Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  In the end Yefremov wrote a 120-page confession of his ‘crimes’; he repeated the same invented stories during the Kharkiv Opera House show trial. Others did the same. A Ukrainian writer, Borys Antonenko, later said of another defendant that ‘even if one were to believe all of his statements, during the trial he looked like an operetta chieftain without an army and fellow thinkers’. Another called the trial ‘a theatre within a theatre’. The writer Kost Turkalo, possibly the only defendant to survive the trial, his subsequent imprisonment and the Second World War, later described the scene:

  It began with the interrogation of the defendants, each of them being given a chance by the presiding justice to say whether he had received a copy of the bill of indictment and, if so, whether he pleaded guilty or not. When all had been put through this ordeal, the justice began to read publicly the whole of the bill of indictment, the reading continuing for more than two days, because the bill was a 230-page book. This book was also given a special name by the defendants, they called it the ‘libretto of the grand SVU opera’ … Everyone was perfectly aware of the court’s attitude. It was plain that all details of the trial and its final outcome were planned ahead, and that it was necessary only for propaganda purposes abroad and for the fanatical party followers and some deluded citizenry at home.64

  All of the defendants were ultimately found guilty. Most received Gulag or prison sentences, and many were later shot during a wave of prison executions in 1938. But the purge didn’t end there. Between 1929 and 1934 the OGPU in Ukraine would ‘discover’ three more nationalist conspiracies: The ‘Ukrainian National Centre’ (Ukraïnskyi Natsionalnyi Tsentr, or UNT), the ‘Ukrainian Military Organization’ (Ukraïnska Viiskova Orhanizatsiia, or UVO) and the ‘Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ (Orhanizatsiia Ukraïnskykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN). The UVO and OUN were real organizations – both were active across the border in Poland, where they resisted Polish rule in western Ukraine – but their influence in Ukraine was vastly exaggerated. All these cases kept acquiring new aspects, and were eventually twisted to include anyone whom the political police wanted to arrest, right to the end of the 1930s.65

  Like the SVU investigation, these cases also had support at the highest levels, and the incentive to expand them was strong. OGPU officers who ‘discovered’ nationalist conspiracies in Ukraine received promotions. In the spring of 1931 those who specialized in these issues received their own special department within the secret police, the Secret Political Department of the OGPU in Ukraine (the sekretno-politychnyi viddil, or SPV). The SPV then created special sections to monitor the Ukrainian Academy of Science, to track the 60,000 Ukrainians who had moved to the USSR from Poland, and to look into a huge range of literary groups and publishers, university professors, high-school teachers and other ‘suspicious’ groups as well. In 1930 the OGPU even announced that it had discovered a conspiracy of ‘counter-revolutionary veterinarians and bacteriologists’ who were allegedly poisoning wells and murdering livestock.66

  Each of these cases was accompanied by a substantial public disinformation campaign. From 1927 onwards the Soviet press was filled with slogans denouncing the ‘Ukrainian counter-revolution’ and ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’. The public campaigns were intended to affect their victims, and they did: public shaming played an important role in the campaign to ‘break’ arrestees and get them to confess to crimes they had not committed – and, of course, to silence and terrify everyone who knew them. In the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred any criticism of the Communist Party or any of its policies, including its agricultural policies, could be used as evidence that the critic was a nationalist, a fascist, a traitor, a saboteur or a spy.67

  At a great distance in space and time, the problem of Ukrainian national aspirations might appear to be quite different from the problem of resistance to Soviet grain procurement. The former involved intellectuals, writers and others who felt continued loyalty to the idea of Ukraine as an independent or even semi-independent state. The latter concerned peasants who feared impoverishment at the hands of the USSR. But in the late 1920s there is overwhelming evidence to show that the two became interlinked, at least in the minds of Stalin and the secret police who worked with him.

  Famously, Stalin had explicitly linked the ‘national question’ and the ‘peasant question’ more than once. In his memorable 1925 speech he had declared that ‘the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army’. In the same lecture he also chided a comrade for failing to take this dangerous combination seriously, for refusing to see the ‘profoundly popular and profoundly revolutionary character of the national movement’.68 Although he did not specifically mention Ukraine by name, Ukraine was the Soviet republic which, at the time, had the largest national movement and the most numerous peasantry, as Stalin well knew.

  Even in his theoretical comments, in other words, Stalin saw the danger of ‘peasant armies’ united behind a national banner. His Bolshevik colleague Mikhail Kalinin made the same point, though Kalinin also repeated a solution offered by the advocates of collectivization: turn the peasants into a proletariat. That way they would lose their attachment to a particular place or nation: ‘The national question is purely a peasant question … the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers … which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.’69

  In practice, the OGPU also anticipated a specific danger to the Soviet state from the Ukrainian peasantry, one that was not theoretical at all. Under economic pressure, the peasants had erupted in revolt in 1918–20. Now, as collectivization loomed, the same provinces were about to be put under economic pressure again. Unsurprisingly, the OGPU feared a repeat of those years, so much so that its officers, echoing Stalin, also began using language lifted straight out of the civil war era.70

  In a certain sense the OGPU’s fears were well founded. Among other things, its tasks included the regular collection of information on the ‘political moods’ and opinions of ordinary people. It was therefore well aware of how much the new policies on grain collection – essentially a revival of the old ones – would be loathed by those upon whom they were about to be inflicted, especially in Ukraine.

  The OGPU were equally aware of discontent among educated Ukrainians in the cities, and they feared the connection between the two disgruntled groups. In 1927 the OGPU reported, among other things, that a former Ukrainian Communist Party member of the Central Committee had been overheard denouncing Moscow’s ‘colonialist’ policies towards Ukraine.71 They observed a ‘chauvinist’ crowd caught up in ‘national-independent’ feelings present yellow and blue flowers – the colours of the Ukrainian flag – to two famous Ukrainian musicians after a concert in Odessa.72 The OGPU took note of an anonymous letter mailed to a newspaper that described the peasants as ‘slaves’ who were oppressed beneath the ‘Muscovite-Jewish boot’ and the ‘Tsars from the Cheka’. The same letter warned the editorial board not to read too much into the nation’s silence: the Ukrainians had not ‘forgotten everything’.73 Police informers in Zhytomyr even heard teachers complaining that Ukrainian food and resources were being sent to Russia. The teachers agreed that the peasants would surely revolt against such practices: ‘It’s only necessary to find leaders from among the peasants themselves, in whom the peasant masses could believe.’74

  Even more worrying was the evidence that some peasants, frightened by the constant drumbeat of war propaganda, were hoping that an invasion might save them from a new round of grain requisitions. Rumours that the Poles were soon to cross the border inspired peasants in the village of Mykhailivka to start stockpiling food, emptying the local cooperative shop of its provisions. A local newspaper printed a letter describing the panic:

  Everyone is crying, and reports arrive as if by telegraph: ‘The Poles are already in Velykyi Bobryk!’ ‘Bobry
k has already been taken!’ ‘They are advancing directly on Mykhailivka!’ No one knows what to do – flee or stay.75

  Secret police reports recorded peasants telling one another that ‘in two months the Poles will arrive in Ukraine, and that will be the end of grain requisitions’ or that ‘We have no grain because the authorities are shipping it to Moscow, and they are shipping it out because they know that they will soon lose Ukraine. Well, never mind, the time is coming for them to take to their heels.’ Polish, German and Jewish residents of Ukraine meanwhile began plotting to leave. ‘The Germans in Russia are outcasts; we need to go to America’, members of that minority told one another: ‘It is better to be a good farmer in America than a bad one in Russia and be called a kulak.’ Ethnic Poles were reportedly excited by news that the Polish army was conducting military exercises across the border, and taking ‘malicious pleasure at the prospect of an impending change of government’.76

  Knowing or at least guessing at what was to come after collectivization, the secret police expected opposition to increase among urban Ukrainians as well as peasants. Their ideology anticipated this resistance: as the class struggle intensified, the bourgeoisie would naturally fight even harder against the revolution. The OGPU knew it was their job to ensure that the revolution triumphed nevertheless.

  In October 1928 two senior OGPU officers, Terentii Derybas and A. Austrin, tried to sketch out the nature of the problem in a wide-ranging report for their superiors, entitled ‘Anti-Soviet Movements in the Countryside’. They started by recounting the searing experiences of the civil war all across the USSR, which had forged so many of their careers. ‘In the history of the struggle of the organs of the Cheka-OGPU against counter-revolution, the fight against counter-revolutionary manifestations in the countryside played a significant role,’ they began. The two officers went on to recall how the ‘kulaks and the rural bourgeoisie’, led by anti-Soviet parties, had fought the Bolsheviks during the ‘kulak uprising’ of 1918–19 – in other words, the great peasant revolts led by Petliura, Makhno, Hryhoriev and others. They observed that these peasant movements had subsided during the early 1920s; but they also suspected that they were again gathering strength, taking new forms and using new slogans. In short, the old peasant uprising might return in a new form.

  The officers had observed, or said they had observed, a new phenomenon: ‘urban anti-Soviet intelligentsia’ were making greater efforts than ever before to link up with ‘anti-Soviet movements of the kulaks’. Thanks to this expanding relationship between the city and the countryside, they wrote, little cells of opposition had emerged around the country – even within the ranks of the Red Army. The officers were particularly worried by the periodic calls for a peasants’ trade union, or for a class-based peasant party – a counterpoint to the workers’ party – which the OGPU’s informers now heard, or thought they had heard, with alarming frequency all across the Soviet countryside. They had counted 139 calls for a peasants’ union in 1925. In 1927 the number had risen to 2,312.

  Despite the fact that Symon Petliura himself was now dead – murdered two years earlier by an assassin’s bullet in Paris – the memory of how his forces had once conquered Kyiv, backed by Polish forces, was never far from the two officers’ thoughts:

  Notably reanimated in recent days are the Petliurists, who are trying to make Ukraine into a beachhead for a future imperialist campaign in the USSR. There is no doubt that the government of Piłsudski stands behind the Petliurist UNR [Ukrainian People’s Republic movement] but it would be incorrect to explain the revival of Petliurists in the Ukrainian Republic as simply an intrigue of the Polish government and UNR. The Petliurists, promoting chauvinist and anti-semitic slogans and attracting the masses with the existence of an independent [Ukrainian national] republic, can become an organizational centre which can unite a wide range of anti-Soviet organizations in the villages and among the urban petit-bourgeoisie under a unified national flag, in order to carry out a joint attack on Soviet power.77

  Even with hindsight it is impossible to judge the veracity of this report. Links between anti-Soviet intellectuals and anti-Soviet peasants in Ukraine may well have been a significant phenomenon, and calls for a peasants’ union may also have been spreading. Certainly the secret police reports include multiple examples of political ferment. In late 1927 the newspaper Vesti received an anonymous letter from the ‘Farmers’ Union of Ukraine’, sent from a fake address in ‘Petliura Street, Kyiv’, declaring ‘we can no longer bear the rule of communists’. The letter ended with a verse from the Ukrainian national anthem, ‘Ukraine has not died yet’. At about the same time the OGPU found leaflets floating around Ukraine, allegedly printed by the ‘Ukrainian revolutionary committee’, a body that called on the peasants to prepare themselves for the ‘day when the rule of the Moscow Bolsheviks will end’ and the Ukrainian People’s Republic would return.78

  But these theories could also have been produced or pumped up by the OGPU’s collective imagination. Some of the parties and leaflets may also have been produced by the secret police themselves. One of their techniques, learned from their tsarist predecessors, was to create fake opposition movements and organizations designed to tempt potential dissidents into exposing themselves by joining them.

  Still, even if these beliefs in a city-country conspiracy were paranoid, they were not illogical. The Bolsheviks’ own experience of revolution taught them that revolutions emerge from the link between intellectuals and workers. So why shouldn’t a new revolution now emerge from the link between Ukrainian nationalist-intellectuals and peasants? And why mightn’t such a movement grow very quickly? After all, that was roughly what had happened in 1919, when the peasant rebellion, seemingly coming from nowhere, had exploded all across Ukraine. Some of the leaders of that movement had certainly had national aspirations, and their rebellion had indeed paved the way for a foreign ‘imperialist’ invasion.

  At the beginning of 1928 the two OGPU officers writing this ponderous essay clearly remembered these events, the tenth anniversary of which was so near. Armed with daily reports of ‘anti-Soviet’ whispers, leaflets and worse, they had to assume that the danger of another explosion in Ukraine was real. Having anticipated the rise of urban-rural nationalism, the OGPU investigated it, sought it out, and recorded the evidence, real or false. Even before the collectivization drive had properly begun, in other words, the Soviet secret police and Soviet leadership already perceived any Ukrainian resistance to grain collection as evidence of a political plot against the USSR.

  Very quickly, the OGPU’s expectations were fulfilled: all across the USSR peasants objected to the confiscation of their property, arbitrary arrests, the criminalization of ‘grain hoarding’ and the imposition of fines. Reports of resistance flooded in from Siberia and the North Caucasus as well as Ukraine, everywhere where ‘emergency methods’ were applied with vigour. ‘Moscow,’ recalled Eugene Lyons, ‘buzzed with rumors of localized rebellion in the Kuban, Ukraine, and other sections … When the press was permitted to speak more openly, many of the rumours appeared to be true. From all sections of the country came reports of local communists, visiting grain agents and tax collectors assaulted and murdered.’79 In some places anger led to real violence. In January 1928 the OGPU arrested six people in a town near Odessa for beating up the secretary of a collective farm. Another group of rebels were arrested in southern Ukraine for thrashing a tax collector.80

  For some Ukrainians this was not resistance, but rather a struggle for survival. The harvests of 1928–9 were poor. Fluctuating weather and rain during the harvesting season meant that the quantity of grain produced in the winter and spring harvests was well below average. As in 1921, political pressure meant that peasants had very little grain in reserve. Food once again became scarce, especially in the steppe region of southeastern Ukraine – but grain collection continued at the same pace. At least 23,000 people died directly of hunger in the scarcely remembered smaller famine of 1928–9, and another
80,000 died from disease and other knock-on effects of starvation.81

  In many ways, this smaller famine was a ‘dress rehearsal’, marking a transition point between the disaster of 1921 and the larger famine of 1932–3. The Soviet Union did not call for international involvement, as it had in 1921. Nor did Moscow provide grain or other food aid. Instead, the USSR left the problem to the Ukrainian communists to solve. In July 1928 the Ukrainian government did create a republican commission to help ‘victims of the famine’. The commission granted loans to peasants for the purchase of seeds (which had to be paid back), provided some food aid (in return for public work), offered some meals and medical assistance to children. But news of the famine was kept to a minimum. In about a third of cases death certificates for victims of starvation listed other causes. And at no point in 1928–9 did anyone in the leadership question whether the ‘emergency methods’ themselves were the source of the problem.82

  Instead, throughout 1928 the OGPU continued to search for evidence of counter-revolutionary activity. Its officers noted the discovery of ‘anti-Soviet leaflets’ in several parts of rural Ukraine, produced by ‘Petliura-friendly circles’. They recorded ‘anti-Soviet’ comments in the Ukrainian countryside. ‘It’s better to burn your bread rather than give it to the Bolsheviks’, one peasant was heard to declare.83 The Soviet leadership believed that many Ukrainians were preparing for outside invasion, and the Ukrainian OGPU was happy to provide them with evidence. Balytsky told Kaganovich in the summer of 1928 that internal dissent in Ukraine was by definition connected to foreign actors:

  One may consider as established the circumstance that the degree of activity of internal chauvinist elements corresponds directly to the complexity and acuteness of the USSR’s international status. They proceed from the fundamental thesis that the breakup of the USSR is inevitable, and with this catastrophe Ukraine will be able to gain independence.84