Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  But in the spring of 1933, Sholokhov’s tone suddenly grew more urgent: Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa was in crisis. Stalin needed to know that people were starving to death:

  In this district, as in other districts, collective and individual farmers alike are dying of hunger; adults and children are swollen, and are eating things that no human being should have to eat, starting with carrion and finishing with the bark of oak trees and all kinds of muddy roots.

  More details followed. In evocative, literary language, Sholokhov described peasants who refused to work because ‘all of our bread sails abroad’. He painted a portrait of the local party secretary, Ovchinnikov, who declared that ‘grain must be collected at any price! We’ll destroy everything, but we’ll grab grain!’ He described Ovchinnikov’s tactics, including the extortion of seed grain, the confiscation of cows, potatoes, pickled food – all of the tactics that the 1932 decrees had stipulated for both the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine.

  Sholokhov also described what happened after the Communist Party purged its lower ranks. Those who lost their party cards were arrested; their families lost access to rationed food, and they began to starve as well. The writer begged Stalin to send some ‘authentic’ communists to Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa, ones with the courage to halt the crisis. Using Stalinist language, he called on the Soviet leader to help ‘unmask’ those who had brutally beaten and tormented the peasants, stolen their grain, and destroyed the agricultural economy of the region.

  Stalin’s reply was blunt. In two telegrams, as well as a handwritten response, he told Sholokhov he was sorry to hear about these mistakes in the party’s work. He offered to send material aid, both to Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa and the neighbouring Verkhne-Donskii district. But he wasn’t entirely sympathetic. He felt the writer’s perspective was incomplete. ‘You see only one side of the matter,’ he told Sholokhov: ‘The grain growers in your region (and not only yours) are conducting sabotage and leaving the Red Army without grain.’ These men might look like simple farmers, Stalin explained, but they were in fact waging a quiet, bloodless, but nevertheless effective ‘war against Soviet power’. Perhaps the writer was under the impression that they were harmless people. If so, he was gravely mistaken.

  Stalin’s answer to Sholokhov in the spring of 1933, at the height of the famine, echoed the conspiratorial phrases that he was using in his personal correspondence as well as in speeches and party debates: those who were starving to death were not innocent. On the contrary, they were traitors, they were saboteurs, they were conspiring to undermine the proletarian revolution. They were waging ‘a war against Soviet power’.

  Whereas, in 1921, the Soviet leadership had spoken of starving peasants as victims, in 1933, Stalin switched the vocabulary. Those who were starving were not victims; they were perpetrators. They were not sufferers; they were responsible for their terrible fate. They had caused the famine, and therefore they deserved to die. From this assessment came the logical conclusion: the state was justified in refusing to help them stay alive.

  This was the argument that Stalin would advocate for the rest of his life. He never denied, to Sholokhov or to anyone else, that peasants had died from a famine caused by state policy in 1933, and he certainly never apologized. He clearly read Sholokhov’s missives, and took them seriously enough to respond. But he never admitted that any important element of his policy – not collectivization, not grain expropriation, not the searches and shakedowns that had intensified the famine in Ukraine – was wrong. Instead, he placed all responsibility for food shortages and mass deaths firmly onto the shoulders of those who were dying.43

  This is certainly what he told his party. During the Congress of Victors at the beginning of 1934, where Stalin had denounced nationalism, he also predicted further violence. ‘We have defeated the kulaks,’ he declared, but the liquidation was not yet complete. Agents of the old regime – ‘former people’, as he called them – could still do a good deal of harm. More to the point, the party should expect more resistance from these ‘moribund classes’: ‘It is precisely because they are dying and their days are numbered that they will go on from one form of attack to another, sharper form, appealing to the backward sections of the population and mobilizing them against the Soviet regime.’44

  This was in line with Marxist thinking: the sharpening of contradictions, the creation of greater stress – these were the precursors of revolutionary change. The deaths of millions was not, in other words, a sign that Stalin’s policy had failed. On the contrary, it was a sign of success. Victory had been achieved, the enemy had been defeated. As long as the Soviet Union lasted, that view would never be contested.

  14

  The Cover-Up

  There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

  Walter Duranty, The New York Times, 31 March 1933

  I am almost illiterate and write in a simple manner, but what I write is true and truth, they say, shall overcome evil.

  Petro Drobylko, Sumy province, 19331

  In 1933 the cities knew that the villages were dying. The leaders and administrators of the Communist Party and the government knew that the villages were dying. The evidence was in front of everyone’s eyes: the peasants at the railway stations, the reports coming in from the countryside, the scenes in the cemeteries and morgues. There is no doubt that the Soviet leadership knew it too. In March 1933, Kosior wrote a letter to Stalin in which he explicitly spoke of hunger – Ukraine’s provinces were begging the Central Committee for help – and anticipated worse, noting that ‘even starvation has not taught good sense to the peasants’, who were still too slow in their spring sowing.2 In April he wrote again, noting the large number of people now joining collective farms: ‘the famine has played a large role, having in the first instance hit individual farmers’.3

  But in the official, Soviet world the Ukrainian famine, like the broader Soviet famine, did not exist. It did not exist in the newspapers, it did not exist in public speeches. Neither national leaders nor local leaders mentioned it – and they never would. Whereas the response to the 1921 famine was a prominent and widely heeded call for international aid, the response to the 1933 famine was total denial, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, of any serious food shortage. The aim was to make the famine disappear, as if it had never happened. In an era before television and the internet, before open borders and travel, this was easier to achieve than it would have been in the twenty-first century. But even in 1933 the cover-up required an extraordinary effort on the part of numerous people over many years.

  The organized denial of the famine began early, before the worst starvation had even begun. From the beginning, its facilitators had a number of different goals. Inside the USSR the cover-up was only partly designed to fool the Soviet public, or at least those who had no direct knowledge of the famine, though at this it probably did not succeed. Rumours were impossible to control, and were even repeated, as Stalin well knew, inside elite Bolshevik families. But letters of protest, which were sent quite frequently from all kinds of people – peasants, officials, bureaucrats – in the years leading up to the famine, soon stopped. There is anecdotal evidence inside the Soviet Union of some effort to control the mail that reached the Red Army. Mariia Bondarenko’s brother, a Red Army soldier serving in the Caucasus, told his sister that none of the Ukrainian soldiers received mail from home in 1933. Members of his unit eventually found the withheld letters. Only then had they learned the truth about what was happening to their families.4 Other soldiers never received letters from home in 1932 or 1933 at all; some recalled that it was as if their families had just disappeared.5

  Even more effort went into the control of public speech. One Ukrainian Red Army soldier went to serve in 1934, having survived the famine. During one of the ‘political instruction’ classes that all soldiers had to attend, he asked the teacher a question about the famine. He was sharply rebuked: ‘There was no famin
e and there cannot be, you will be locked up for ten years if you keep talking like this.’6 Students and workers sent to the countryside to help bring in the 1933 harvest were often told bluntly not to speak of what they had seen. Out of fear many obeyed. We were told to ‘sew up our mouths’, one remembered.7 The code of silence was understood by everyone:

  At work no one spoke of the famine or of the bodies in the streets, as if we were all part of a conspiracy of silence. Only with the closest and most trusted of friends would we talk about the terrible news from the villages … The rumours were confirmed when the townspeople were ordered to the countryside to help with the harvest and saw for themselves whence had come the living skeletons that haunted our city’s streets.8

  The taboo on speaking of the famine in public affected medical workers too. Both doctors and nurses recall being told to ‘invent something’ for death certificates, or to write down all cases of starvation as the result of ‘infectious diseases’ or ‘cardiac arrest’.9

  Fear even affected correspondence between officials. In March the secretary of the local government in Dnipropetrovsk wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, complaining that numerous cases of starvation, swelling and deaths from hunger had received no official attention because lower-level officials had failed to report them: ‘It was considered to be anti-party, reprehensible even to react to them.’ In one case a village party secretary who was himself swollen from hunger had failed to report anything, so afraid was he of censure.10

  As the emergency passed, official vigilance spread to record-keepers. In April 1934 the Odessa provincial leadership sent out a note to all the local party committees, warning them about the ‘criminally outrageous manner’ in which births and deaths were being registered: ‘In a number of village councils this work is actually in the hands of class enemies – kulaks, Petliura henchmen, special deportees etc.’ Allegedly to increase supervision, the Odessa bosses withdrew death registration books from all village councils, from 1933 ‘without exception’ and from 1932 in some regions as well.11 Similar orders exist for Kharkiv province, where officials also demanded all death registries from November 1932 until the end of 1933, on the grounds that they were in the hands of ‘class-hostile elements’ such as kulaks, Petliurites and special deportees.12

  In reality, both types of document conformed to an identical formula, probably the result of an order from the Ukrainian authorities, and both were intended to destroy evidence of the famine.13 Although mortality numbers compiled at the provincial and national level did remain in statistical archives, at the village level many records were physically destroyed. Eyewitnesses from Zhytomyr and Chernihiv provinces have described the disappearance of death registries from their villages in 1933–4.14 In Vinnytsia, Stepan Podolian recalled that his father had been asked to burn the village registry books and rewrite them, eliminating references to hunger.15

  At the highest levels the cover-up functioned as a form of party discipline: it was a means of controlling officials, even testing their loyalty. To prove their dedication, party members had to accept and endorse the official falsehoods. Roman Terekhov, one of the party bosses in Kharkiv, dared to use the word ‘famine’ in Stalin’s presence and in public during the autumn of 1932, as Terekhov himself later recalled. The Soviet leader’s response was harsh: ‘You spin this yarn about the famine thinking that you’ll intimidate us, but it won’t work!’ Instead, Stalin told him, ‘go to the Writers’ Union and write fairy tales for idiots to read’.16 Terekhov lost his job two weeks later.

  An echo of this incident is found in the party conference speeches made over the subsequent year. In many of them Ukrainian communists referred to ‘problems’ or ‘difficulties’, but very rarely to ‘famine’. Of course they knew it was happening, but in order to survive they had to observe the Kremlin’s taboos. Privately, the word remained in use, as we have seen in Kosior’s letters to Stalin. But although no written record exists of an order not to use the word ‘famine’ in public, it is striking how rarely it was used.17 Instead, Soviet officials used euphemisms. When a Japanese consul in Odessa made an official inquiry about the famine, for example, even he was told ‘there are food shortages but no famine’.18

  The victims were harder to banish. Even after the bodies had been buried in unmarked mass graves, and even after the death registries were altered, there still remained the problem of Soviet statistics. In 1937 the Soviet census bureau set out to count and measure the Soviet population, a vast task made urgent by the need to coordinate central planning. But even as the complex process began – it involved asking millions of people to fill out forms – the Soviet leadership began to be anxious about the possible result. ‘Not one figure from the census can be published’, employees of the local statistical offices were told in December 1936. There was to be ‘no preliminary processing of the raw material’ either.19

  Even so, the final result of the 1937 census was shocking. Newspapers had floated advance stories of growth and a population boom, ‘evidence of the great increase in our workers’ standard of living’ after ‘ten years of our heroic fight for socialism’.20 Statisticians, not wanting to be blamed for sending a negative message, had been filing regular reports of growth too. One preliminary report did cautiously hint that the population levels might turn out to be lower than anticipated in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Volga region – ‘regions where the resistance of kulaks to collectivization was particularly determined and bitter’ – but it devoted little space to the problem. Overall, the projections were optimistic. In 1934 census officials estimated that the population of the USSR stood at 168 million. In 1937 they estimated 170 million or even 172 million.

  The real numbers, when they finally arrived, were quite different. The total population figure of the USSR came to 162 million – meaning that (for those who expected 170 million) some eight million people were ‘missing’. That inexact number included victims of the famine and their unborn children. It also reflected the genuine chaos of the famine years. The peasants dying by the roadsides, the mass migration, the deportations, the impossibility of keeping accurate statistics in villages where everyone was starving, including public officials – all of these things made the census-takers’ job more difficult.21 In truth, nobody was absolutely sure how many people had really died and how many lived, counted or uncounted. The census-takers had erred on the side of caution.

  Rather than accept the result, Stalin abolished it. Meetings were called; expert panels were created. A special Central Committee resolution declared the census badly organized, unprofessional, and a ‘gross violation of the basic fundamentals of statistical science’.22 The journal Bolshevik declared that the census had been ‘disrupted by contemptible enemies of the people – Trotsky-Bukharinite spies and traitors to the motherland, having slipped at that time into the leadership of the Central Directory of People’s Economic Accounting … Enemies of the people set themselves the goal of distorting the real number of the population.’23

  The publication of the 1937 census was halted immediately, and the results never appeared. The statisticians themselves paid the price. The head of the census bureau, Ivan Kraval, at the time a resident of the House on the Embankment, the most exclusive party residence in Moscow, was arrested and executed by firing squad in September. His closest colleagues were also put to death. Repression cascaded downwards to Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as the Russian provinces, where hundreds of lower-level census officials were sacked from their jobs and sometimes arrested and executed as well. The list of the repressed included not only those directly responsible for the census, but also statisticians who might have had access to the original numbers. Mykhailo Avdiienko, the Kyiv editor of Soviet Statistics, was arrested in August and executed in September. Oleksandr Askatin, the head of the economics department at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, met the same fate.24

  By November an entirely new cadre of officials had replaced these men, e
very one of whom now understood that it was extremely dangerous to produce accurate numbers.25 A new census was duly commissioned. This time Stalin did not wait for the result. Even before the census had taken place, he declared victory:

  Under the sun of the Great Socialist Revolution an astonishingly rapid, never-before-seen increase in population is taking place. Mighty socialist industry has called into life new professions. Tens of thousands of people, who yesterday were unskilled labourers, today have become qualified masters in the most diverse branches of production. Yesterday’s Stakhanovites today have become technicians and engineers. Millions of peasant smallholders, eking out a beggarly life, have become prosperous collective farmers, creators of socialist harvests … The all-Union census of the population must show all the great changes that have happened in the life of the people, the growth of the cultural and material level of the masses, the increase in the qualification of factory workers and office workers …26

  Stalin got what he ordered: at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, before the final tally was complete, he announced, with great fanfare, that the Soviet population had indeed reached 170 million.27

  In due course the statisticians found ways to make the numbers match the rhetoric. They massaged data to mask the high number of prisoners in the north and east of the USSR – the years 1937–9 were a time of major Gulag expansion – and, of course, to hide the ravages of the famine. Census forms for more than 350,000 people residing elsewhere were assigned to Ukraine. Another 375,000 dead souls were allotted to Kazakhstan. As well as altering the totals, the census-takers erased some small national and ethnic groups, and changed the balance of the population in ethnically divided regions to suit Soviet policy. Overall, they boosted the population by at least 1 per cent. For decades afterwards the 1939 census was held up as a model piece of statistical research.28