Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  These decisions had a significant impact. The percentage of books published in Ukrainian doubled between 1923 and 1929, and the number of Ukrainian-language newspapers and periodicals grew rapidly as well. So did the number of Ukrainian schools. In 1923 just over half of schools in the republic taught children in Ukrainian. A decade later the figure had risen to 88 per cent.90

  In many places the change went even deeper than language. Petro Hryhorenko, a schoolboy at the time – the son of peasants, he became a Soviet general, and later a dissident – remembered the era as one of real enlightenment. Two of the teachers in his village founded a branch of Prosvita, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian cultural organization, which had been revived: ‘In their house I first saw and heard played the Ukrainian national musical instrument, the bandura. From them I learned of Kobzar, written by the great Ukrainian poet Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko. And from them I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko, that I was Ukrainian.’91 At the time Hryhorenko perceived no conflict between his ‘Ukrainian’ identity and the ideals of the Bolsheviks: ‘Love for my culture and my people mingled in my mind with the dream of universal happiness, international unity and the unlimited “power of labor”.’ His Prosvita club eventually founded a Komsomol cell, and he eventually became an active communist.92

  Others trod a similar path. Ukrainization launched a broad fashion for folk music, and hundreds of young Ukrainians, both urban and rural, formed bandura ensembles that performed traditional songs at public events. Sometimes the songs, with their Christian and anti-Russian echoes, had to be toned down and ‘secularized’. But their romantic appeal seemed to move young people, including those like Hryhorenko who had not grown up with them.93

  Romantic legends of the past inspired many. One headmaster in Kyiv was so moved to teach children the language of Ukrainian poetry that he christened his school Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Labour School No. 1, and put Ukraine’s national poet at the centre of the curriculum. He encouraged the school’s pupils to keep journals, to write down their thoughts and to draw pictures in response to Shevchenko’s poetry. They also performed skits about the poet at the local workers’ club, and interviewed the school janitor, whose father had met the poet, for the school newspaper.94 In all of these projects the slogans calling for social justice derived from Shevchenko, not Marx. That some of Shevchenko’s verse had anti-Russian overtones seemed, at the time, not to matter: his words were interpreted as opposition to the Russian empire, not to the Russian nation, and allowed to stand.

  Still, cracks in the scheme were visible very early. Not all of the schools officially deemed ‘Ukrainian-speaking’ necessarily taught the language very well. The majority of teachers were still native Russian speakers, and few of them found it easy to make the switch – or wanted to. In rural schools, teachers who spoke bad Ukrainian were instructing pupils who also spoke bad Ukrainian; both might end up speaking an ungrammatical mix of languages. Attempts to verify the skills of teachers met with many forms of passive resistance. Teachers would refuse to be tested, protest that they had no time to acquire fluency or complain, no doubt accurately, about inadequate textbooks. It was hard to disprove their claims, since many members of the commissions set up to check on the teachers’ aptitudes could not themselves speak Ukrainian either.95

  Some resisted more actively. Many people didn’t want their children to be educated in Ukrainian, on the grounds that they would be handicapped when attempting to enter higher education, where Russian was still dominant.96 Bureaucrats also resisted efforts to make the state apparatus use Ukrainian. Despite being theoretically required to speak Ukrainian, party officials often shirked the task with impunity. By the second half of the decade the regional party committee in Odessa, a Russophone city, had established courses in Ukrainian for 300 party apparatchiks. Only 226 actually registered, and of that number only 75 attended regularly. Even fewer paid the required fees. The organizers of the programme harassed the recalcitrant pupils to pay up, which could hardly have encouraged them to attend, and complained constantly that they had lost money.97

  The party’s failure even to train its own officials in the language hinted at something deeper. By the mid-1920s the USSR had already become a strict police state, one that, if it had wanted to do so, could have cracked down hard on party members who refused to learn Ukrainian. But in truth the police state was already quietly pursuing another set of policies. Even as Hrushevsky, Shumskyi, Skrypnyk and other advocates of an independent Ukrainian identity rose to prominence in cultural and educational ministries, a very different group of officials were rising alongside them. Pro-Soviet, Russian speaking – and, often, Russian, Jewish or even Latvian or Polish by ‘ethnicity’ – Ukraine’s political policemen were far more likely to be devoted to Stalin than to any abstract idea of the Ukrainian nation. As the decade wore on, their allegiances would begin to show.

  Of the Ukrainian policemen who came of age in the 1920s, the most loyal, and in many other ways the most notable, was Vsevolod Balytsky.98 Born in 1892 in Verkhniodniprovsk, a small city on the Dnieper River, Balytsky spent most of his childhood in the industrial city of Luhansk, where his father was an accountant in a factory. Raised in the Russian-speaking world of the Ukrainian industrial intelligentsia – rumour had it that he was even of aristocratic origin – Balytsky described himself in a 1922 document as ‘Russian’, though later he changed his national designation to ‘Ukrainian’. Only much later, at the time of his arrest during the ‘great terror’ of 1937, did he declare himself ‘Russian’ once again.

  In fact, Balytsky’s national sympathies had always been less important to him than his political sympathies. He was radicalized as a teenager, and later claimed to have been ‘in contact with the revolutionary movement in Luhansk’ from the age of seventeen. He went to law school in Moscow, and in 1913 joined the Menshevik Party, the Bolsheviks’ rivals, a fact that he later tried to strike out of his biography. He switched sides and became a Bolshevik in 1915, joining the party early enough to count as a true believer. Tall and blonde, he was given to dramatic gestures and radical declarations. After being drafted into the army to fight in the First World War, he conducted ‘revolutionary agitation’ among other soldiers. When the revolution finally broke out in February 1917, he ran one of the bloody ‘people’s tribunals’ in the Caucasus. Perhaps it was there that he acquired his taste for identifying, purging and murdering class enemies. Violence, in Balytsky’s rhetoric, was often associated with cleansing and purifying, with ridding the party of ‘termites’ and ‘pollution’.

  Balytsky’s belief in the cleansing power of political violence motivated him to return to Ukraine, and to join the Ukrainian Cheka, in 1919. In February of that year he published a poem in the Ukrainian Izvestiya:

  There, where even yesterday life was so joyous

  Flows the river of blood

  And so? There where it flows

  There will be no mercy

  Nothing will save you, nothing!99

  Soon after his return, Balytsky had the opportunity to see the ‘river of blood’ he had imagined. He played an active role in resisting the peasant rebellion of 1919. Fighting alongside the Red Army, he took part in the mass murder of hostages, before being forced out of the republic altogether. For a few weeks he wound up in Gomel, in the southeastern corner of the Republic of Belarus, in what must have felt like a major setback. Just as he had been preparing to take his place among the leaders of Ukraine, he found himself stranded in a distant provincial city, once again leading a revolutionary tribunal. Nevertheless, he stuck to his goal even at the edge of the war zone, arresting and shooting counter-revolutionaries, speculators and others who seemed to pose a threat to Soviet forces.

  Eventually, Balytsky returned to Ukraine, where he triumphantly helped Dzerzhinsky ‘clean up’ in the wake of the White Army’s retreat. He travelled a good deal around the republic at this time, and at one point accidentally walked into a band of Makhno parti
sans. According to his own account, the insurgents immediately arrested him and marched him to the edge of the village to be shot. But one of their commanders, apparently impressed by Balytsky’s aristocratic bearing, stopped them from killing him. After a brief interrogation, the partisan chief decided to let him go. A few years later Balytsky returned the favour. After Bolshevik forces captured the same commander, Balytsky allegedly commuted his death sentence.100

  After the fighting died down, Balytsky was rewarded for his loyalty. In 1923 he became commander of the Ukrainian Cheka. Taking the lead from his colleagues in Moscow, who were then busy prosecuting the Bolsheviks’ socialist opponents, he helped organize the first trial of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. In this period the courts handed down relatively mild sentences and many of the accused received pardons.

  Quietly, Balytsky’s power and influence kept growing. In 1925, at his insistence, the Ukrainian Politburo signed a series of decrees strengthening the Ukrainian secret police, whose name was changed first to GPU – the State Political Directorate – and then to OGPU – the Joint State Political Directorate.101 Among other things he convinced the Politburo to protect the salaries of his departments’ employees. Even as the cultural influence of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was its height and the power of the peasants was at their greatest, Balytsky, Ukrainian by birth but Russian-speaking and Soviet by sympathy, was building the loyalty of quite a different team, preparing them to play a large role in the future of Ukraine.

  4

  The Double Crisis, 1927–9

  Glavlit instructs you to take all measures to completely bar the appearance in the press of any dispatches (articles, items, etc) that refer to difficulties or interruptions in the supply of grain for the country as they could, without sufficient grounds, cause panic and derail measures being taken by the government to overcome temporary difficulties in the matter of grain procurements and supplies for the country.

  Mailgram to all units from the information department of the OGPU, 19271

  It is not possible that there is no bread. If they gave us rifles we would find some.

  Comment overheard by a secret police informer, 19272

  War Communism had failed. The radical workers’ state had not brought prosperity to the workers. But by the latter part of the 1920s, Lenin’s New Economic Policy was failing too.

  Theoretically, markets were free. But in practice, the state was not content to leave them alone. Officials, suspicious of the traders profiting from the sale of grain, interfered constantly by circulating aggressive, ‘anti-speculator’ propaganda and imposing heavy regulations. They set high prices for industrial goods and low prices for agricultural products (hence the designation ‘scissors crisis’), which created an imbalance. Some traders offered to buy grain at low ‘state’ prices, others offered high ‘private’ prices. Many peasants who could not get the higher prices did not sell at all. Instead they preferred – logically – to store their grain, feed it to their livestock, and wait for the prices to go up.

  This new crisis came as a shock. Food supplies had gradually been improving since the famine of 1921–3. A poor grain harvest in 1924 led once again to widespread hunger, but the peasants still had beets, potatoes, and their cows and pigs to rely upon. The moratorium on enforced grain collection, which was still then in place, meant that peasants were willing to plant during the following spring.3

  By 1927 the system looked shaky again. In that year the state obtained (according to its own unreliable counting methods) 5.4 million tonnes of grain. But the food distribution agencies that handed out strictly rationed bread loaves to the urban proletariat and the bureaucracy had been counting on 7.7 million tonnes.4 In an all-union survey, the OGPU reported ‘crushing mobs and shouting matches’ in the queues for food all across the USSR. The same secret survey quoted the wife of a factory worker: ‘the whole day is killed just for 10 pounds of flour, your husband comes home from work and dinner isn’t ready’. Ominously, some of the complaining had a political edge. In the city of Tver, police found a proclamation calling for a strike: ‘There’s no butter, flour became available only recently, there’s no kerosene, the people have been duped.’5 Paul Scheffer, the Moscow correspondent for Berliner Tageblatt, reported ‘waiting lines in front of the shops everywhere in the Soviet Union’ and extraordinarily high prices. His ominous thought: ‘Might one not say, in comment on all such things, that they are “like the winter of 1917” in Germany?’6 Eugene Lyons, freshly posted to Moscow as the correspondent for United Press International, also described the queues he saw in the winter of 1927–8:

  Everywhere these ragged lines, chiefly of women, stretched from shop doors, under clouds of visible breath; patient, bovine, scarcely grumbling … Bread, which constitutes the larger half of the ordinary Russian’s diet, became a ‘deficit product’.7

  For the Communist Party the crisis threatened to overshadow an important anniversary: ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars. Food of all kinds was obsessively rationed – workers received food coupons according to their status – and very scarce. So sensitive was information about grain production that five months before the anniversary celebrations, in May 1927, the OGPU forbade all Soviet newspapers from writing about any ‘difficulties or interruptions in the supply of grain to the country as they could … cause panic’.8

  The renewed food crisis also came at a critical moment in the Communist Party’s own internal power struggle. Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had been organizing support inside the Communist Party, marshalling his forces against Trotsky, his main rival. To do so, he had sided with the ‘Rightists’, most notably Nikolai Bukharin – who supported the principles of the New Economic Policy, limited free commerce and cooperation with the peasants – against Trotsky’s ‘Leftists’, who warned that the policy would create a new capitalist class and enrich the kulaks in the countryside. But in 1927 he flipped his politics: having satisfactorily disposed of the ‘Leftists’ – Trotsky was by now in disgrace, and would soon be in exile – Stalin now began preparing an attack on the ‘Rightists’, Bukharin and the New Economic Policy. In other words, Stalin used the grain crisis, as well as the general economic dissatisfaction, not only to radicalize Soviet policy, but also to complete the destruction of this group of rivals.

  From the Kremlin’s standpoint, 1927 was also an important year in foreign policy. For the previous several years, the OGPU had been expanding its spy network throughout Europe with great enthusiasm. But in 1927 the Soviet Union’s foreign spies suffered some embarrassing setbacks. Major Soviet espionage operations were uncovered in Poland, Turkey, China and France, among other places. In London, the British government broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR after uncovering an operation described by the Home Secretary in the House of Commons as ‘one of the most complete and one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet’.9

  At the same time the newly expanded Soviet espionage service uncovered what it claimed to be evidence of Japanese territorial designs on the Soviet Far East. Poland was assumed to have ongoing designs on the USSR as well, especially after Marshal Piłsudski’s successful coup d’état in 1926 brought the victor of the Polish-Bolshevik war back to power. Ironically, Poland did secretly sponsor some schemes to promote Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s, with some support from Japanese diplomats, but there is no evidence that Stalin knew about it.10 His suspicions were focused instead on non-existent Polish and Japanese spy networks and what was, at best, some very superficial Polish-Japanese military collaboration.11

  Taken together all these incidents did seem threatening, especially to Soviet leaders who still remembered the bitterness of the fighting a decade earlier. In a Pravda article in July 1927, Stalin warned of the ‘real and material threat of a new war in general, and a war against the USSR in particular’. Unconnected stories were presented in newspapers and public speeches as
a looming conspiracy.12 The accompanying propaganda campaign prepared Soviet society for wartime conditions and more austerity, and sought to inspire greater loyalty to the communist system at the same time.13

  Responding both to the apparent threat of hostilities as well as to the more realistic prospect of mass food riots, the OGPU proposed a list of harsh new policies in October 1927. Among other things the secret police wanted the right to ‘hold accountable’ private grain traders who were ‘speculating’ in scarce goods and inflating prices.14 The Politburo also called for an immediate transfer of industrial goods to the countryside (a carrot among the many sticks); the collection of back taxes; the freezing of grain prices; and the direct involvement of local party officials in the collection of grain.15

  None of these changes had any significant impact. In early January 1928 the Soviet Central Committee observed that despite their orders, ‘no breakthrough was visible’ in the collection of grain. To solve the problem, Stalin told party bosses to ‘rapidly mobilize all of the party’s best forces’, to make local party leaders ‘personally responsible’ for grain collection, to organize a propaganda campaign that would point clearly at those who were failing, and to apply ‘harsh punishments’ to those who were refusing to pay their taxes, especially if they were kulaks.16 Eventually, the state would fine peasants who could not deliver grain, charging them up to five times its monetary value. Those who refused to pay these fines could have their property confiscated and sold at auction.17

  The language Stalin now used was militaristic. He spoke of ‘mobilization’ and ‘fronts’, as well as of ‘enemies’ and ‘danger’. The kulaks and the speculators had, he said, ‘taken advantage of the goodwill and the slow workings of our organizations and broken through the front on the bread market, raised prices and created a wait-and-see mood among the peasants, which has paralysed the grain collection even more’. In the face of this threat it would be a terrible mistake to move softly or slowly. Instead, the kulaks and traders had to be separated from the other peasants, and hit hard with arrests: