Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Worse, there was evidence of discontent among Red Army troops in the Ukrainian military district, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Knowing how poor the conditions were for their families, they talked about abandoning their units, joining partisan groups, even fighting for peasants’ rights. The historian Lyudmyla Hrynevych has compiled a striking list of overheard complaints, all made in May 1928:

  ‘In the event of war, the forests will be overflowing with bandits’ (80th Infantry Division)

  ‘As soon as war breaks out, all these organizations will fall apart, and the peasantry will go to fight for its rights’ (44th Infantry Division)

  ‘In the event of war, we will turn our bayonets against those who are flaying the skin off the peasants’ (51st Infantry Division)

  ‘As soon as war breaks out, we will throw down our rifles and scatter to our homes’ (Communications Company of the 17th Infantry Corps)85

  Because the ‘political mood’ in Ukraine was thought to be so bad, in 1928 the OGPU also began to monitor closely anyone who might potentially become the leader of a peasant uprising or a Ukrainian liberation movement. An informer reported that Hryhorii Kholodnyi, head of the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language, told colleagues he believed the police were arresting anyone who had close ties to the villages or who was well regarded among the peasantry. His comments triggered a search for precisely the kind of person that Kholodnyi described. And thus did one of the victims’ hypotheses about the wave of arrests become one of the OGPU’s working theories. Kholodnyi was eventually arrested himself as part of the SVU case. He spent eight years in the Gulag before being shot in 1938.86

  But the OGPU now identified another potential scapegoat: the Ukrainian Communist Party itself. While Stalin was in Siberia in 1928, Molotov made a similar trip to Ukraine. Upon his return to Moscow, he told the Politburo that the news was not good. Ukraine – which, Molotov observed, accounted for 37 per cent of the entire grain collection plan for the Soviet Union – was already collecting less and less grain every month. He blamed not just the kulaks and speculators, but the Ukrainian communists. The Ukrainian Party, he complained, had underestimated the grain deficit. ‘Elementary discipline’ was lacking in the provinces. Local officials were setting their own grain collection targets, regardless of the ‘all-Union’ targets and requests sent from Kyiv. Some of these local officials didn’t even seem to care about his visit, Molotov observed with all the outrage he could muster: they had evidently decided these ‘emergency measures’ amounted to a ‘mini-storm’ that would soon pass.87

  The idea that some local communist parties were more than merely ineffective also began to appear in OGPU reports soon afterwards. Another account spoke of ‘khvostism’ – from the Russian for ‘tail’, meaning to be behind events – and ‘inactivity’ among party members. It also accused them of offering ‘incorrect explanations of the goals of the [grain procurement] campaign’ and harbouring unwarranted sympathy for kulaks. Some lower-level officials, the report stated, were actually refusing to procure grain or carry out any orders at all.88 OGPU informers even recorded the grumblings of Marchenko and Lebedenko, two local officials. The former objected to Molotov himself. The man was a Russian who lived in Moscow, Marchenko grumbled: his visit was evidence that the Ukrainian Republic was nothing but a ‘fiction’, and that the Ukrainian communists were mere puppets. Lebedenko went further: ‘The Bolsheviks have never robbed Ukraine as thoroughly and as cynically as they do now. Without question, there will be famine …’89

  Instead of addressing the problem, the Soviet Communist Party sought to eliminate the dissidents. In November 1928 the state conducted a purge of the komnezamy, the committees of poor peasants, kicking out those members who were insufficiently enthusiastic. Purges of the Ukrainian Communist Party also took place that year. These were not the lethal purges of 1937–8; the point was not to kill people, but to eliminate potential troublemakers, and to create the atmosphere of insecurity and tension that would persuade party members to carry out the difficult task of collectivization in the months to come.90 In practice, Moscow was also accumulating the evidence it might need in the future. Collectivization was coming. And if it failed in Ukraine, Moscow could force the Ukrainian Communist Party to shoulder the blame.

  Wild rumours now swept across the countryside. Ukrainians were afraid of a new wave of requisitions, famine, economic collapse, or war. The peasants told one another that the grain requisitions had become harsher because the Soviet Union owed money to foreign governments. Many started to bury their grain underground. Some refused to sell anything for paper money. Others began hoarding whatever goods they could buy.91 In this atmosphere – of conspiracy, hysteria, uncertainty, suspicion – collectivization began.

  5

  Collectivization: Revolution in the Countryside, 1930

  Green corn waves new shoots

  Though planted not long ago

  Our brigadier sports new boots

  While we barefoot go.

  Collective farm song, 1930s1

  The words ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ carry few implications of human agony. It seems a formula of social engineering and has an impersonal and metallic ring. But for those who saw the process at close range the phrase is freighted with horror …

  Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 19372

  In the winter of 1929 outsiders came to Miron Dolot’s village on the banks of the Tiasmyn River in central Ukraine. It was a large village by the standards of the time, with about eight hundred families, a church and a central square. Villagers owned their own house and land, but most of those houses had thatched roofs and the plots were tiny. Few farmers possessed more than fifty acres, but they felt, by the standards of the time, comfortably off.

  As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal. ‘We were completely free in our movements. We took pleasure trips and travelled freely looking for jobs. We went to big cities and neighboring towns to attend weddings, church bazaars, and funerals. No one asked us for documents or questioned us about our destinations.’3 Others remembered the era before collectivization in the same way. The Soviet Union was in charge, but not every aspect of life was controlled by the state, and peasants lived much as they had in the past. They farmed the land, ran small businesses, traded and bartered. A woman from Poltava remembered that her parents, ‘very industrious people and religious’, had owned ten hectares of land and earned money doing other odd jobs too: ‘My father was a good carpenter. He also knew many other crafts.’4

  Politics had remained loose and decentralized: ‘The Ukrainian government did not dictate in the 1920s and say that a particular school had to be Ukrainian or Russian, because that decision was made in the locale itself.’5 Villages were self-governing, much as they always had been. Tension between the adherents of Bolshevism and the more traditional peasants remained, but the various groups tried to accommodate one another. In Pylypivka, this is how a group of boys prepared to go carolling on Christmas Day:

  the boys made a star [traditional for carollers] and thought about how to design it. After some debate, a decision was made: on one side of the star, an icon of the Mother of God would be featured, while on the other, a five-pointed [Soviet] star. In addition, they learned not only old carols, but also new ones. They made a plan: when they were approaching a communist’s house, they would display the five-pointed star and sing the new carols, but when they approached the house of a religious man, they would display the side with the icon of the Mother of God, and would sing [old carols].6

  But the outsiders who came to Dolot’s village that December brought with them a different set of ideas about how life there should be lived. Loose organization was to be replaced by strict control. Entrepreneurial farmers would become paid labourers. Independence was to be replaced with strict regulation. Above all, in the name of efficiency, collective farms, owned jointly by the commune or the state, were to replace all private far
ms. As Stalin had said in Siberia, the ‘unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms … for us is the only path’.7

  Eventually, there would be different types of collective farm with different degrees of communal ownership. But most would require their members to give up their private property – their land as well as horses, cattle, other livestock and tools – and to turn all of it over to the collective.8 Some peasants would remain in their houses, but others would eventually live in houses or barracks owned by the collective, and would eat all of their meals in a common dining room.9 None of them would own anything of importance, including tractors, which were to be leased from centralized, state-owned Machine Tractor Stations that would manage their purchase and upkeep. Peasants would not earn their own money, but would rather be paid day wages, trudodni, often receiving for their labour not cash but food and other goods, and those in small quantities.

  Supposedly, all of this was to come about spontaneously, as the result of a great upswell of rural enthusiasm. In November 1929, Stalin lauded the collectivization ‘movement’, which he claimed was ‘sweeping the country’:

  radical change … has taken place in the development of our agriculture from small, backward individual farming to large-scale, advanced collective agriculture, to cultivation of the land in common … the new and decisive feature of the peasant collective farm movement is that the peasants are joining the collective farms not in separate groups, as was formerly the case, but in whole villages, whole regions, whole districts and even whole provinces.10

  But in practice, the policy was pushed hard from above. In the week starting 10 November 1929 the party’s Central Committee met in Moscow and resolved to ‘speed-up the process of collectivization of peasant households’ by sending party cadres into the villages to set up new communal farms and persuade peasants to join them. The same resolution condemned the opponents of collectivization and expelled their leader, Nikolai Bukharin – Stalin’s most important political opponent by that time – from the Politburo. A few weeks later the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture declared that all of the grain-producing regions of the USSR would be collectivized within three years.11

  The men and women who showed up in Dolot’s village that winter were the first tangible evidence of the new policy. At first, the villagers didn’t take them seriously: ‘Their personal appearance amused us. Their pale faces and their clothes were totally out of place in our village surroundings. Walking carefully to avoid getting snow on their polished shoes, they were an alien presence among us.’ Their leader, Comrade Zeitlin, treated the peasants rudely and seemed to know nothing of their ways. Supposedly, he mistook a calf for a colt. A farmer pointed out his mistake. ‘Colt or calf,’ he replied, ‘it does not matter. The world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.’12

  Comrade Zeitlin was, in the language of the time, a ‘Twenty-Five Thousander’ – a ‘Thousander’ for short – meaning that he was one of approximately 25,000 working-class, urban aktivists recruited at the end of 1929, following the Central Committee’s resolution, to help carry out the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The physical manifestation of the Marxist-Leninist belief that the working class would be an ‘agent of historical consciousness’, these urban activists were enticed into the countryside with a campaign that had the feel of a ‘military recruitment drive in the initial stages of a patriotic war’.13 Newspapers published photographs of these ‘worker-volunteers’, and factories held meetings to celebrate them. Competition to join their ranks was, at least according to official sources, quite fierce. One volunteer, a former Red partisan, later made an explicit comparison to the bloody battles of the previous decade: ‘Here now before me arises an image of ’19, when I was in the same district, climbing along snowdrifts with rifle in hand and blizzard raging, like now. I feel that I am young again …’14

  The motivations of the urban men and women themselves were mixed. Some sought advancement, some hoped for material rewards. Many felt genuine revolutionary fervour, stoked by constant, angry, repetitive propaganda. Others felt fear as well, as the newspapers wrote constantly about imminent war. Urban food shortages, all too real, were widely blamed on the peasants, and the Twenty-Five Thousanders knew that too. Even in 1929 many Soviet citizens already believed that recalcitrant peasants posed a very real threat to themselves, and to the future of their revolution. This powerful belief enabled them to do things that ‘bourgeois morality’ would have once described as evil.

  One of the people gripped by this revolutionary fervour was Lev Kopelev, a Twenty-Five Thousander who played an unusual role in the history of Soviet letters. Kopelev was born in Kyiv to an educated Jewish family, studied in Kharkiv, spoke Ukrainian as well as Russian, but identified himself as ‘Soviet’. Much later, in 1945, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag. He survived, befriended the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, became a model for one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, wrote powerful memoirs of his own, and became a prominent dissident. But in 1929 he was a true believer:

  With the rest of my generation, I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism’, the attributes of people who ‘could not see the forest for the trees’.15

  He was not alone. In 1929, Maurice Hindus, the American socialist, received a letter from a Russian friend, Nadya, who did not yet have the benefit of Kopelev’s hindsight. She wrote in a state of ecstatic excitement:

  I am off in villages with a group of other brigadiers, organizing kolkhozy. It is a tremendous job, but we are making amazing progress … I am confident that in time not a peasant will remain on his own land. We shall yet smash the last vestiges of capitalism and forever rid ourselves of exploitation … The very air here is afire with a new spirit and a new energy.16

  Kopelev, Nadya and others like them were bolstered by a sense of grievance. The Bolsheviks had made extraordinary promises to people, offering wealth, happiness, land ownership, power. But the revolution and the civil war had been violent and disorienting, and the promises had not been kept. Ten years after the revolution, many people were disappointed. They needed an explanation for the hollowness of the Bolshevik triumph. The Communist Party offered them a scapegoat, and urged them to feel no mercy. Mikhail Sholokhov, in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, painted a telling portrait of one such disappointed fanatic. Davidov was a Twenty-Five Thousander who had come to collectivize the peasants at any cost. When, at one point, a farmer tentatively suggested that he had been too cruel to the village kulaks, he lashed back: ‘You’re sorry for them … you feel pity for them. And have they had pity for us? Have our enemies ever wept over the tears of our children? Did they ever weep over the orphans of those they killed?’17

  It was with this kind of attitude that, after very brief training sessions – usually no more than a couple of weeks – the urban volunteers set out for the villages. But although they boarded trains in Leningrad, Moscow or Kyiv while listening to the strains of revolutionary music and the echoes of patriotic speeches, as they moved into the countryside the music faded away. One brigadier wrote later, ‘They saw us off with a triumphal march, they met us with a funeral dirge.’18 It was at this moment in time that the Stalinist rhetoric of progress clashed headlong with the reality of Ukrainian and Russian peasant life.

  The trains ran more slowly as they entered the countryside: not every provincial railway manager was enthusiastic about the new urban activists. In Ukraine most of these volunteer outsiders were Russian speakers, either from Russia or from Ukrainian cities; in either case they seemed equally foreign to the Ukrainian-speaking peasants. When they arrived in provincia
l capitals, the activists sometimes found that the reception was hostile, which was unsurprising. To local peasants who had just recovered from the shortages and hunger of the summer of 1929, the newcomers would have seemed indistinguishable from the soldiers and activists who had come to the Ukrainian countryside to expropriate grain a decade earlier.

  Nor was their task simple. Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary. The activists were simply meant to argue and harangue, and in the process persuade. Village meetings were held, and these agitators also went from house to house. Antonina Solovieva, an urban activist and Komsomol member in the Urals, remembered the collectivization drive with nostalgia:

  The objective was to talk individual peasants into joining the collective farm; to make sure that the collective farm was ready to begin sowing; and, most important, to find out where and by whom state grain was being hidden … We would spend long evenings around a small table with a weakly flickering kerosene lamp at some collective farm headquarters, or by a burning stove in some poor peasants’ hut.19

  But while the objectives might have been clear, the lines of command were not. Many different groups had some responsibility for the implementation of collectivization, including the local communist parties, the Komsomol (the communist youth organization), the Young Pioneers (the communist children’s organization), the remaining Committees of Poor Peasants, the Central Control Commission, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Collective Farm Centre (kolkhoz-tsentr), the trade unions and, of course, the secret police. Other state officials, most notably teachers – educators of the new generation – were involved too.

  All these local authorities, already burdened with chaotic chains of command and conflicting priorities, had mixed feelings about these young enthusiasts who had no experience in farming, agriculture or even of country life, while the young urban enthusiasts had mixed feelings about the local authorities too. Many documents from the period cite complaints about the local village councils, which were alleged to be dragging their feet or otherwise obstructing the work of the volunteers sent from the outside. Clearly the village councils were inefficient. But they may also have wanted to protect their neighbours from the harsh impact of orders issued by fanatical young outsiders.20