Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  An emaciated person can die very quickly, unexpectedly, and many did. Volodymyr Slipchenko’s sister worked in a school, where she witnessed children dying during lessons – ‘a child is sitting at a school desk, then collapses, falls down’ – or while playing in the grass outside.17 Many people died while walking, trying to flee. Another survivor remembered that the roads leading to Donbas were lined with corpses: ‘Dead villagers lay on the roads, along the road and paths. There were more bodies than people to move them.’18

  Those deprived of food were also liable to die suddenly in the act of eating, if they managed to get hold of something to eat. In the spring of 1933, Hryhorii Simia remembered that a terrible stench arose from wheatfields close to the road: hungry people had crawled into the grain stalks to cut off ears of wheat, eaten them and then died: their empty stomachs could no longer digest anything.19 The same thing happened in the bread lines in the cities. ‘There were cases when a person bought bread, ate it and died on the spot, being too exhausted with hunger.’20 One survivor was tormented by the memory of finding some beets, which he brought to his grandmother. She ate two of them raw and cooked the rest. Within hours she was dead, as her body could not cope with digestion.21

  For those who remained alive, the physical symptoms were often just the beginning. The psychological changes could be equally dramatic. Some spoke later of a ‘psychosis of hunger’, though of course such a thing could not be defined or measured.22 ‘From hunger, people’s psyches were disturbed. Common sense left them, natural instincts faded,’ recalled Petro Boichuk.23 Pitirim Sorokin, who experienced starvation in the 1921 famine, remembered that after only a week of food deprivation, ‘It was very difficult for me to concentrate for any length of time on anything but food. For short periods, by forcing myself, I was able to chase away the “thoughts of hunger” from my consciousness, but they invariably returned and took possession of it.’ Eventually, ideas about food ‘begin to multiply abundantly in the consciousness, and they acquire a diversity and unprecedented vivacity often reaching the stage of hallucinations’. Other kinds of thoughts ‘fade from the field of consciousness, become very vague and uninteresting’.24

  Over and over, survivors have written and spoken about how personalities were altered by hunger, and how normal behaviour ceased. The desire to eat simply overwhelmed everything else – and familial feelings above all. A woman who had always been kind and generous abruptly changed when food began to run short. She sent her own mother out of her house and told her to go and live with another relative: ‘You’ve lived with us for two weeks,’ she told her, ‘live with him and do not be a burden to my children.’25

  Another survivor remembered a young boy searching for extra grain in a field. His sister ran to him and told him to go home because their father had died. The boy replied: ‘To hell with him, I want to eat.’26 A woman told a neighbour that her youngest daughter was dying, and so she had not given the little girl any bread. ‘I need to try to support myself, the children will die anyway.’27 A five-year-old boy whose father had died stole into an uncle’s house to find something to eat. Furious, the uncle’s family locked him in a cellar where he died as well.28

  Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine. One woman told her village that while she would always be able to give birth to other children, she had only one husband, and she wanted him to survive. She duly confiscated the bread her children received at a local kindergarten, and all her children died.29 A couple put their children in a deep hole and left them there, in order not to have to watch them die. Neighbours heard the children screaming, and they were rescued and survived.30 Another survivor remembered her mother leaving the house in order not to hear a younger sibling cry.31

  Uliana Lytvyn, aged eighty at the time she was interviewed, remembered these emotional changes, and especially the disappearance of family feelings – maternal and paternal love – above all else: ‘Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neither intellect nor consideration, neither sorrow nor conscience. This is what can be done to kind and honest peasant farmers. When sometimes I dream of that horror, I still cry through the dream.’32

  Distrust grew too, and indeed had been growing since the beginning of the collectivization and de-kulakization drives a few years earlier. ‘Neighbours had been made to spy on neighbours,’ wrote Miron Dolot: ‘friends had been forced to betray friends; children had been coached to denounce their parents; and even family members avoided meeting each other. The warm traditional hospitality of the villagers had disappeared, to be replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Fear became our constant companion: it was an awesome dread of standing helplessly and hopelessly alone before the monstrous power of the State.’33

  Iaryna Mytsyk remembered that families who had always left their houses open, even during the years of revolution and civil war, now locked their doors: ‘Centuries-old sincerity and generosity did not exist any more. It disappeared with hungry stomachs.’34 Parents warned their children to beware of neighbours whom they had known all their lives: no one knew who might turn out to be a thief, a spy – or a cannibal. No one wanted others to learn how they had survived either. ‘Trust disappeared,’ wrote Mariia Doronenko: ‘Anyone who got hold of food, or who discovered a means of obtaining food, kept the secret to themselves, refusing to tell even the closest family members.’35

  Empathy disappeared as well, and not only among the hungriest. The desperation and hysteria of the starving inspired horror and fear, even among those who still had enough to eat. An anonymous letter that eventually found its way into the Vatican archives described the feeling of being around the starving:

  In the evening and even in the daytime it is not possible to bring bread home uncovered. The hungry will stop and seize it out of your hands, and often bite your hands or wound them with a knife. I have never seen faces so thin and savage, and bodies so little covered with rags … It is necessary to live here to understand and believe the scope of the disaster. Even today, having been to the market, I saw two men dead of hunger whom soldiers threw on a cart on top of each other. How can we live?36

  As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel – perhaps could not feel – pity. Instead, they turned their anger on the sufferer.37 Propaganda encouraged this feeling: the Communist Party loudly and angrily blamed the Ukrainian peasants for their fate, and so did others too. An inhabitant of Mariupol remembered a particularly ugly scene:

  One day, as I waited in a queue in front of the store to buy bread, I saw a farm girl of about 15 years of age, in rags, and with starvation looking out of her eyes. She stretched her hand out to everyone who bought bread, asking for a few crumbs. At last she reached the storekeeper. This man must have been some newly arrived stranger who either could not, or would not, speak Ukrainian. He began to berate her, said she was too lazy to work on the farm, and hit her outstretched hand with the blunt edge of a knife blade. The girl fell down and lost a crumb of bread she was holding in the other hand. Then the storekeeper stepped closer, kicked the girl and roared: ‘Get up! Go home and get to work!’ The girl groaned, stretched out and died. Some in the queue began to weep. The communist storekeeper noticed it and threatened: ‘Some are getting too sentimental here. It is easy to spot enemies of the people.’38

  Hunger also heightened suspicion of strangers and outsiders, even children. The residents of cities became particularly hostile towards any peasants who managed to get through police blockades and enter urban areas in order to beg, or indeed any city-dwellers who could not find anything to eat either. Anastasiia Kh., a child in Kharkiv during the famine, was taken by her father several times to stand outside a cafeteria to receive uneaten scraps of food – until a ‘well-dressed man’ eventually screamed at them and told them to go away.39 But she also had the reverse experience. Once, having managed to buy a loaf of bread, she was hurrying home with it. She was
stopped by a peasant woman, carrying a baby, who begged her to share it. Thinking of her family, she hurried away: ‘No sooner had I walked away than the unfortunate woman keeled over and died. Fear gripped my heart, for it seemed that her wide open eyes were accusing me of denying her bread. They came and took her baby away, which in death she continued to hold in a tight grip. The vision of this dead woman haunted me for a long time afterwards. I was unable to sleep at night, because I kept seeing her before me.’40

  In these circumstances the rules of ordinary morality no longer made sense. Theft from neighbours, cousins, the collective farm, workplaces became widespread. Among those who suffered, stealing was widely condoned. Neighbours stole chickens from other neighbours, and then defended themselves however they could.41 People locked their homes from the outside in the daytime and from the inside at night, one anonymous letter-writer complained to the Dnipropetrovsk province committee: ‘There is no guarantee that someone won’t break in, take your last food and kill you, too. Where to seek help? The militia men are hungry and scared.’42

  Anybody who worked in a state institution – a collective farm, a school, an office – also stole whatever he or she could. People put grain in their pockets, shoved grain into their shoes, before walking out of public buildings. Others dug secret holes into wooden work implements and hid grain inside them.43 People stole horses – even from militia headquarters – cows, sheep and pigs, slaughtered them and ate them. In a single district of Dnipropetrovsk province, thirty horses were stolen from collective farms in April and May 1933; in another district thieves stole fifty cows. In some places, peasants were reportedly keeping their cows, if they had them, inside their houses at night.44

  People also stole seed reserves, which had of course been confiscated from them and were now kept in storage facilities. Often the quantities were small – collective farm workers were regularly caught filling their pockets. But so widespread did this problem become that in March 1933 the Ukrainian authorities issued a special decree instructing the OGPU, militia and activist teams to protect the seeds and punish those caught under the harsh law of 7 August. Special mobile court sessions were set up to hasten prosecution.45

  No one felt at all guilty anymore about stealing communal property. Of his thefts during the famine period, one man wrote, ‘At that time we did not think that this was a big sin, nor did we remember that we probably killed someone by depriving them of food.’46 Ivan Brynza and his childhood friend, Volodia, stood outside a grain elevator and joined the mad scramble every time some kernels fell to the ground:

  The sacks would rip apart, but the keen-eyed NKVD troops would immediately surround the spot and shout: ‘Don’t you dare touch socialist property!’ The spilled grain was put into new sacks, but a dozen or so grains would always be left behind in the dust. Hungry children would throw themselves onto the dust, trying to scrape up as much of it as possible. But in that ‘battle’ those children would be beaten and crushed. Weak from hunger, they never got up from the ground.47

  Sometimes the theft was on a much larger scale. In January 1933 an inspection of bread factories and bakeries in Ukraine revealed that workers all across the republic were hoarding bread and flour on a massive scale, either for personal use or to sell on the black market. As a result, virtually all of the bread available for sale in the official shops was ‘of bad quality’, containing excessive amounts of air and water, as well as fillers – sawdust, other grains – instead of wheat. In some cases the factories were controlled by ‘criminal organizations’ that bartered the bread in exchange for other kinds of food products. Account books were also massaged on a massive scale to hide these trades.48

  This transformation of honest people into thieves was only the beginning. As the weeks passed, the famine literally drove people crazy, provoking irrational anger and more extraordinary acts of aggression. ‘The famine was horrible, but that was not the only thing, people became so angry and wild, it was scary to go outside,’ recalled one survivor. A boy at the time, he remembered that a neighbour’s son teased other children with a loaf of bread and jam that his family had procured. The other children began throwing stones at him, eventually beating him to death. Another boy died in the ensuing battle for the loaf of bread.49 Adults were no better equipped to cope with the rage brought on by hunger: one survivor remembered that a neighbour became so angered by the sounds of his own children crying for food that he smothered his baby in its cradle, and killed two of his other children by slamming their heads against a wall. Only one of his sons managed to escape.50

  A similar story was recorded by the secret police in Vinnytsia province, where one farmer, unable to bear the thought of his children starving to death, ‘lit a fire in the stove and closed the chimney’ in order to kill them: ‘The children began to suffocate and cry for help because of the fumes, then he strangled them with his own hands, after which he went to the village council and confessed …’ The farmer said he had committed the murders because ‘there was nothing to eat’. During a subsequent search of his home, no food was found at all.51

  Vigilantism became widespread. Armed guards would shoot gleaners on sight, and anyone who tried to steal from a warehouse met with the same fate. As the famine worsened, ordinary people also took vengeance on those who stole. Oleksii Lytvynskyi remembered seeing a collective farm boss pick up a boy who had stolen bread and slam his head against a tree – a murder for which he was never held responsible.52 Hanna Tsivka knew of a woman who killed her niece for stealing a loaf of bread.53 Mykola Basha’s older brother was caught looking for spoiled potatoes in the kitchen garden of a neighbour, who then grabbed him and put him in a cellar filled with waist-high water.54 Another survivor’s aunt was stabbed to death with a pitchfork for stealing scallions from a neighbour’s yard.55

  Sometimes the vigilantism took hold of a whole group. At the ‘New Union’ collective farm in Dnipropetrovsk province a mob – including the farm chairman, the local veterinarian and the accountant – beat a collective farmer to death for stealing a jug of milk and a few biscuits.56 When peasants from a nearby village stole a sheep from the collective farm in Rashkova Sloboda, Chernihiv province, a hunt was organized. The farmers from Rashkova Sloboda found the four culprits, surrounded them – and shot them on the spot. Mykola Opanasenko was a witness to this attack as a child. Later, he had another reflection: ‘A bitter question arises: who imbued the peasants’ soul with so much animal ferocity that they dealt so mercilessly with people?’57

  Sometimes the lynch mobs tortured their victims. In Vinnytsia province a mob kept a woman suspected of theft without food and water in a barn for two days before burying her alive. In another Vinnytsia district a twelve-year-old girl, Mariia Sokyrko, was murdered for stealing onions. In Kyiv province the head of a village council ‘arrested’ two teenage girls accused of theft and burned their arms with matches, stabbed them with needles, and beat them so badly that one died and the other was hospitalized.58 So common was this kind of behaviour that in June 1933 the Ukrainian government ordered prosecutors to prevent ‘mob law’ by putting the perpetrators on public trial. Dozens of small-scale ‘show trials’ took place across Ukraine in June and July, but lynch mobs nevertheless continued to be reported across Ukraine in 1934 and even 1935.59

  ‘Animal ferocity’ could evolve further. Real insanity of various kinds – hallucinations, psychosis, depression – soon resulted from hunger. A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the ‘red broom’ had taken her family away.60 One survivor recalled the horrific story of Varvara, a neighbour who was left alone with two children. At the beginning of 1933, Varvara took her remaining clothes and travelled to a nearby city in the hope of exchanging them for bread. She succeeded, and returned home with a whole loaf. But when she cut the bread, she began to scream: the bread was not a whole loaf, it was stuffed with a paper sack – which meant that once again there was
nothing to eat. She took the knife, turned around, stuck it into her son’s back and began laughing hysterically; her daughter saw what was happening, and ran for her life.61

  In time, all of these emotions subsided – to be replaced by complete indifference. Sooner or later, hunger made everyone listless, unable to move or think. People sat on benches in their farmyards, beside the roadside, in their houses – and didn’t move. Bustling villages grew quiet, recalled Mykola Proskovchenko, who survived the famine in Odessa province. ‘It was a strange silence everywhere. Nobody cried, moaned, complained … Indifference was everywhere: people were either swollen or completely exhausted … Even a kind of envy was felt toward the dead.’62 In the spring of 1933, Oleksandra Radchenko wrote in her diary in the middle of the night: ‘It is already three o’clock in the morning, meaning that today is 27 April. I am not sleeping. The last days have been filled with a terrible apathy …’63

  ‘No one feels sorry for anyone,’ wrote another survivor, Halyna Budantseva: ‘nothing is wished, no one even wants to eat. You wander with no goal in the yard, on the street. After a while, you don’t want to walk, there is no strength for that. You lie and wait for death.’ She recovered because an uncle came to rescue her. But her sister Tania died on the way to the uncle’s village.64

  Petro Hryhorenko, at that time a student at a military academy, witnessed this indifference when in December 1931 he received an odd letter from his stepmother, alluding to his father’s ill health. Alarmed, Petro returned to his village. There he discovered that his father, an enthusiastic proponent of collectivization, was now starving. Petro walked into the office of the local collective farm to inform the officials that he would take his parents away: