Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  At the same time the institution of the kobzar – the traditional wandering minstrel, playing the bandura, who had once been a staple of Ukrainian village life – disappeared so abruptly that many long believed they had been arrested en masse. There is no documentary evidence of this (though Dmitry Shostakovich referred to it in his memoirs), but it is not unthinkable. Still, even without a deliberate murder, the kobzars would have fallen foul of the passport laws passed in 1932; later the famine would have killed many, since they would not have had easy access to ration cards. Inevitably, they would also have attracted the attention of the police. Many of their traditional songs retold Cossack legends, and had anti-Russian overtones that acquired anti-Soviet overtones after the revolution. In 1930 an alert citizen in Kharkiv wrote an indignant letter to a local newspaper, claiming that he had heard a minstrel at a bazaar recite anti-Lenin (and anti-semitic) rhyming couplets, and sing an anti-Soviet song:

  Winter asks the Frost

  Whether the kolkhoz has boots

  There are no boots just sandals,

  The kolkhoz will disintegrate.85

  The song (which rhymes in Ukrainian) must have been popular, because two ethnographers recorded another man, a blind kobzar, singing exactly the same one at a bazaar in Kremenchuk. When policemen came to arrest him, he sang another verse:

  Oh see, good folks,

  What world has arrived now:

  The policeman has become

  A guide for a blindman.86

  The official dislike of the kobzar and the bandura was no surprise: like court jesters in Shakespeare’s day, they had always expressed impolitic thoughts and ideas, sometimes singing of things that could not be spoken. In the heated atmosphere of collectivization, when everyone was in search of enemies, this form of humour – along with the nostalgia and emotion that folk music evoked in Ukraine – was intolerable. A Red Army colonel in Kyiv complained about it to a colleague:

  Why is it that when I listen to a piano concert, a violin concert or a symphony orchestra, or a choir, I always notice that the audience listens politely? But when they listen to the women’s bandura choir, and they get to singing the dumy [epic ballads], then I see tears welling up in the eyes of the Red Army soldiers? You know, these banduras have a Petliurist soul.87

  Folk music inspired an emotional attachment to Ukraine and evoked memories of village life. No wonder the Soviet state wanted to destroy both of them.

  The joint attack on the churches and village rituals had an ideological justification. The Bolsheviks were committed atheists who believed that churches were an integral part of the old regime. They were also revolutionaries who wanted to destroy even the memory of another kind of society. Churches – where villagers had gathered over many decades or centuries – remained a potent symbol of the link between the present and the past. In most Russian and many Ukrainian cities, the Bolsheviks had immediately sacked churches – between 1918 and 1930 they shut down more than 10,000 churches across the USSR, turning them into warehouses, cinemas, museums or garages.88 By the early 1930s few urban churches were still functioning as places of worship. The fact that they had continued to exist in so many villages was one of the things that made the peasants seem suspicious to urbanites, and especially to the urban agitators who arrived to help carry out collectivization.

  Churches also served a social function, especially in poorer villages that had few other social institutions. They provided a physical meeting place that was not controlled by the state, and at times were centres of opposition to it. During a series of violent peasant riots in Ryazan province, near Moscow, church bells had served as a call to arms, warning the farmers that the brigadiers and soldiers from the capital had arrived.89 Above all, the church was an institutional umbrella under which people could organize themselves for charitable and social endeavours. During the 1921 famine Ukrainian priests and church institutions had helped organize assistance for the starving.

  Once the churches were gone, no independent bodies in the countryside remained capable of motivating or organizing volunteers.90 The church’s place in the cultural and educational life of the village was taken instead by state institutions – ‘houses of culture’, registry offices, Soviet schools – under the control of the Communist Party. Churches were eliminated in order to prevent them from becoming a source of opposition; in practice, their absence also meant that they could not be a source of aid or comfort when people began to die from hunger.

  Whether they had volunteered to join communal farms or had been forced, whether they joined the campaign or opposed it, collectivization was a point of no return for all the inhabitants of the Soviet countryside. Villagers who had participated in acts of violence found it difficult to return to the old status quo. Long-standing friendships and social relationships were destroyed by unforgivable acts. The attitude to the village, to work and to life changed for ever. Petro Hryhorenko was shocked to discover, on a trip into the countryside in 1930, that his formerly hard-working neighbours had lost their desire even to bring in their own harvest:

  Arkhanhelka, an enormous steppe village consisting of more than 2,000 farmhouses, was dead during the height of the harvest season. Eight men worked one thresher for one shift daily. The remaining workers – men, women and young people – sat around or lay in the shade. When I tried to start conversations people replied slowly and with total indifference. If I told them that the grain was falling from the wheat stalks and perishing they would reply, ‘Of course, it will perish.’ Their feeling must have been terribly strong for them to go to the extreme of leaving the grain in the fields.91

  Family relationships changed too. Fathers, deprived of property, could no longer bequeath land to their sons and lost authority. Before collectivization it was very unusual for parents to abandon children, but afterwards mothers and fathers often went to seek work in the city, returning sporadically or not at all.92 As elsewhere in the USSR, children were instructed to denounce their parents, and were questioned at school about what was going on at home.93 Traditions of village self-rule came to an abrupt end too. Before collectivization, local men chose their own leaders; after collectivization, farcical ‘elections’ were still held, with candidates making speeches exhorting their neighbours to join the great Soviet project. But everyone knew that the outcome was determined in advance, guaranteed by the omnipresent police.94

  Finally, and perhaps most ominously, collectivization left the peasants economically dependent on the state. Once the collective farms were established, nobody who lived on them had any means of earning a salary. The farm bosses distributed food products and other goods according to the quality and quantity of work. Theoretically, the system was supposed to provide an incentive to work. In practice, it also meant that peasants had no cash, no way to purchase food, and no mobility. Anyone who left without permission or refused to work could be deprived of his or her ration. When their family cows and garden plots were taken away, as they would be during the autumn and winter of 1932–3, the peasants had nothing left at all.95

  By itself, collectivization need not have led to a famine on the scale of the one that took place in 1932–3. But the methods used to collectivize the peasants destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order. Old values – respect for property, for dignity, for human life – disappeared. In their place the Bolsheviks had instilled the rudiments of an ideology that was about to become lethal.

  6

  Rebellion, 1930

  Comrades! I call on you to defend your property and the property of the people. Be prepared for the first and the last call. The rivers and seas will dry up and water will flow on to the high Kurgan and blood will flow in the streams and the land will rise up in high whirlwinds … I call on you to defend each other, don’t go into the collective farm, don’t believe the gossips … Comrades, remember the past, when you lived freely, everyone lived well, poor and rich, now all live poorly.

  Anonymous proclamation, 193
01

  If we had not immediately taken measures against violations of the party line, we would have had a wide wave of insurrectionary peasant uprisings, a good part of our lower officials would have been slaughtered by the peasants.

  Central Committee secret memorandum, 19302

  In just a few short months during the winter of 1929–30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken.

  The result was rapid, massive, sometimes chaotic and often violent resistance. But properly speaking, it is incorrect to say that resistance followed collectivization, since resistance of various kinds actually accompanied every stage of de-kulakization and collectivization, from the grain requisitions of 1928 to the deportations of 1930, continuing throughout 1931 and 1932, until hunger and repression finally rendered further defiance impossible. From the beginning, resistance helped shape the nature of collectivization: because peasants refused to cooperate, the idealistic young agitators from outside and their local allies grew angrier, their methods became more extreme and their violence harsher. Resistance, especially in Ukraine, also raised alarm bells at the highest level. To anyone who remembered the peasant rebellion of 1918–19, the rebellion of 1930 seemed both familiar and dangerous.

  At different stages the rebellion took different forms. The initial refusal to join collective farms was itself a form of resistance. Many Ukrainian peasants did not trust the Soviet state that they had fought against only ten years earlier. Parts of Ukraine were just recovering from the famine and food shortage of 1929; with no tradition of jointly owned land, the peasants had good reason to believe that outsiders would make things worse rather than better. All across the USSR peasants felt attached to their cows, horses and tools, which they did not want to surrender to some uncertain entity. Even in Russia, where there was a tradition of communally owned farmland, peasants were suspicious of collective farms, which had an uncertain future and an unfamiliar organization. The Soviet state had proposed rapid policy changes before, and sometimes unwound them with equal speed. Some remembered that the disarray of the civil war years had given way to the more ‘reasonable’ New Economic Policy, and assumed collectivization was another short-lived Soviet fad that would soon disappear.

  Peasants also had reason to fear that, even if they went along with it, worse could follow. In his first report to Moscow for the year 1930, Vsevolod Balytsky noted that many middle-income peasants – farmers who were not kulaks but not quite the poorest either – had been overheard saying that ‘after the kulaks, they will de-kulakize us too’.3

  Outright refusal was often followed by immediate action. Ordered to hand over their livestock to collective farms that they did not trust, peasants began to slaughter cows, pigs, sheep and even horses. They ate the meat, salted it, sold it or concealed it – anything to prevent the collective farms from getting hold of it. All across the Soviet Union, in all the rural districts, slaughterhouses suddenly began working overtime. Mikhail Sholokhov penned a famous fictional portrait of a livestock bloodbath:

  Hardly had darkness fallen when the brief and stifled bleating of a sheep, the mortal scream of a pig or the bellowing of a calf would be heard piercing the silence. Not only those who joined the collective farm, but individual farmers also slaughtered. They killed oxen, sheep, pigs, even cows; they slaughtered animals kept for breeding … the dogs began to drag entrails and guts about the village, the cellars and granaries were filled with meat … ‘Kill, it’s not ours now!’ ‘Kill, they’ll take it for the meat collection tax if you don’t!’ ‘Kill, for you won’t taste meat in the collective farm!’4

  This most visceral and immediate form of resistance continued well into the following year and beyond. Between 1928 and 1933 the numbers of cattle and horses in the USSR dropped by nearly half. From 26 million pigs, the number went down to 12 million. From 146 million sheep and goats, the total dropped to 50 million.5

  Those who did not slaughter their animals protected them ferociously. In one village the OGPU observed a mob attempting to beat up a Komsomol member who was trying to lead away a horse. In another village a group of twenty women, armed with clubs, raided a collective farm to take back their horses. In yet another, peasants burned a barn full of horses to the ground, preferring to see their animals dead rather than confiscated.6 Peasants were heard to declare that it was ‘better to destroy everything’ rather than let the authorities have their property.7

  In a few cases peasants simply released their animals into the streets rather than hand them over. In the North Caucasian village of Ekaterinovka one farmer set his chestnut mare free to wander the streets, carrying the sign ‘please take, whoever wants’. One report on this incident indignantly described the horse as playing the role of a ‘kulak agitator’: the mare was ‘wandering around the village for two days already, provoking curiosity, laughter and panic’.8

  Both the killing of animals and the resistance to their confiscation was entirely personal: peasants feared losing their wealth, their food, their entire future. But the authorities perceived the slaughter as purely political: it was deliberate ‘sabotage’, motivated by counter-revolutionary thinking – and they punished the saboteurs accordingly. One man who refused to give his cow to the collective farm and killed it instead was forced to walk around the village with the dead cow’s head tied to his neck. The local brigade leaders wanted to ‘show the entire village what can happen, what everybody can expect later on’.9 More commonly, those who slaughtered their livestock were automatically categorized as ‘kulaks’, if they had not been so designated already, with all of the consequences: loss of property, arrest, deportation.

  Unsurprisingly, demands for seed grain produced similar reactions. The memory of the grain confiscations, shortages and famines of the previous decade were still strong. One woman, a young girl at the time, remembered the day that her father abruptly came home and locked her in the house. She sat at the window and saw dozens of people, mostly women, running across her courtyard towards the railway station. Not long afterward, she saw them come back, dragging sacks of grain. Later, her father told her that people from the surrounding villages had attacked the grain storage bins at the town’s railways station – bins containing their own grain – and had begun removing the contents. Although the local security guards failed to prevent them from entering the storage area, additional police troops arrived from Poltava. Horses trampled the ‘thieves’. A few people escaped with some grain, but most were left with nothing.10 This was not unusual: in a report covering sixteen Ukrainian districts the OGPU noted that the riots following the ‘collectivization’ of seed grain led to the deaths of thirty-five people ‘from our side’ – meaning the police and authorities. Another thirty-seven were wounded and 314 were beaten. In the exchange twenty-six rioters – described by police as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – were killed as well.11

  But if police viewed the rioters as political agents rather than desperately poor people who feared starvation, it was equally true that the rioters viewed the government as a hostile force, or worse. To some, the collectivization policy was the ultimate betrayal of the revolution, proof that the Bolsheviks intended to impose a ‘second serfdom’ and rule like the nineteenth-century tsars. In 1919 similar fears had helped inspire the anti-Bolshevik sentiments of the peasant rebellion. Now they were frequently expressed, so much so that the OGPU gleaned them from informers. In the Russian Central Black Earth district OGPU sources heard one peasant declare, ‘The communists deceived us in their revolution, all land was given out to work for free and now they take the last cow.’ In the Middle Volga province another said, �
�They said to me “revolution”, I didn’t understand but now [I] understand that such a revolution means to take everything from the peasants and leave them hungry and naked.’ In Ukraine a peasant declared, ‘They push us into the collective farm so that we will be eternal slaves.’12 Many decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the grandson of kulaks, described the collective farms as ‘serfdom’. In order for the memory of collective farms as a ‘second serfdom’ to have had such a long life, it must have been deeply rooted.13

  But to some people the regime quickly became far more than just an ordinary earthly enemy. In the past, fears of the apocalypse and expectations of the end of the world had periodically swept through the Russian and Ukrainian countryside, where religious cults and magical practice had been present for centuries. The 1917 revolution inspired another wave of religious mania. Throughout the 1920s dire prophecies were common, as were omens and miracles. In Voronezh province, pilgrims flocked to see trees that had unexpectedly burst into bloom: their ‘regeneration’ was taken as a sign of a change to come.14 In Ukraine a crowd gathered to watch a rusty icon on the road to Kharkiv ‘come to life’, taking on shape and colour.15

  In 1929–30 some Soviet peasants, appalled by the attacks on churches and priests, once again became convinced that the Soviet Union was the Antichrist – and that collective farm managers were therefore his representatives. Priests told their parishioners that the Antichrist was taking their food, or that the Antichrist was trying to destroy them.16 In line with those beliefs, peasants rejected the collective farms not merely for material or political reasons, but for spiritual ones: they feared eternal damnation. The state was attacking the Church; group prayers, singing and church services became a form of opposition. One local official recorded the words of a Ukrainian farmer: ‘You will be forced to work on Sundays if you go into the collective farm, [they] will put the seal of Antichrist on your forehead and arms. Now already the kingdom of Antichrist is begun and to go into the collective farm is a big sin. About this it is written in the bible.’17 Members of the Catholic minority in Ukraine were affected by the same spirit: in the ethnic German village of Kandel, the local bishop, Antonius Zerr, began to offer counsel and even ordain priests in secret, in defiance of anti-religious laws.18