Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Another memoirist remembered the peasants in the marketplaces:

  The mothers with babies in their arms made the strongest impression. They seldom mingled with the others. I remember seeing one such mother who looked more like a shadow than a human being. She was standing by the side of the road, and her little skeleton of a child, instead of suckling her mother’s empty breast, sucked its own small knuckles thinly covered with translucent skin. I have no idea how many of the unfortunates I saw managed to survive. Every morning on my way to work I saw bodies on the pavements, in ditches, under a bush or a tree, which were later carried away.63

  As a result of the influx, municipal authorities found themselves simultaneously trying to cope with several different kinds of crisis. Orphans began to crowd into city orphanages, as many parents left their children behind in the hope that they would survive. Dead bodies caused a sanitary crisis. In January 1933 the city of Kyiv had to remove 400 corpses from the streets. In February the number rose to 518, and in just the first eight days of March there were 248.64 These were only the official numbers. Multiple witnesses in Kyiv and Kharkiv recall the trucks cruising the city at that time, the men pulling the dead off the streets and loading them onto their vehicles in a manner which suggested that no one would give much thought to counting them.

  The beggars from the countryside added to the pressure on city residents who were also running short of food. Tempers inside Kharkiv rose particularly quickly. That spring the Italian consul reported that several thousand people had attacked the militiamen assigned to distribute bread in one suburb of the city. In another part of town an enraged mob attacked two bakeries, stole the flour and wrecked the buildings. Police began to use special, preventative measures in response. At about 4 a.m. one morning, the consul reported, Kharkiv police blocked the side streets around a bakery where hundreds of people had been waiting all night for the doors to open. They beat the crowd back and forced the people towards the train station. They then pushed them onto trains and drove them out of the city.

  The influx was further demoralizing the countryside, because the vast migration made life more difficult for those who remained. In desperation, one Communist Party member from Vinnytsia wrote a letter to Stalin in the autumn of 1932 begging for help:

  All the peasants are moving and leaving the villages, to save themselves from starvation. In the villages, ten to twenty families die from hunger every day, the children run away to wherever they can, all of the train stations are full of peasants trying to get out. In the countryside neither horses nor cows remain. Starving peasant-collective farm workers leave everything and disappear … it is impossible to speak of fulfilling the sowing campaign, because the small percentage of peasants who remain are wasting away from hunger.65

  What really concerned the Soviet authorities was the political significance of this mass movement of people. All across the Soviet Union, in the far north and far east, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of Poland and in Ukraine itself, itinerant Ukrainians were not only spreading news of the famine, they were bringing their allegedly counter-revolutionary attitudes along with them. As their numbers increased dramatically, the Soviet government finally declared there could no longer be any doubt: ‘the flight of villagers and the exodus from Ukraine last year and this year is [being] organized by the enemies of the Soviet government … and agents of Poland with the goal of spreading propaganda among the peasants’.

  A solution was found. In January 1933, Stalin and Molotov simply closed the borders of Ukraine. Any Ukrainian peasant found outside the republic was returned to his or her place of origin. Train tickets were no longer sold to Ukrainian villagers. Only those who had permission could leave home – and permission was, of course, denied.66 The borders of the heavily Ukrainian North Caucasus district were also closed, and in February the Lower Volga district was also blocked.67 The border closures remained in place throughout the famine.

  Separately, work continued on an internal passport system, which was finally set up in December 1932. In practice, this meant that anyone who resided in the city needed a special passport, a residence document – and peasants were explicitly prevented from obtaining them. In conjunction with this new law, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odessa were all to be cleared of ‘excess elements’ from the countryside.68 City-dwellers were reassured: the new measures would facilitate ‘the unburdening of the cities and the purging of kulak criminal elements’.69

  These restrictions were implemented with unprecedented speed. Within days the OGPU had sent reinforcements from Moscow. Cordons appeared on the roads leading out of Ukraine and along major highways entering the cities. Between 22 and 30 January 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU’s boss, told Stalin and Molotov that his men had caught 24,961 people trying to cross the borders, of whom two-thirds came from Ukraine and almost all the rest from the North Caucasus. The majority were sent back home, though nearly eight thousand were being detained under police investigation and more than a thousand had already been arrested.70

  By their own account, Yagoda’s Ukrainian colleagues were even busier. In February they reported that they had established an ‘unconditional ban on issuing any travel document’, so that no peasant could legally leave his or her village. In addition, they had created ‘mobile patrols’ that had detained more than 3,800 people found on the roads and over 16,000 people on the railways. They had mobilized ‘secret agents’ and ‘village activists’ to uncover ‘exodus organizers’ and help arrest them.71

  The effect was stark, as if Ukraine and Russia now had a visible border. A Polish diplomat who travelled by car from Kharkiv to Moscow in May 1933 was struck by it:

  What intrigued me most during the whole journey was the difference between what villages looked like in Ukraine and the neighboring [Russian] Black Earth province … Ukrainian villages are in decay, they are empty, deserted and miserable, cottages half-demolished, with roofs blown down; no new houses in sight, children and old people are more like skeletons, no sight of livestock … When I found myself in [Russia] afterwards I had the impression of crossing the border from the state of the Soviets to Western Europe.72

  To preserve a semblance of order, policemen also began to remove any peasants who had made it into the cities. Vasily Grossman – the Soviet writer who grew up in Ukraine, worked in Donbas, and knew of the famine as it was happening – remembered that ‘blocks were put on the roads to prevent peasants from getting into Kyiv. But they used bypasses, forests, swamps to get there.’73 Those who made it did so by ‘cutting through’ the cordons, and hacking through the underbrush.74 But even those who found their way into the queues for bread did not necessarily last long, as another Kyiv resident remembered: ‘The police would take villagers from these lines, load them on trucks and take them out of the city.’75

  Halyna Kyrychenko saw police remove people from bread queues in Kharkiv too. They were put onto trucks, she remembered, and driven so far out of town that they could not return: ‘being exhausted, they died somewhere on the road’. Police also seized people on the streets who seemed to be trying to buy or barter for bread, since to do so was suspicious: city-dwellers had access to ration cards and workers with the proper registration ate their meals in canteens. Kyrychenko herself, then aged thirteen, several times escaped from police.76

  Urban Ukrainians saw what was happening, and spread rumours about it. Mariia Umanska’s father told her that he had helped pick up peasants and their children off the streets of Kharkiv. The authorities had promised him that they would be fed and taken home, but he had heard a different story: at night, the living and the dead would be loaded onto trucks, driven to a ravine outside of town and thrown into it: ‘They said that the ground stirred.’77 Olena Kobylko heard the same story: peasants found on the streets of Kharkiv were supposedly ‘carried out in a freight train behind the city to a field so that they die there unseen by anybody’, and then, alive or dead, were thrown into pits.78

  These stories surely filtered back
to the villages, as they were intended to do. Peasants knew that if they left home without the permission of the local authorities, they could be returned by force. Lev Kopelev’s conclusion was stark: ‘The passport system laid an administrative and judicial cornerstone for the new serfdom [and] tied down the peasantry as it had been before the emancipation of 1861.’79

  9

  Famine Decisions, 1932: The End of Ukrainization

  They placed their talents at the service of the kulaks and Ukrainian counter-revolutionary nationalists and have not even now shown such symptoms of artistic change as would prove that they are ready to serve fully with their art the interests of the Party, the Soviet government and the workers of the great socialist fatherland – the USSR.

  Ivan Mykytenko, explaining why some Ukrainian writers had been turned down for membership of the Writers’ Union, 1934.1

  To anyone who knew the Ukrainian countryside it would have been clear, in the autumn of 1932, that widespread famine was coming, and that many people would die. Such an extraordinary catastrophe required an extraordinary justification. In December that is exactly what the Politburo provided. Just as it was publicly publishing the new decrees on food requisition and blacklists, the Politburo also issued, on 14 and 15 December respectively, two secret decrees that explicitly blamed Ukrainization for the requisitions failure.

  In the context of the broader, 1932–3 Soviet famine, these two decrees are unique, as are the events that followed them. There were, it is true, other regions that received special treatment. Suspicion of their loyalty probably contributed to higher death rates among peasants in the Volga provinces, where some of the policies used in Ukraine, including mass arrests of communist leaders, were also deployed, though not at the same level as in Ukraine.2 In Kazakhstan the regime blocked traditional nomadic routes and requisitioned livestock to feed the Russian cities, creating terrible suffering among the ethnic Kazakh nomads. More than a third of the entire population, 1.5 million people, perished during a famine that barely touched the Slavic population of Kazakhstan. This assault on the nomads, sometimes called ‘sedentarization’, was another form of Sovietization and a clear attack on a recalcitrant ethnic group.3 But nowhere else were agricultural failures linked so explicitly to questions of national language or culture as they were in both Ukraine and in the North Caucasus, with its large Ukrainian-speaking population.

  The first decree blamed the failure to procure grain in both Ukraine and the North Caucasus on the ‘poor efforts and absence of revolutionary vigilance’ in local and regional Communist Parties. Although pretending to be loyal to the USSR, these lower-level party committees had allegedly been ‘infiltrated by counter-revolutionary elements – kulaks, former officers, Petliurites, supporters of the Kuban Rada, etc.’. They were secret traitors, and they had ensconced themselves in the very heart of the party and state bureaucracy:

  They have managed to find their way into collective farms as directors and other influential members of administration, accountants, storekeepers, foremen at threshing floors etc. They have succeeded in infiltrating village soviets, land management bodies, cooperative societies, and are now trying to direct the work of these organizations contrary to the interests of the proletarian state and the party policy, as well as to organize a counter-revolutionary movement and the sabotage of the harvest and sowing campaigns …

  The worst enemies of the party, working class and the collective farm peasantry are saboteurs of grain procurement who have party membership cards in their pockets. To please kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements, they organize state fraud, double-dealing, and the failure of the tasks set by the party and government.4

  The policy of Ukrainization was at fault: it had been carried out ‘mechanically’, the decree explained, without taking proper notice of the purposes it served. Instead of furthering the interests of the USSR, Ukrainization had allowed ‘bourgeois-nationalist elements, Petliurites and others’ to create secret counter-revolutionary cells within the state apparatus. Nor was this merely a problem for Ukraine. The decree also inveighed against the ‘irresponsible non-Bolshevik “Ukrainization” in the North Caucasus’, which provided ‘the enemies of Soviet power’ with a legitimate cover.5

  Kulaks, former White officers, Cossacks and members of the Kuban Rada – those who had fought, during the civil war, for an independent Cossack state in Kuban – were all blamed. They were named and linked together as ‘Ukrainians’, or at least as the beneficiaries of Ukrainization.

  The second decree echoed the first but extended the ban on Ukrainization further, to the Far East, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Central Black Earth province and ‘other areas of the USSR’ that might have been infected with Ukrainian nationalism. The Soviet government issued this supplement in order to ‘condemn the suggestions made by individual Ukrainian comrades about the mandatory Ukrainization of entire areas of the USSR’ and to authorize an immediate halt to any Ukrainization anywhere. The regions named were ordered to stop printing Ukrainian newspapers and books immediately, and to impose Russian as the main language of school instruction.6

  The two decrees provided an explanation for the grain crisis and named scapegoats. They also set off an immediate mass purge of Ukrainian Communist Party officials, as well as verbal and then physical attacks on university professors, schoolteachers, academics and intellectuals – anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian national idea. During the following year all of the institutions connected to Ukrainian culture were purged, shut down, or transformed: universities, academies, galleries, clubs.

  The decrees established a direct link between the assault on Ukrainian national identity and the famine. The same secret police organization carried them out. The same officials oversaw the propaganda that described them. From the point of view of the state, they were part of the same project.

  PURGING THE UKRAINIAN PARTY

  The OGPU often devised fantastical conspiracy theories about its enemies. But the opposition to the grain requisition policies in the lower-level leadership of the Ukrainian Communist Party was real. In November 1932 the reports on party dissatisfaction that had prompted Stalin to declare that ‘things in Ukraine are terrible’ were updated and recirculated. Hundreds of Ukrainian party members regularly and repeatedly opposed the grain requisitions and the blacklists, both verbally and in practice.

  At times, their pleas were emotional. One party member in the town of Svatove declared his views openly in a long letter to his local party committee. ‘I remember how from my first day in the Komsomol, in 1921, I yearned and went to work with a feeling that the party line is right and I am right,’ he wrote. But in 1929 he had begun to have doubts. And when people began to starve, he felt he had to protest: ‘The general party line is wrong and its implementation led to poverty in the countryside, to forced proletarianization in agriculture, which is confirmed by our train stations and the appearance in the cities of entire masses of homeless orphans.’7 Others clearly perceived the new requisitions as an attack on the republic itself. ‘They could make mistakes in 10 or 20 districts’, one local party secretary was heard to say, ‘but to make mistakes in all districts of Ukraine – this means that something is wrong.’8

  Such expressions of doubt unsettled the Soviet leadership. For if communists no longer supported the official policy, then who would carry it out? Nobody took this problem more seriously than Stalin himself. After consulting with Balytsky, whom he met twice in November 1932, Stalin sent out a letter addressed to all party leaders, national, regional and local, all across the country, declaring war on the traitors inside the party. ‘An enemy with a party card in his pocket should be punished more harshly than an enemy without a party card,’ he proclaimed:

  The organizers of sabotage are in the majority of instances ‘communists’, that is people who have a party card in their pocket but have long ago remade themselves and broken with the party. These are the same swindlers and crooks who conduct kulak policy under the false flag of th
eir ‘agreement’ with the general line of the party.9

  By that time, high-level change had already begun. Stalin had sent Balytsky back to run the secret police in Ukraine, ending his brief sojourn at headquarters in Moscow. He had also sent Pavlo Postyshev, a former Kharkiv party boss, back to Ukraine after a stint running the propaganda office at the Central Committee in Moscow. In subsequent months Postyshev functioned as Stalin’s direct emissary, a kind of governor-general of Ukraine. Stalin also removed Vlas Chubar from the Ukrainian leadership, though he allowed Stanislav Kosior and Hryhorii Petrovskyi to stay (the former was arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939; the latter managed to survive until the 1950s).10 In the winter of 1932–3 he launched a new wave of investigations, prosecutions and arrests of the low-level Ukrainian Communist Party members who had dared to protest. The result of this purge, which took place at the same time as the famine, was to make the Ukrainian Communist Party a tool of Moscow, with no autonomy or any ability to take decisions on its own.11

  Local leaders paid a high price for honesty. In the village of Orikhiv, for example, the local communists had tried to tell the truth. ‘We are party members and should be candid,’ they told colleagues in Kharkiv: ‘the plan is unrealistic and we won’t fulfil it. We’ll get to 45–50 per cent.’12 Years later, when the Orikhiv case was re-examined – in 1964, during the brief period known as ‘the Khrushchev thaw’ – witness after witness declared that the Orikhiv communists did not fulfil the plan because it was an impossible task: their fields simply did not produce that much grain. One of them, Mykhailo Nesterenko, a former collective farm boss, remembered how much pressure there had been in those years ‘The fact of the matter is that the word “sabotage” in those years was a meaningless word. For the tiniest defect, they called us bosses saboteurs, and threatened us with repression.’13