Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Fear was reinforced by memories of past violence. Almost everyone in Ukraine had been brutalized by successive waves of political change. Except for the very youngest, all of them remembered the pogroms and mass murders during the civil war just thirteen years earlier. Everyone recalled the more recent cruelty of de-kulakization as well.80 Many had already exercised power over their neighbours, and they knew what was to be gained from it. The leader of Kopelev’s brigade, Bubyr, was the consumptive son of a landless peasant who had been ‘orphaned early’. Bubyr had participated in punishment squads during the revolution, worked for the Komsomol since 1921, taken part in collectivization and de-kulakization, and clearly enjoyed the power he had to threaten his neighbours. Matvii Havryliuk, a member of the ‘poor peasants’ committee’ in the village of Toporyshche, had been part of a brigade in 1921, ‘collecting bread from kulaks’, as he later told a court, and working to ‘organize poor peasant masses’. He had taken an active role in de-kulakization, was an agitator for collectivization, and an enthusiastic participant in the house searches that led to the famine. He knew well the people he was starving to death but he felt no empathy for them: ‘I had nothing in common with the kulaks, and the proof can be found in the fact that they have always been against me.’81

  As the peasants began to starve in the winter and spring of 1933, hunger became the most important motivator of all. In a devastated world, where food was scarce and possessions were few, desperate people confiscated their neighbours’ food in order to eat it. Often it was hard to distinguish the behaviour of the brigades from that of criminal gangs. ‘They robbed everyone and lived well,’ remembered Maryna Korobska from Dnipropetrovsk province: ‘They wore what they had stolen from people, and ate our food.’82

  Even those who didn’t openly steal hoped to gain some advantage. As noted, informers had an expectation of reward. In some districts, activists received a percentage of what they collected outright. The 2 December law on blacklists contained an order to ‘issue a directive on bonuses to activists who find hidden grain’.83 A decision from the Dnipropetrovsk provincial council in February 1933 recommended that brigade members be given ‘10–15 per cent’ of what they collected outright, and other provinces issued similar instructions.84 Everyone knew that working with the party might bring with it access to food or to ration cards, or to other people who had them. Kateryna Iaroshenko, also from Dnipropetrovsk province, survived the famine because her father was a party leader who had access to a special Communist Party shop providing grain and sugar.85 The highest party officials also had ration cards, which enabled them to make purchases that were impossible for others. Privileges were also extended to their children, as those less fortunate remembered: ‘There was a special school for the children of the bosses. There was a canteen inside … breathtaking smells spread from that kitchen, I wept because of them, with such tears!’86

  Others believed that they would receive food, but were deceived, as one Poltava man remembered: ‘Of those who went with rods and searched for food, half died of hunger. They were promised they would get food if they searched for food. They received nothing!’87 Another survivor remembered that brigade members who stole food and kept it in their homes were horrified when they too were searched. Activists from one village would be sent to search the homes in another village, and would not necessarily spare their fellow collaborators.88 Some of the perpetrators were even met with violence from the neighbours they had robbed. In the space of just three weeks in December 1932, nine local officials were murdered in Kyiv province alone; there were eight other murder attempts, and eleven cases of arson, when peasants had tried to burn down the homes of brigade members.89 Even children carried out small acts of revenge. The son of an activist in Novopokrovka, Dnipropetrovsk province, hid his loaves of white bread from the other children at his school, but to no avail. He was beaten up by his classmates anyway.90

  As winter turned to spring, and the lack of food took its toll, the vast majority of peasants ceased to fight back. Even those who had rebelled in 1930 stayed silent. The reason for this was physical, not psychological. A starving person is simply too weak to fight back. Hunger overwhelms even the urge to object.

  Whether they were locals or outsiders, all those who carried out orders to confiscate food did so with a sense of impunity. They may have felt some personal sense of guilt in the years that followed, or they may have been aware of the anger and despair of the peasants whom they left to starve. But they were also certain that their actions were sanctioned at the very highest levels. Over and over again they had been told that their starving neighbours were kulak agents, dangerous enemy elements. In November 1932 the Ukrainian Communist Party instructed its members to repeat this language again. ‘Simultaneously’, while they were using legal and physical repression, the party and its collection brigades must act: ‘Against thieves, ruffians and bread thieves, against those who deceive the proletarian state and the collective farmers … we must raise the hatred of the collective farm masses, we must ensure that the entire mass of collective farmers denigrate these people as kulak agents and class enemies.’91 With those instructions ringing in their ears, grain collectors not only did not fear punishment for their behaviour, they expected rewards.

  The curious story of Andrii Richytskyi illustrates the problem very well, for he is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. Richytskyi, by the time he became a district plenipotentiary, had already been a participant in many of the intellectual and political movements of his time. As a young man he had been part of the 1919 peasant uprising, operating with one of the partisan groups, at least according to his police record. Later he was a Socialist Revolutionary, before seeing the light and becoming an ardent communist, though as a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, one of the ‘national communist’ parties that initially opposed the Bolsheviks. Later still he was a biographer of the poet Taras Shevchenko and the first translator of Karl Marx into Ukrainian. In 1931, Richytskyi had participated in the orchestrated attacks on Mykhailo Hrushevsky, ‘unmasking’ the famous historian as a bourgeois enemy of socialism.92 Despite these efforts to ingratiate himself with the regime, Richytskyi’s complicated history of political engagement made him a suspicious figure in the Ukraine of the early 1930s, and in November 1933 he was arrested as part of the case against the fictitious ‘Ukrainian Military Organization’.93

  Richytskyi’s trial in March 1934 focused on his short career as a grain collector and the leader of an activist brigade in Arbuzynka, Mykolaiv province, from December 1932 until the end of February 1933. The investigation into his activities during those three months was thorough, running into hundreds of pages and more than forty witnesses. The court accused Richytskyi and other local leaders, most notably Ivan Kobzar, secretary of the district party committee, of counter-revolution, distorting the party line, and deliberately using excessive violence in order to create ‘disaffection’.

  In fact, the documentation shows that Richytskyi, Kobzar and the other local leaders behaved no differently from thousands of other communist officials in Ukraine in that same era. Richytskyi had been sent to Arbuzynka precisely because he already had a successful track record as a grain collector in Vinnytsia province. Even before that, in 1930, he had served as a grain collector in Ukraine’s Moldovan autonomous republic – one of the places that used brutal methods very early – and received a medal for his efforts. Upon arrival in his new workplace, he immediately began to form a brigade that would force the peasants of Arbuzynka to meet their targets as well.

  His intentions became clear on his very first night, as one farmer testified. Richytskyi gathered the village leaders together in a room, closed the door, and ‘started shouting that all the collective farmers are Petliurites and we should beat them until the grain is gathered’. When some objected, he shouted again: ‘Do you know who is speaking to you? A member of the government, a member of the Central Committee, a candidate member of the Politburo.’ He then called for t
he creation of a brigade, which would act differently from all others before it: ‘every house, after this brigade enters it, should require capital refurbishment. It should have no oven and no roof.’

  Several local secret police informers and officers joined the brigade. So did two well-known criminals, as was common practice; again, the police selected such people for their known ruthlessness. One of them was Spyrydon Velychko, who had been expelled from one of the local collective farms for theft in September 1932. Velychko was allowed to join the brigade because he was willing to inform on his fellow collective farmers and reveal where they had hidden their grain. He understood that this was a quid pro quo, and in his case it worked: ‘He wasn’t forgotten during the famine’, according to the testimony. In other words, he did not starve.

  In the weeks following Richytskyi’s arrival, the new Arbuzynka brigade added some twists to the traditional methods of collecting grain. They detained recalcitrant peasants in a cellar, sometimes for two or three days, with little or no food. They beat them regularly, until they revealed the location of their grain. They subjected others to a form of public shaming: stripped of their clothes, peasants were placed in barrels and driven from village to village as ‘examples’ for others not to follow. If neither of those methods worked, then Richytskyi’s team resorted to even more spectacular punishments. After confiscating peasants’ property – underwear, frying pans, shoes – they simply destroyed their houses altogether.

  They used other kinds of violence and torture as well. One local man described how Richytskyi’s methods worked in one case: ‘After I discovered four hiding places for grain at one farmer’s place, I brought the man to the village council. Richytskyi beat him up, shouting “Do you know, for hiding bread you will be shot?” The man shouted back: “I don’t care, we will die anyway.” On another occasion several brigade members poured kerosene onto a cat, set it alight and threw it into the cellar where men, women and children were being held. Sexual coercion was also used as a weapon: one brigade member told several women that in exchange for sex with him, they would not have to give up their grain.

  The accusations of abuse appear to have been designed to blame the violence, retrospectively, on rogue elements, to minimize the party’s role in these crimes. But Richytskyi had a strong defence: he had followed clear orders – and had been consistently rewarded for doing so. In his testimony he explained that when he came to Arbuzynka he discovered that the decrees of autumn 1932 had not actually been applied. The local communists had not begun to confiscate all the peasants’ food or make them pay ‘taxes’ if their grain quotas fell short. They had not evicted anyone from their homes. These were precisely the methods that Richytskyi had used successfully in Vinnytsia, with the approval of higher authorities, and upon arrival in Arbuzynka he had resolved to repeat them.

  Richytskyi also declared that Kaganovich himself had reinforced his faith in these methods. On 24 December 1932, Richytskyi and Kobzar, the local party leader, attended the meeting with Kaganovich in the village of Voznesensk. The two men clearly heard this senior Soviet figure tell the assembled party officials that they were not tough enough. They even heard the order, quoted previously, that their task was to put villages into such a panic ‘that the peasants themselves give away their hiding places’.94 At that meeting – which ended at 4 a.m. – they signed an agreement to collect 12,000 tonnes of grain by 1 February 1933. Richytskyi testified that he had been inspired by this speech. It persuaded him that the village should drop its old ‘ineffective’ grain procurement methods and adopt harsher techniques.

  Nor was Kaganovich the only high-level party figure to drive home this point. In the second half of January a Ukrainian Politburo leader, Volodymyr Zatonskyi, had visited Arbuzynka and was more than satisfied with the brutal work of the brigade. Zatonskyi specifically approved of their ‘concentrated strikes’ on peasants, along with fines, evictions and arrests. These were necessary to ‘scare others’. Richytskyi openly admitted that he had been inspired by this language to destroy peasant houses: ‘I reckoned that for a greater effect, the houses that were about to be confiscated should be ruined. So that people would see this with their own eyes.’

  Richytskyi’s trial was a curious one, not least because he made his points forcefully, sometimes over the objections of a prosecutor who tried to dismiss his arguments. It is not clear who ordered the investigation, or why it was allowed to happen; generally speaking, it was very rare for perpetrators of the famine to face any kind of retribution at all.95 No doubt it happened for reasons related to Richytskyi’s patchwork career, which drew the attention of OGPU officers looking for secret nationalists and closet counter-revolutionaries. He was sentenced to death in 1934.

  Richytskyi’s testimony nevertheless removes any doubt about the prevailing moral atmosphere at the time. Far from being an outlier or a criminal, he felt himself to be very much in the mainstream. He and the other brigade members had good reason to believe that the party leadership, at the very highest levels, sanctioned extreme cruelty and supported the removal of food and possessions from the peasantry. There was no misunderstanding at all.

  11

  Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933

  How could we resist when we had no strength to go outside?

  Mariia Dziuba, Poltava province, 19331

  Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.

  Ilya Ehrenburg, 19342

  The starvation of a human body, once it begins, always follows the same course. In the first phase, the body consumes its stores of glucose. Feelings of extreme hunger set in, along with constant thoughts of food. In the second phase, which can last for several weeks, the body begins to consume its own fats, and the organism weakens drastically. In the third phase, the body devours its own proteins, cannibalizing tissues and muscles. Eventually, the skin becomes thin, the eyes become distended, the legs and belly swollen as extreme imbalances lead the body to retain water. Small amounts of effort lead to exhaustion. Along the way, different kinds of diseases can hasten death: scurvy, kwashiorkor, marasmus, pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, and a wide range of infections and skin diseases caused, directly or indirectly, by lack of food.

  The rural Ukrainians deprived of food in the autumn and winter of 1932 began to experience all these stages of hunger in the spring of 1933 – if they had not already done so earlier. Years later some of those who survived sought to describe these terrible months, in written accounts and thousands of interviews. For others who managed to live through this period, the experience was so awful that they were later unable to recall anything about it all. One survivor, a child of eleven at the time, could remember things that caused sadness or disappointment before the famine, even trivial things such as a lost earring. But she had no emotional memory of the famine itself, no horror and no sorrow: ‘Probably, my feelings were atrophied by hunger.’ She and others have wondered whether famine wasn’t somehow deadening, an experience that suppressed emotions and even memory later in life. To some it seemed as if the famine had ‘mutilated the immature souls of children’.3

  Some searched for metaphors to describe what had happened. Tetiana Pavlychka, who lived in Kyiv province, remembered that her sister Tamara ‘had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people – they were more like starving ghosts.’4 Another survivor remembered that his mother ‘looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen … was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.’5 A third remembered his brother lying down, ‘alive but completely swollen, his body shining as if it were made of glass’.6 We felt ‘giddy’, another recalled: ‘everything was as if in a fog. There was a horrible pain in our legs, as if someone were pulling the tendons out of them.’7 Yet another could not rid himself of the memory of a child sitting, rocking its body ‘back and forth, back and forth’, reciting one endless ‘
song’ in a half voice: ‘eat, eat, eat’.8

  An activist from Russia, one of those sent to Ukraine to help execute the confiscation policy, remembered children too:

  All alike: their heads like heavy kernels, their necks skinny as a stork’s, every bone movement visible beneath the skin on the arms and legs, the skin itself like yellow gauze stretched over their skeletons. And the faces of those children were old, exhausted, as if they had already lived on the earth for seventy years. And their eyes, Lord!9

  Some survivors specifically recalled the many diseases of starvation and their different physical side effects. Scurvy caused people to feel pain in their joints, to lose their teeth. It also led to night-blindness: people could not see in the dark, and so feared to leave their homes at night.10 Dropsy – oedema – caused the legs of victims to swell and made their skin very thin, even transparent. Nadia Malyshko, from a village in Dnipropetrovsk province, remembered that her mother ‘swelled up, became weak and looked old, though she was only 37. Her legs were shining, and the skin had burst.’11 Hlafyra Ivanova from Khmelnytskyi province remembered that people turned yellow and black: ‘the skin of swollen people grew chapped, and liquid oozed out of their wounds’.12

  People with swollen legs, covered in sores, could not sit: ‘When such a person sat down, the skin broke, liquid began to run down their legs, the smell was awful and they felt unbearable pain.’13 Children developed swollen bellies, and heads that seemed too heavy for their necks.14 One woman remembered a girl who was so emaciated that ‘one could see how her heart was beating beneath the skin’.15 M. Mishchenko described the final stages: ‘General weakness increases, and the sufferer cannot sit up in bed or move at all. He falls into a drowsy state which may last for a week, until his heart stops beating from exhaustion.’16