uprisings of the era. Food shortages also helped inspire the infamous Kronstadt rebellion, during which the Red Army fired on sailors who had played an important role in the revolution. Over the course of three years some 33.5 million people were affected by famine or food shortages – 26 million in Russia, 7.5 million in Ukraine – though precise death rates are difficult to calculate because nobody was keeping track of the numbers.56 In Ukraine the best guesses put the number of deaths between 250,000 and 500,000 for southern Ukraine, the hardest-hit region.57 In the USSR as a whole the ARA estimated that 2 million people had died; a Soviet publication produced soon after the famine concluded that 5 million had died.58