Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  The first characteristic is that in Ukraine the class enemy masks his activity against socialist construction with the nationalist banner and chauvinist slogans.

  The second characteristic is that the Ukrainian kulak underwent a lengthy schooling in struggle against Soviet power, for in Ukraine the civil war was especially fierce and lengthy, given that political banditry was in control of Ukraine for an especially long period.

  The third characteristic is that splinter groups of various counter-revolutionary organizations and parties settled in Ukraine more than elsewhere, being attracted to Ukraine on account of its proximity to western borders.

  The fourth characteristic is that Ukraine proves to be an object of attraction to various interventionist centres and finds itself under their especially diligent observation.

  And, finally, the fifth characteristic is that the deviationists in the CP(B)U in all-Party questions usually allied and continue to ally themselves with the nationalist elements in their ranks, with the deviationists on the nationality question …

  Unfortunately, the CP(B)U did not draw all those conclusions in full measure. There lies the explanation of its errors and failures both in agriculture and in carrying out Leninist nationality policy in Ukraine …20

  Further concessions followed. In the spring of 1934 there were no requisitions of vegetables. Peasants were allowed to keep the food they had grown inside their remaining private allotments. The Ukrainian leadership now dared to inform Stalin, openly, that some fields would not be sown – there was no one to sow them – and that there was a shortage of seeds, including corn, linen and hemp seeds as well as grain. This time around, Stalin agreed to ‘loan’ Ukraine seeds as well as food.21

  Collectivization continued, indeed accelerated: any individual farmers who had survived the famine joined collective farms en masse that spring. This time there was no talk of rebellion, as 151,700 terrified families gave up their homes and property to work for the state. Another 51,800 households joined in the autumn. The demands for grain were quietly relaxed, and the number of arrests in the countryside fell.22

  Life did not return to ‘normal’; it never would. But slowly, Ukrainians stopped dying of hunger.

  In the late spring of 1933, Max Harmash, an agricultural specialist from the Dnipropetrovsk region, was recruited by the provincial government to help with sowing the harvest at a collective farm about 25 kilometres from his home. On his first night in the countryside a village councillor directed Harmash to a house where he was told that he could sleep. There he encountered a ‘very thin man in rags’, who did not answer his greetings. He also found the ‘grotesque, half-naked swollen body’ of another person lying on a pallet. Rags were strewn about the floor; the stench was unbearable. Harmash backed out of the house, leaving some of his bread for its inhabitants, and ran back to the village council building. There, a watchman told him that there was hardly any food to be found anywhere in the vicinity. Only a few members of the collective farm still had any reserves at all. About half the villagers were already dead. The rest survived by eating cats, dogs and birds.

  Horrified and shocked by what he had seen, Harmash fled the dying village as soon as he could. For a long time afterwards he had ‘nightmares’ and expected severe punishment for abandoning his duties. He was afraid to tell anybody about what had happened. But the punishment never came. Years later he reckoned that the officials who had sent him to the village must have known that there was no grain to sow and no one to sow it, but they had sent for him anyway. Someone had told them to do so, and they were simply fulfilling the task. No one dared to say clearly that the villagers were dying of hunger.23

  At about the same time Lidiia, a student in Kharkiv, was also sent out to the countryside as part of a labour brigade. She and her companions received accommodation in an empty school building, were warned not to go outside at night and told not to open the door. During the day they went into the fields to weed around the sugar beets. They met no one. But after only a few days their mission was abruptly cut short: ‘We returned to Kharkiv at daybreak, but we were not allowed to go home. We were taken to an official building, despite the fact that we were hungry and dirty. When government officials arrived, a girl told me that I had to go to a special department. The manager asked me what I had seen. I said nothing. Then he said “go and don’t say anything”. Frightened, I never asked the others whether they had been called to the same department.’24

  Lidiia and Max were witnesses to another facet of the post-famine crisis: in 1933 the Soviet state suddenly faced a drastic shortage of labour in the Ukrainian countryside, which was particularly extreme in some districts. In the Markivka district of Donetsk province, for example, a meeting of village council leaders in December reckoned their prospects were bleak. Some 20,000 people, more than half the population, had perished in the famine. More than 60 per cent of local horses had been killed that year, and 70 per cent of the oxen. Their owners were gone too, one observed: ‘Now when you go out into the country you can see villages that are so empty, wolves are living in the houses.’ Grain stores were so low that it was impossible to provide collective farm workers with their daily grain ration in exchange for work. The amount of sown land was decreasing, from more than 80,000 hectares in 1931 to 67,000 in 1933.25

  The brigades of students, workers and party officials sent from the city to the countryside did help somewhat. But this policy now carried some risks: the teams from the urban USSR might get to see, first hand, what had happened in the villages. Like Max, some ran away. Like Lidiia, some had to be monitored. They might go back and describe the scenes of death and devastation, with unknown consequences.

  Students and workers could not provide a permanent solution either. For that, the regime needed permanent inhabitants, new people who could live in the countryside and continue to farm. And so, in late 1933, it launched a resettlement programme. Its practical result, in many parts of Ukraine, was the replacement of Ukrainians with Russians, at least as long as the programme – which was not successful – lasted.

  By 1933 the Soviet Union already had some experience with moving and resettling people. Hundreds of thousands of kulaks had been moved to the empty northern and eastern regions of the country, as well as to the poorer and emptier districts of Ukraine itself. During the Second World War a range of explicitly ethnic deportations would result in the evictions of whole nationalities, including several Caucasian tribal peoples – the Chechens and the Ingush, the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Meshketians – as well as the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. In his famous ‘Secret Speech’ to the party elite in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced these mass population transfers, and joked that ‘Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, [Stalin] would have deported them also.’ The official transcript recorded that this remark sparked ‘laughter and animation in the hall’.26

  Officially, the movement of Russians into Ukraine began as a response to a clear need. Those at the top of the system knew about the drastic labour shortages. In a telegram sent in August 1933, Yakov Yakovlev, the Soviet Commissar for Agriculture, described a collective farm in Melitopol, southeast Ukraine, where ‘no more than a third of the households remain … less than one-fifth with horses’. Single households were labouring under the responsibility for farming 20 hectares of fertile soil by themselves. In western Russia, by contrast, crowded conditions meant that a single family had only one hectare to farm. Stalin responded in a note to Molotov, ‘it is necessary to speed up a possible “resettlement of the peasantry” ’.27

  The first phase of the project began with 117,000 Russian peasants – 21,000 households – from Russia and Belarus. They began to arrive in Ukraine in the autumn of 1933. In January and February 1934 a further 20,000 arrived in the depopulated villages of eastern and southern Ukraine, this time coming from Russia as well as other regions of Ukraine.28 These numbers
may be an underestimation, since they include only those who received state assistance to make the trip. Others – an unknown number – simply gathered together what belongings they could take and made the journey from Russia and the other regions on their own, having heard that there was more space and free land in Ukraine. In general, this first wave of arrivals was mostly voluntary – settlers believed they would be given free housing and good food rations, as well as transportation – although some had been evicted from their homes as kulaks or as enemies and so had little choice.

  Many were disappointed. They had expected to find accommodation and rich soil. The state had paid for their transportation, including their cattle and tools, given them hot food and rations on their journey, and even promised tax breaks. But the reality proved to be very different, as one woman settler from Zhytomyr province, a child at the time, remembered:

  We were evicted from our house too, but we were sent to Horodyshche in Dnipropetrovsk province. That village had died out and we were re-settled there … In Horodyshche we were given a small room in the hut, we put down some hay and slept on the ground. In the collective farm they gave out 1 kg of bread for 10 days. We were promised a lot but we have not seen anything of it.29

  Other surprises lay in store. On arrival, many of the Russians found the Ukrainian steppe unaccommodating. They did not know how to start fires with straw and dried grass, as the Ukrainians did. They were not necessarily welcomed by their new neighbours, who of course spoke a language they failed to understand. The villages were empty: even cats and dogs were now quite rare, as Ukrainian planners noted at the end of 1933, which had led to an infestation of mice in the houses as well as the fields.30 One settler, writing back to relatives in Russia, found the atmosphere uncanny and strange, though if he knew that there had been famine, he didn’t say so. ‘A lot of people died here,’ he wrote instead, ‘there were epidemics in 1932. There were so few of them left that they can’t till the land themselves.’ Another noted that ‘all the households are destroyed and derelict, and there is chaos in workplaces. Locals say that it wasn’t like that before, the village used to be orderly. People lived well here … the potatoes grow amazingly well.’31

  Others began to worry that they would meet the same fate as their predecessors, particularly when, after a few months’ residence, the things they had been promised gradually disappeared. In 1935 the new settlers were told that they, like the locals, would have to pay meat and milk taxes: this too must have seemed an ominous sign. The records of the Markivka district show that many of the Russian settlers left in the spring of 1935, and that those who remained were uneasy. They wrote home, complained about local conditions, observed that their new neighbours seemed lethargic, half dead. They had no shoes. They were eating corn husks.32

  Although the records are probably incomplete, many of those settlers sent to Ukraine in this first wave of resettlement did indeed return home within the year. Presumably as a consequence, new waves of deportation followed. But this second group did not contain volunteers. According to the deportation orders for the 39,000 ‘settlers’ in February 1935, they were people who had ‘not proved themselves in the strengthening of the border and the collective farm system’, as well as ‘nationalistic and anti-Soviet elements’. Many were from regions of western Ukraine that bordered on foreign countries, including large numbers of ethnic Germans and Poles. The ‘fifth column’ that the OGPU had described so many times was now removed from the border region for good.

  This time the state made far greater efforts to keep the new settlers in place. Secret policemen enlisted locals to help monitor the new arrivals and prevent them from escaping. Those caught trying to leave were punished. This relatively ‘successful’ resettlement was repeated in 1936, though many of those deported from western Ukraine at this time were sent to distant destinations beyond eastern Ukraine. Some 15,000 Polish and German households – by some accounts 70,000 people – found themselves assigned to Kazakhstan, where famine had also devastated the countryside.33

  Even at the time these resettlement campaigns were understood to be a form of Russification. Sergio Gradenigo, the observant Italian consul in Kharkiv, reported to Rome a conversation with an unnamed acquaintance who had agreed that the ‘Russification of Donbas’ was underway. He linked the policy to the closure of Ukrainian-language theatres, the restriction of Ukrainian opera music to just three cities, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, and the end of Ukrainization.34 Ordinary people also knew that uninhabited villages were being populated by Russians. ‘People said that the authorities wanted to exterminate Ukraine with hunger and settle the land with a Russian population so that Russia will be here,’ one eyewitness recalled.35 An anonymous letter from a resident of Poltava to the Kommunist newspaper made the same point: ‘The historically unprecedented physical extermination of the Ukrainian nation … is one of the central goals of the illegal programme of Bolshevik centralism.’ This letter was considered important enough to be the topic of a report sent to Stalin himself.36

  Dramatic as these emergency movements between 1933 and 1936 must have been, they are far less important, in terms of numbers and influence, than the slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine, and into depleted Ukrainian republican institutions, in subsequent years and decades. Some of them arrived to shore up the Ukrainian Communist Party, which had never recovered from the sweeping arrests of 1933. During and after the famine, the state purged, arrested and even executed tens of thousands of Ukrainian party officials. Often, their replacements came directly from Moscow. In 1933 alone the Soviet Communist Party sent thousands of political cadres, at all levels of the hierarchy, to Ukraine from Russia. By January 1934 only four of the twelve members of the Ukrainian Communist Party Politburo were Ukrainians. Eight of the twelve, in other words, did not speak Ukrainian, which was still the native language of a majority of Ukrainians.37

  Nor did the purge end there. Three years later the Ukrainian communist leadership became a particular target of the Great Terror, Stalin’s nationwide attack on the older members of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev himself famously remembered in his memoir that in 1937–8 the Ukrainian Communist Party was ‘purged spotless’.38 He was certainly in a position to know, since he stage-managed the arrests. Khrushchev, born in a Russian village near the Ukrainian border, grew up in working-class Donbas. Like Kaganovich, he identified with proletarian, Russophone Ukraine, not with the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry. At Stalin’s request he returned to Kyiv in 1937, accompanied by a host of secret police troops. After a struggle – the Ukrainian Communist Party at first resisted – he oversaw the arrest of the entire leadership, including Kosior, Chubar and Postyshev. Within months they were all dead; most members of the Ukrainian government were executed in the spring of 1938. Ordinary party members disappeared too: between January 1934 and May 1938 a third of the Ukrainian Communist Party, 167,000 people, were under arrest.39 In Khrushchev’s words, ‘it seemed as though not one regional or executive Committee secretary, not one secretary of the council of people’s commissars, not even a single deputy was left. We had to start building from scratch.’40

  By the end of the decade, the purge was complete: at the time of the outbreak of war in 1939 none of the Ukrainian Communist Party leadership had any connection with or sympathy for the national movement or even national communism. By the time the war ended in 1945, the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust devastated the republic and its institutions even further. In the post-war era the party continued to pay lip service to ‘Ukrainian’ symbols and even language, but at the higher levels it was overwhelmingly Russian speaking. The native Ukrainians who remained in the party were often drawn from the activist groups who had carried out the searches that led to the famine – or, in the years that followed, their children and grandchildren.41 No one in the party remembered a different Ukraine.

  Where the party led, the people followed. Between 1959 and 1970 over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn t
o the republic by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine and purges had created for energetic new residents. As the Soviet economy industrialized, a network of Russian-speaking industry bosses recruited colleagues from the north. Universities, hospitals and other institutions did the same. At the same time almost all the other minorities still living in Ukraine – the Jews who remained, the Germans, Belarusians, Bulgarians and Greeks – assimilated into the Russian-speaking majority. Peasants who moved from the devastated countryside into the cities often switched from Ukrainian to Russian, in order to get on. As in the nineteenth century, the Russian language offered opportunities and advancement. Ukrainian became simply a ‘backwards’ language of the provinces.42

  By the 1970s and 1980s the idea of a mass Ukrainian national movement seemed not just dead but buried. Intellectuals kept the flame alive in a few cities. But most Russians, and many Ukrainians, once again thought of Ukraine as just a province of Russia. Most outsiders failed to distinguish between Russia and Ukraine, if they remembered the name of Ukraine at all.

  In the spring of 1933, Mikhail Sholokhov, already then a celebrated writer, sat down at his typewriter in Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa, a Cossack stanitsa in the North Caucasus, and composed a letter to Stalin. It was not the first such missive. As a patriotic and pro-Soviet citizen, Sholokhov had been informing Stalin about the progress of collectivization in Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa for many months. Perhaps because he had met the Soviet leader in Moscow, he did not fear the consequences. His first missives were short and mostly handwritten, and they often focused on small things he saw going wrong. In 1931 he wrote with concern about the cattle and horses he saw all across the countryside, dying for lack of food. In 1932 he worried that collective farmers were stealing seeds straight out of the sowing machines. He also told the Soviet leader that an order to collectivize livestock had backfired. In some of the local villages ‘purchasers’ of cattle were beating up peasants and forcibly dragging their livestock away. The peasants fought back and in one village they murdered a requisitioner.