Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Threatened by violence and afraid of hunger, hundreds of thousands of peasants finally relinquished their land, animals and machines to the collective farms. But just because they had been forced to move, they did not become enthusiastic collective farmers overnight. The fruits of their labour no longer belonged to them; the grain they sowed and harvested was now requisitioned by the authorities.

  Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives. Like the serfs of old, they were forced to accept a special legal status, including controls on their movement: all collective farmers, kolkhozniks, would eventually need to seek permission to work outside the village. Instead of deciding when to reap, sow and sell, kolkhozniks had to follow decisions made by the local representatives of Soviet power. They did not earn regular salaries but were paid trudodni or day wages, which often meant payment in kind – grain, potatoes or other products – rather than cash. They lost their ability to govern themselves too, as collective farm bosses and their entourages supplanted the traditional village councils.

  As a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible. Farm machines were not maintained and frequently broke down. In August 1930 some 3,600 tractors out of 16,790 in Ukraine were in need of repair. The problem was cynically blamed on ‘class struggle’ and ‘wreckers’ who were allegedly sabotaging the farm machinery.5

  Even when peasants did sow and till the fields, they often did their work without the care and enthusiasm they had shown in the past. Collective farms produced dramatically less than they could or should have done. Everyone tried to borrow or take from the collective as much as possible: after all, the state’s grain belonged to ‘no one’. Men and women who would never have considered stealing in the past now had no compunction about taking from state organizations that no one owned or respected. This form of ‘everyday resistance’ was not unique to the peasantry.6 Working as little as possible, stealing public property, failing to care for state-owned equipment and machinery – these were the methods by which underpaid, underfed and unmotivated Soviet workers of all kinds got along.

  Peasants also continued to abandon the collective farms for work in the cities – the OGPU quoted one saying ‘it’s impossible to tolerate this any more’. They divided up the land or the harvested grain among themselves instead of sharing it out with others. In a few places the authorities observed that kulaks ejected from their own farms banded together to form what the authorities called ‘kulak collectives’. Working together, they ‘tried to win sympathy from the local population and to demonstrate their superiority to the other collective farms’. This too was seen as a form of anti-Soviet activity.7

  Attacks on shops and grain warehouses continued too. In May 1930 a crowd of several thousand people – mostly women – from outside Odessa swarmed into the city and attacked several state-run grocery stores as well as a restaurant. Mounted policemen were sent in to restore order, and several arrests were made. The unrest was significant enough to appear in the reports of both the Turkish and the Japanese consuls in Odessa – and those reports were significant enough to alarm the OGPU. Although the police had responded promptly, the Japanese observed, ‘the general atmosphere in the town remains agitated’.8

  Nevertheless, the summer of 1930 seemed, from the perspective of Moscow, to mark a moment of victory. Despite the evidence of suffering and the reports of chaos, the illusion that collectivization would still be a ‘success’, dizzy or otherwise, persisted through the end of 1930. There are many arguments about whether the published figures for that year – and indeed subsequent years – were real, falsified, or simply mistaken. But there is no question that the state claimed, and Stalin appears to have believed, that 1930 was a high point. The official statistics decreed that 83.5 million tonnes of grain had been collected in 1930, a notable rise over 1929 – a year of famine and bad weather – when the comparable figure was 71.7 million tonnes.9 Convinced that collectivization was now on the path to success, the Kremlin made what would turn out to be a disastrous and callous decision: to increase the export of grain, as well as of other food products, out of the Soviet Union in exchange for hard currency.

  Grain export was of course not new. As we have seen, in 1920 the Bolsheviks had reckoned grain to be one of the safest goods to sell to the West, since doing so required no interaction with ‘capitalists’.10 Nor was it the only source of hard currency. Funds also came in from the sale of art, furniture, jewellery, icons and other objects confiscated from ‘the bourgeoisie’ and the Church. In July 1930 the state also opened the ‘Torgsin’ chain of hard currency shops (from torgovlia s inostrantsami or ‘trade with foreigners’), originally created to attract foreign visitors forbidden to spend foreign money elsewhere but later accessible to Soviet citizens. Goods in them were available to those who had tsarist-era gold coins; during the famine they would become a means of survival for peasants who had saved gold objects or even had foreign currency transferred to them from relatives abroad.11

  But grain was still the most lucrative export, especially since the timber trade had run into trouble; reports (which were accurate) that convict labour produced Soviet timber had led to calls for boycotts in a number of Western countries. The level of grain exports duly rose throughout the 1920s. Britain bought 26,799 tonnes of wheat from the USSR in 1924; by 1926–7 that had risen to 138,486 tonnes. Exports to Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands grew as well. Between 1929 and 1931, Soviet grain exports to Germany tripled.12

  As exports rose, the Soviet leadership perceived that they brought more than just hard currency. Foreshadowing the future Soviet (and Russian) use of gas as a weapon of influence, the Bolsheviks also began asking for political favours in response to large shipments of relatively low-priced grain. In 1920 they demanded that, in exchange for grain, the Latvians recognize the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. In 1922 the Soviet government told the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that unless Britain signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, it would cut off the supply of grain to British markets. Some speculate that in the late 1920s the Soviet Union began dumping grain at low prices for geopolitical reasons: Stalin hoped to damage Western capitalism. By 1930 one German newspaper was arguing for trade barriers to stop the flood of ‘cheap Russian produce’. At a League of Nations gathering in 1931 the Soviet Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, smugly boasted that ‘I am enjoying a special status here thanks to the fact that the country I represent not only does not suffer from economic crisis, but is on the contrary living through an unprecedented moment in its economic life.’13

  The desire to maintain this ‘special status’ was intense, but domestic pressure for more imports was enormous as well. In the cities and on new building sites, Stalin’s drive for industrialization was intensifying. To meet the extraordinarily ambitious targets of the first Five Year Plan, Soviet factories urgently required machines, parts, tools and other things available only for hard currency. In a letter to Molotov in July 1930, Stalin was already writing of the need to ‘force the export of grain … this is the key’. In August, fearing that American grain would soon flood the market, he again urged speed: ‘if we don’t export 130–150 million poods [2.1–2.4 million tonnes] our currency situation may become desperate. Once again: we must force the export of grain with all of our strength.’14

  Elsewhere Stalin spoke of the risk that a lack of hard currency posed to the metallurgical and machine-building industries, and of the need to obtain a foothold in the international market. He also railed against the ‘know-it-alls’ in the export department who advised waiting for prices to rise, and who should be thrown out by the scruff of their necks: ‘to wait, we would need currency reserves. And we haven’t got any.’15 In September 1930, Anastas Mikoyan – now Commissar for Internal and External Trade – wrote a note to the head of the grain export enterprise, urging him to conclude longer-term export agreements with European companies, although this would me
an ‘holding back some reserves for them’.16 A few weeks later the Politburo discussed increasing food exports to fascist Italy, and even taking credit from Italian banks to finance them.17

  The result of this urgent policy directive would be a far higher rate of grain export in 1930 – 4.8 million tonnes, up from 170,000 tonnes in 1929 – and an even higher rate in 1931, 5.2 million tonnes.18 These numbers were a relatively small fraction of the more than 83 million tonnes, with higher totals in future, that Stalin believed should be harvested. But when less than that came in, they represented food that would not be available to Soviet citizens – and certainly not to the peasants who produced it.

  The optimism that followed the 1930 summer harvest did not last. The autumn sowing season was delayed by the general confusion – peasants were still joining, leaving and rejoining the collective farms – and by uncertainty over who controlled which pieces of land. The spring sowing of 1931 was hampered by shortages of horses, tractors and seeds. Worse, the spring was cool, and there was less rain than in some other years, especially in the east. The Volga region, Siberia and Kazakhstan all suffered from bouts of drought, as did central Ukraine. By itself the weather might not have created a crisis. But, as in 1921, poor conditions combined with the chaos of Soviet policy meant that farmers could not produce what the state demanded from them. Some were already finding it difficult to produce enough even to feed themselves.19

  By the summer of 1931 bureaucrats and activists at all levels were once again warning of trouble to come. The OGPU in Ukraine predicted the loss of a ‘significant part of the harvest’. Aside from the weather problems, their report described unprepared storage containers, as well as tractors and other machinery in poor condition: ‘In not a single region have district plans been brought to individual villages and collective farms … No mass-educational work or organizational preparation for the harvest has been conducted at the local level.’20 Multiple reports – some sent directly to Stalin – described the poor working practices of the collective farms and their inefficient methods.21

  Throughout the summer and autumn a flurry of letters and directives circulated in Moscow and Kharkiv, all expressing the fear that grain collection would go badly, especially in Ukraine – or even that Ukrainian peasants would not sow at all. On 17 June, Stalin and Molotov sent out an order, jointly signed, demanding that the Ukrainian leadership ensure that ‘unsown fields be sown’, and bluntly calling on the Ukrainian Communist Party to mobilize all existing resources: ‘Please inform us of the results by June 25th.’22

  But the situation was not better by that date, or even by the autumn. By September it was already clear that the 1931 harvest would be smaller than that of the previous year, not larger as expected.23 The Soviet leadership was particularly concerned that the country would not meet its export quotas. In the middle of the month Molotov sent a secret telegram to the Communist Party leaders in the North Caucasus, declaring that grain collection for purposes of export was proceeding ‘disgustingly slowly’.24 By late autumn it was clear that grain collection all across the USSR would fall short of the targets; the official harvest total for 1931–2 would eventually come to 69.5 million tonnes, instead of the 83 million-plus expected.25

  Soviet exports would be hit if the numbers didn’t rise. Worse, people in the cities would once again have no bread. The leader of Kyiv province had already written a begging letter to Mikoyan, who was at the time the People’s Commissar of Trade: ‘For two weeks we haven’t distributed any rationed meat, no one brings us any fish, potatoes only sometimes.’ As a result, ‘the mood of the workers is agitated; the rural poor have no bread. Industrial productivity is on the edge of a serious crisis.’ Please, he asked, could someone ‘supply Kyiv quickly with bread according to the established norms’.26 In Moscow no meat was available at all.27

  Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages. Stalin himself had received reports explaining exactly what was wrong with the collective farms, describing their inefficiency in great detail. One official from the Central Black Earth province even wrote him a daring defence of private property: ‘How to explain this enormous drop in collective farm production? It’s impossible to explain it, except to say that the material interest in and responsibility for the losses, and for the low quality of work, don’t affect each individual collective farmer directly …’28

  The missing feeling of ‘responsibility’, destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed. But although this was already clear as early as 1931, it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself. He had staked his leadership of the party on collectivization and he had defeated his rivals in the course of fighting for it. He could not be wrong. A large chunk of the Central Committee plenum in October was therefore devoted to a search for alternative scapegoats. Since Stalin could not be responsible, and since senior party officials did not want to be, responsibility for the looming disaster was again sought further down the hierarchy.

  Echoing the ‘Dizzy with Success’ accusations, Stanislav Kosior – since 1928 the General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, as well as a member of the Soviet Politburo – blamed the lower levels of the party hierarchy for the harvest failures. Ukrainian officials, he explained, had gone into the rural districts. They had personally talked to the directors of the machine tractor stations. They had directly accused them of failing to put their energy into collecting grain. But even so, many had ‘fallen captive’ to the idea that the state’s demands for grain were too high. For they had returned to Kharkiv and Moscow from their sojourns into the countryside with the wrong message for the leadership: the peasants were very hungry and needed more food.

  As a good Bolshevik, Kosior could only see this demand in conspiratorial terms. ‘Even our communists and often our twenty-five thousanders had come to believe the fiction about hungry peasants,’ he declared. Worse, ‘among the twenty-five thousanders there has appeared a whole array of alien elements’. The result: ‘Not only did they not fight, not only did they fail to organize the collective farm masses in the struggle for bread against the class enemy, they often followed along with this peasant mood, sometimes out of gullibility, and sometimes consciously.’ Suspect party members had already been expelled from the Ukrainian Communist Party: ‘In the countryside we need genuine Bolsheviks, who will fight for the construction of socialism, for the collective farm, for the interests of our Soviet state, and not for kulak nonsense.’29

  As they so often did when their policies failed, the authorities also blamed ‘sabotage’. During the Shakhty trial in 1928 they had focused on mining engineers in order to explain production failures in heavy industry. Now they sought agricultural specialists to blame. In the spring of 1931 secret police operatives in the western Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia disclosed and eliminated a ‘saboteur counter-revolutionary organization’, the ‘Peasants’ Labour Party of Podolia’. Most of the sixteen people arrested for ‘organized acts of sabotage in all sectors of agriculture: planning, land administration, crediting, machine supplies etc’ were agronomists. Most had been members of the Podolian branch of the All-Ukrainian Agricultural Society, an institution set up in the more optimistic year of 1923. Now they stood accused of seeking the ‘overthrow of Soviet rule and the establishment of a bourgeois democratic republic’.

  Although none of their biographies appeared obviously counter-revolutionary, they were educated people who had connections in both town and country – precisely the category of suspect that interested the OGPU most. Stepan Cherniavsky was an agronomist who had been working for the Ukrainian government since the days of Petliura, and had been chairman of the Podolia Land Office. Iukhym Pidkui-Mukha had been secretary of the same organization. Ivan Oliinyk had been a professor at the Agricultural Institute in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Others worked on agricultural credit issues or as expert
s in various fields of agriculture and husbandry. Not only could this educated, accomplished group be blamed for the multiple agricultural failures, its members could also be plausibly accused of spreading counter-revolutionary ideas among the rural peasants in the countryside. The trial was heavily covered by the Soviet press; most of the accused would spend between three and ten years in the Gulag.30

  This search for scapegoats was effective, but only in a narrow sense: the arrest of the ‘enemy’ agronomists and the expulsion of some party members helped explain Ukraine’s failure to meet its quotas, at least to the rest of the party, but it did not produce more grain. Angry telegrams from Moscow did not produce more grain.31 Nor did Mikoyan’s declaration, in October 1931, that the year’s plan still had to be fulfilled, whatever the weather, so any regions unaffected by drought should contribute more. This was perhaps unfair, as even he conceded – ‘people are working hard … and now we demand more’ – but it hardly mattered, since this order could not make more bread appear on the shelves either.32

  Both threats and persuasion were failing. That left coercion – and in December 1931, Stalin and Molotov made coercion the policy: collective farms that had not met their grain quotas would have to repay any outstanding loans, and return any tractors or other equipment that had been leased to them from the machine tractor stations. Their spare cash – including that intended to buy seeds – would be confiscated. Molotov, dispatched to Kharkiv to explain the new rules, showed little mercy. He pushed aside any complaints about bad weather and a poor harvest. The problem was not lack of grain, he told the Ukrainian party leaders: the problem was that they were incompetent. They were badly organized, they had failed to mobilize, and they had not managed to collect as much grain as they should have done. In the districts he harangued collective farm leaders, calling them ‘agents of the kulaks’. He repeated Stalin’s threat to take away their tractors while at the same time dangling the promise of more manufactured goods for farms that met the state targets. Upon returning to Moscow, Molotov and Stalin sent another missive to Kosior, who was on vacation in Sochi. They ordered him back to Ukraine and demanded that he force the republic to meet the grain requirements as planned.33