Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Discontent was also simmering within the Ukrainian political class, which objected to the heavy-handed role Moscow continued to play in the affairs of the republic’s communists. In April 1925, less than two years after the first decree on Ukrainization, the Soviet Communist Party abruptly sacked the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Emmanuel Kviring, who had been an open opponent of Ukrainization, and replaced him with Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest colleagues. Although Kaganovich had been born in Kyiv province, he spoke Ukrainian poorly. He was also Jewish, had spent most of his career in Russia, and was perceived in Ukraine not as a native Ukrainian but as an advocate for the Russian Bolsheviks.

  Ostensibly, Kaganovich arrived with a plan to speed up the process of Ukrainization. During his three years in charge of the Ukrainian Communist Party (he was replaced in 1928 by Stanislav Kosior) he would in practice continue to encourage ‘low’ Ukrainization – the elimination of the bureaucratic obstacles to the use of the language – because the Bolsheviks still thought that was necessary to keep Ukrainian speakers loyal to the regime. But his suspicion of ‘high’ Ukrainization – culture, literature, theatre – turned quickly into real antagonism, irritating his new colleagues. Soon after Kaganovich’s appointment, Oleksandr Shumskyi, the Commissar of Education, met with Stalin. He complained about the new Ukrainian party secretary and demanded the appointment of a ‘real’ Ukrainian in Kaganovich’s place. A few months later Shumskyi also complained to the Ukrainian Politburo about unnamed Ukrainian communists – ‘unprincipled and hypocritical, slavishly two-faced and traitorously sycophantic’ – who paid lip service to Ukraine but in truth would do anything to please the Russians in order to ‘get a position’.

  Shumskyi’s confidence – in himself, his position, in Moscow’s commitment to Ukrainian culture – was remarkably high, given that the ground was already beginning to shift under his feet. As Kaganovich oriented himself in Ukrainian affairs, he grew increasingly alarmed by what he saw and heard. He was astonished to discover that Hrushevsky, a man who had ‘served in a series of governments’ – meaning non-Bolshevik ones – was still walking freely on the streets of Kyiv. Elsewhere in the USSR such people were long behind bars. The more aggressive writings of the Ukrainian literati, especially Khvylovyi’s call for Ukrainian poetry to ‘flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles’, shocked Stalin’s envoy too.38 So did the writer’s frequently repeated slogan, ‘Het vid Moskvy!’ (‘Away from Moscow!’). Kaganovich sent a few choice Khvylovyi quotations to Stalin, who was predictably outraged, denounced the ‘extreme views’, and fulminated against Comrade Shumskyi for failing to understand that ‘only by combatting such extremisms is it possible to transform the rising Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian social life into a Soviet culture and a Soviet social life’.39

  Stalin had no need to alert his other ally in Ukraine to his concerns, for he already shared them. By that time, Vsevolod Balytsky had run the Ukrainian OGPU for several years, mostly keeping his activities shrouded in mystery. Although in charge of what was technically a Ukrainian party organization, Balytsky kept quiet about his surveillance of leading cultural figures and politicians, never making regular reports to the Ukrainian Council of Ministers or to local administrators. He even blocked a propaganda film intended to laud the work of his agents, on the grounds that it would reveal too many secrets. He remained loyal not to the Republic of Ukraine but to the Communist Party leadership in Moscow, and he demanded the same of his subordinates: ‘If the order is given to shoot into the crowd and you refuse,’ he told them at one point, ‘then I will shoot all of you. You must conform without objection to my commands, I will permit no protests.’ At the same time Balytsky worked hard to improve their salaries and privileges, as well as his own. Presumably it was at about this time that he acquired the taste for jewellery and fine art, which would be discovered in his possession at the time of his death.40

  By 1925, Balytsky had also convinced the Ukrainian Politburo to set up a commission to monitor the activities of ‘Ukrainian intellectuals’, particularly those linked to the Academy of Sciences. In 1926 the OGPU produced a report ‘on Ukrainian separatism’ that recommended close observation of anyone with past links to any ‘Ukrainian anti-Soviet movements’.41 The nationalists had stopped conducting an open struggle against the Soviet state, but that ‘does not mean that they have been fully reconciled to the existing situation and have sincerely abandoned their hostile intentions’.42 Perhaps, the authors mused, the nationalists had changed not ideology but tactics:

  Their hopes to overthrow Soviet power failed. The nationalists were forced to accept Soviet power as an unavoidable fact. Therefore, a new battle tactic was forged. They will use the new weapon of ‘cultural work’ against Soviet power … In general, representatives of Ukrainian nationalism work without rest to embed nationalist feelings in the masses …43

  Kaganovich, who would have read all these reports, concluded that these nationalists, among them the former Borotbysts, had not ‘come over to our side’ because they were true Bolsheviks, but rather because they were ‘calculating that they would re-orient us’. The Soviet programme of Ukrainization had, he feared, failed to Sovietize Ukraine. Instead, it had emboldened the enemies of the USSR, turning them into a ‘hostile force’ that threatened Soviet society from within: by allowing Ukrainian nationalists to remain in power, the Bolsheviks had nurtured the seeds of a new opposition.44

  Balytsky, with the skill of a trained conspiracy theorist, detected an even deeper plot. He suspected that the Ukrainian nationalists were not merely enemies: they were also traitors, a ‘fifth column’ that had infiltrated its way into the Soviet system on behalf of foreign powers. In a report entitled ‘On the Strength of the Counter-Revolution in Ukraine’, he traced the origins of this secret force to the coup carried out by Piłsudski in Poland in May 1926. ‘Anti-Soviet elements’ in Ukraine had, he explained, ‘seen in the figure of Piłsudski an old ally of Petliura’, and had been inspired once again to fight for the bourgeois-nationalist cause. The destruction of this elaborate plot would require a ‘vast operation to strangle anti-Soviet Ukrainian activity’.45

  As 1926 turned to 1927, the vast operation began. Stalin kicked off a wave of attacks on Shumskyi, denouncing him by name. One by one the other members of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee also denounced Shumskyi, censured him and insulted him, both at party meetings and in the press. He had to resign as Commissar of Education, and from a host of other institutions as well, including the orthographic commission tasked with writing the Ukrainian language dictionary. Khvylovyi was also attacked and expelled from VAPLITE; the literary organization was forcibly dissolved and replaced with a more ‘pro-Soviet’ – in other words controlled and penetrated – union of proletarian writers, the All-Ukrainian Union of the Workers of Communist Culture. ‘Shumskyism’ and ‘Khvylovyism’ became buzzwords for dangerous nationalist deviations. In subsequent months and years association with either one of them became toxic.

  The attacks on Shumskyi and Khvylovyi were only the loudest manifestations of the political pressure that began to affect other Ukrainian intellectuals as well. Hrushevsky, under heavy surveillance since his return to Kyiv, began to have trouble getting his books published.46 Suddenly, he encountered difficulties in travelling abroad – the informers watching him were convinced he was planning to defect – and an OGPU plot would soon prevent him from becoming president of the Academy of Sciences.47

  The OGPU also stepped up its surveillance campaign. One of its informers heard a Ukrainian professor predicting a war between the Soviet Union and Poland and arguing, allegedly, that Ukrainians should ‘use the conflict to strengthen themselves’. A further informer claimed that another professor believed that ‘Ukrainization’ would raise national awareness to such an extent that soon – within two or three years – Ukraine would separate itself from Russia. The OGPU also recorded Ukrainian intellectuals worrying that the republic
would soon fall into the hands of ‘foreign’ elements – that is, Russians and Jews.48 These accusations filtered into the language of the leadership. At a special plenum in the spring of 1927, Skrypnyk, who had now replaced Shumskyi as Commissar of Education, echoed the general paranoia about foreign enemies and denounced both Shumskyi and Khvylovyi for collaborating with ‘fascist’ Poland.49

  By the end of 1927, Balytsky was ready to proclaim the existence of a broader conspiracy: in Ukraine the Communist Party was facing opposition of an unprecedented kind. Acting both openly and subversively, people with links to anti-Bolshevik parties were working inside Soviet institutions in order to hide their true allegiance. Many remained in contact with ‘foreigners’ who were actively seeking to launch a counter-revolution, just as they had done in 1919.

  Not accidentally, this wave of accusations coincided with the food shortages and discontent of 1927, as well as the ten-year anniversary of the revolution. Someone, after all, had to be blamed for the slow pace of Soviet growth – and it would not be Stalin.

  In 1927 the OGPU had begun looking for a ‘case’ that could launch a new campaign against the saboteurs and foreign agents who were allegedly holding back the USSR. In the spring of 1928 they found one. In the Russian town of Shakhty – just to the east of Ukraine, in the North Caucasus, on the edge of the Donbas coal basin – the OGPU ‘discovered’ a conspiracy of engineers who allegedly were aiming to destroy the coal industry, in league with manipulative foreign powers. A few of them had indeed come from abroad and in due course more than two dozen German engineers were arrested, along with similar numbers of Soviet colleagues. The secret police also believed they would find connections between members of the workforce and the former owners of factories who had lost their property in the revolution and were supposedly plotting to get it back, as well as links to other foreign powers, including Poland.

  The result was an elaborate show trial, the first of many. Dozens of foreign journalists attended the court in Shakhty in southwest Russia every day, along with the German ambassador and other prominent guests. The chief prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko – an advocate of ‘socialist justice’, the theory that politics matter more than rule of law – lectured the spellbound audience about the ‘vampires’ who had sucked the blood of the working class. ‘This was Revolutionary Justice,’ wrote Eugene Lyons, ‘its flaming eyes wide open, its flaming sword poised to strike.’50 Not all of the testimony went quite the way it was supposed to. One of the witnesses, Nekrasov, failed to appear. His lawyer explained that Nekrasov ‘was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a padded cell, where he screamed about rifles pointed at his heart and suffered paroxysms’.51 One of the German engineers openly declared he had made his ‘confession’ only under duress.52 Nevertheless, five of the engineers accused of ‘wrecking’ were sentenced to death, and forty-four received prison sentences. Newspapers across Russia covered the trial in great detail. Party functionaries everywhere got the message: if you don’t obey, this too can be your fate. In practice, ‘the Shakhty engineers were essentially on trial not as individuals but as members of a class’.53 Anyone with education, expertise, technical experience was now under suspicion.

  Because so many foreigners were involved, the Shakhty trial enjoyed huge notoriety abroad. Foreign diplomats rightly interpreted it as a signal that the New Economic Policy had been abandoned and that bigger changes were coming. But inside the Soviet Union almost as much attention was paid to a second show trial: that of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukraïny or SVU, an organization which seems to have been entirely fictional. A group with a similar name had been founded in Lviv in 1914 – it later developed small branches in Vienna and Berlin before fading away – and had propagated the Ukrainian cause among prisoners of war. But the Soviet version was invented by Balytsky’s Ukrainian OGPU. The goal was clear: the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals who might secretly harbour a belief in Ukrainian independence, and the destruction of that belief once and for all.54

  The SVU trial was just as well prepared as the Shakhty trial, and had equally broad aims.55 The first arrests were made in the spring of 1929. Eventually, the OGPU detained 30,000 people – intellectuals, artists, technical experts, writers and scientists – and publicly tried forty-five of them at the Kharkhiv Opera House in the spring of 1930. The most prominent was Serhii Yefremov, a literary critic, historian, vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a former deputy chairman of the Central Rada. Yefremov had already been under public attack for many months, on the grounds that he had published an article in a Ukrainian-language newspaper based across the Polish border in Lviv. Others on trial included professors, lecturers, editors, laboratory assistants, as well as linguists, doctors, lawyers, theologians and chemical engineers.56 Several others had also been Central Rada politicians; nearly half were either priests or the sons of priests.57

  Teachers and students were particular targets. Among them was the director of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Labour School No. 1, which had so assiduously organized its curriculum around the verse of Ukraine’s national poet. The director and four of his colleagues were arrested on the grounds that they had supposedly excluded the children of Jews and workers from the school, had catered exclusively to the ‘bourgeois nationalists’, and had collected funds for a monument to Petliura. Leaders of student organizations, including some that had allegedly recruited kulak children by reading Shevchenko’s poetry, were also arrested and tried. The state seemed to fear that many Ukrainians would be seduced by nationalist poetry, a paranoia that would last until the 1980s.58

  The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was another target. Its success – at its height it had 6 million followers and thirty bishops – had inspired suspicion. Balytsky’s secret police had picked up ‘clues’ about the Church’s real nature. Informers had reported, for example, that Church leaders secretly told peasants to stay faithful to the Ukrainian cause.59 During the SVU trial the state openly accused the Church of preparing a revolt:

  the Ukrainian counter-revolution defeated on the battlefields of the civil war hid in the underground and began to organize partisans, to undermine the construction of Soviet power and to launch an uprising against the worker-peasant state. One of the most important roles in this uprising was to be played by the Autocephalous Church, created by the leaders and ideologists of the Petliura movement.60

  Two Church leaders – brothers, one of them a former member of the Central Rada – were among the group of accused at the SVU trial. Thousands of others, priests as well as ordinary believers, were swept up in the mass arrests that followed.

  The occupations of the other defendants varied widely. The state clearly wanted the group to represent a broad swath of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia, in order to slander as many of them as possible. The indictment accused the SVU of plotting the overthrow of Soviet power in Ukraine, ‘with the assistance of a foreign bourgeois state’ – Poland – so as to ‘restore the capitalist order in the form of the Ukrainian People’s Republic’. During the trial the journal Bilshovyk Ukraïny (Ukrainian Bolshevik) put it even more bluntly: ‘the proletarian court is examining a case not only of the Petliurite scum, but also judging in historical retrospect all of Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. One of the defendants, a student named Borys Matushevsky, later recalled hearing similar language from his interrogator. ‘We have to put the Ukrainian intelligentsia on its knees, this is our task – and it will be carried out; those whom we do not [put on their knees] we will shoot!’61

  Stalin personally helped write the trial scenario, sending memoranda about it to the Ukrainian leadership. In one of them he expressed a particular paranoia that would repeat itself many years later, during the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ investigations of the early 1950s. ‘We think that not only the insurgent and terrorist actions of the accused must
be enlarged upon during the trial,’ he wrote to the Ukrainian communist leadership, ‘but also the medical tricks, the goal of which was the murder of responsible workers.’ That order resulted in the arrest of Arkadii Barbar, a well-known Kyiv physician and professor of medicine. No evidence was produced against him, even during the trial. But Stalin’s desire to punish ‘the counter-revolutionary part of the specialists who seek to poison and murder communist patients’ was all that mattered.62

  The trial itself was farcical. The case against Yefremov derived almost entirely from notes in his diary, whose existence was revealed to the police by another defendant. But although it contained a few entries that sniped at some of Ukraine’s communist leaders, the diary didn’t mention a clandestine organization at all. It contained no evidence of foreign contacts or revolutionary conspiracies. Yefremov nevertheless ‘confessed’, after being told that there was no other way to save his wife from arrest and torture. An informer placed in his cell reported back on his behaviour:

  Yefremov returned from the interrogation very upset and to my question, ‘How’s it going?’ he replied: ‘I have never been in such a loathsome and pitiful and stupid state. It would be better if they took me right away and finished me off than this torment every day with their interrogations … I would be very glad if there truly had been such an organization with all those people and details they are attaching to it today. Then I would say everything and that would be the end of it … But here I have to tell them about details about which I know nothing …’ It should be added that here during this conversation Yefremov was very upset, completely exhausted, and spoke with tremor in his voice and tears in his eyes.63