Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  As a sovereign state, Ukraine was free, by the autumn of 1993, to debate and commemorate its own history. From a mix of motives, former communists and former dissidents were all eager to have a say. In Kyiv the government organized a series of public events. On 9 September the deputy prime minister opened a scholarly conference, underlining the political significance of the famine commemorations. ‘Only an independent Ukraine can guarantee that such a tragedy will never be repeated,’ he told the audience. James Mace, by then a widely known and admired figure in Ukraine, was also there. He too drew political conclusions: ‘I would hope that this commemoration will help Ukrainians remember the danger of political chaos and political dependence on neighboring powers.’ President Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist apparatchik, also spoke: ‘A democratic form of government protects a people from such misfortunes,’ he said. ‘If we lose our independence we are destined to forever lag far behind economically, politically and culturally. If this happens, most importantly, we will always face the possibility of repeating those horrible pages in our history, including the famine, which were planned by a foreign power.’74

  Ivan Drach, the leader of Rukh, called for a broader acknowledgement of the significance of the famine: he demanded that Russians ‘repent’, and that they follow the example of Germans in acknowledging their guilt. He referred directly to the Holocaust, noting that the Jews had ‘forced the whole world to admit its guilt before them’. Although he did not claim that all Ukrainians had been victims – ‘Bolshevik marauders in Ukraine mobilized Ukrainians as well’ – he did strike a nationalist tone: ‘The first lesson which is becoming an integral part of Ukrainian consciousness is that Russia has never had and never will have any other interest in Ukraine beyond the total destruction of the Ukrainian nation.’75

  The ceremonies continued throughout the weekend. Black streamers hung from government buildings; thousands of people gathered for a memorial service outside St Sofia’s Cathedral. But the most moving celebrations were spontaneous. Crowds flocked to Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central boulevard, where people had put personal documents and photographs on billboards set up at three points along the street. An altar was set up halfway down; visitors left flowers and bread beside it. Civic leaders and politicians from all over Ukraine laid wreaths at the foot of a new monument. Some brought jars of earth – soil taken from the mass graves of famine victims.76

  To those who were there, the moment would have seemed definitive. The famine had been publicly recognized and remembered. More than that: after centuries of Russian imperial colonization and decades of Soviet repression, it had been recognized and remembered in a sovereign Ukraine. For better or worse, the famine story had become part of Ukrainian politics and contemporary Ukrainian culture. Children would now study it at school; scholars would piece together the full narrative in archives. Monuments would be built and books would be written. The long process of understanding, interpreting, forgiving, arguing and mourning was about to begin.

  EPILOGUE

  The Ukrainian Question Reconsidered

  The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism … Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin – one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the process of ‘union’ that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the ‘Soviet Man’, the ‘Soviet Nation’ and to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe.

  Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’, 19531

  Ще не вмерла України і Слава, і Воля

  (The glory and the freedom of Ukraine has not yet died)

  Ukrainian national anthem

  Those who lived through the Ukrainian famine always described it, once they were allowed to describe it, as an act of state aggression. The peasants who experienced the searches and the blacklists remembered them as a collective assault on themselves and their culture. The Ukrainians who witnessed the arrests and murders of intellectuals, academics, writers and artists remembered them in the same way, as a deliberate attack on their national cultural elite.

  The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

  As we have seen, Stalin did not seek to kill all Ukrainians, nor did all Ukrainians resist. On the contrary, some Ukrainians collaborated, both actively and passively, with the Soviet project. This book includes many accounts of assaults carried out by neighbours against neighbours, a phenomenon familiar from other mass murders in other places and at other times. But Stalin did seek to physically eliminate the most active and engaged Ukrainians, in both the countryside and the cities. He understood the consequences of both the famine and the simultaneous wave of mass arrests in Ukraine as they were happening. So did the people closest to him, including the leading Ukrainian communists.

  At the time it took place, there was no word that could have been used to describe a state-sponsored assault on an ethnic group or nation, and no international law that defined it as a particular kind of crime. But once the word ‘genocide’ came into use in the late 1940s, many sought to apply it to the famine and the accompanying purges in Ukraine. Their efforts were complicated at the time, and are complicated still, by multiple interpretations of the word ‘genocide’ – a legal and moral category rather than a historical one – as well as by the convoluted and constantly shifting politics of Russia and Ukraine.

  In a very literal sense the concept of ‘genocide’ has its origins in Ukraine, specifically in the Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian city of Lviv. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who invented the word – combining the Greek word ‘genos’, meaning race or nation, with the Latin ‘cide’, meaning killing – studied law at the University of Lviv, then called Lwów, in the 1920s.2 The city had previously been Polish until the eighteenth century, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It became Polish after the First World War; Soviet after the Red Army invasion of 1939; German between 1941 and 1944; part of Soviet Ukraine until 1991; and part of independent Ukraine after that. Each change was accompanied by upheaval and sometimes mass violence as new rulers imposed changes in language, culture and law.

  Although he left Lviv for Warsaw in 1929, Lemkin wrote in his autobiography that he was inspired to think about genocide by the history of his region, as well as by the brutal emotions that washed over it during the First World War. ‘I began to read more history to study whether national, religious or racial groups, as such, were being destroyed,’ he wrote. The Turkish assault on the Armenians, ‘put to death for no reason other than that they were Christians’, moved him in particular to think more deeply about international law and to ask how it could be used to stop such tragedies.3 His work was made more urgent by the Nazi invasion of Warsaw in 1939, which he immediately understood would involve an assault on the Jews as a group, as well as others. He finally articulated his views in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, a book he published in the United States in 1944, having fled occupied Poland. Lemkin defined ‘genocide’ in Axis Rule not as a single act but as a process:

  Generally sp
eaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.4

  In Axis Rule, Lemkin spoke of different kinds of genocide – political, social, cultural, economic, biological and physical. Separately, in an outline for a history of genocide that he never finished or published, he also listed the techniques which could be used to commit genocide, including among them the desecration of cultural symbols and the destruction of cultural centres such as churches and schools.5 As broadly defined in Lemkin’s published and unpublished work in the 1940s, in other words, ‘genocide’ certainly included the Sovietization of Ukraine and the Ukrainian famine. He later argued explicitly that this was so. In a 1953 essay entitled ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’ Lemkin wrote that the USSR attacked Ukrainian elites precisely because they are ‘small and easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labour, exile and starvation’.6

  Had the concept of genocide remained simply an idea in the minds and writings of scholars, there would be no argument today: according to Lemkin’s definition, the Holodomor was a genocide – as it is by most intuitive understandings of the word. But the concept of genocide became part of international law in a completely different context: that of the Nuremberg trials and the legal debates which followed.

  Lemkin served as adviser to the chief counsel at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and, thanks to his advocacy, the term was used at the trial, though it was not mentioned in any of the verdicts. After the Nuremberg trials ended, many felt, for reasons of both morality and Realpolitik, that the term ought to be enshrined in the UN’s basic documents. But as Norman Naimark and others have argued, international politics, and more specifically Cold War politics, shaped the drafting of the UN convention on genocide far more than the legal scholarship of Lemkin or anyone else.7

  Initially, a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1946 condemned genocide in language that echoed Lemkin’s broad understanding. Genocide was identified as ‘a crime under international law … whether it is committed on religious, racial, political or any other ground’. Early drafts of what would become the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide also included ‘political groups’ as potential victims of genocide. But the USSR, knowing that it could be considered guilty of carrying out genocide against ‘political groups’ – the kulaks, for example – resisted this broader definition. Instead, the Soviet delegation argued that political groups ‘were entirely out of place in a scientific definition of genocide, and their inclusion would weaken the convention and hinder the fight against genocide’. The Soviet delegation sought instead to ensure that the definition of ‘genocide’ was ‘organically bound up with fascism-nazism and other similar race theories’. Lemkin himself began to lobby for this narrower definition, as did others who badly wanted the measure to pass, and feared that the USSR might otherwise block it.8

  The Convention finally passed in 1948, which was a personal triumph for Lemkin and for many others who had lobbied in its favour. But the legal definition was narrow, and it was interpreted even more narrowly in the years that followed. In practice, ‘genocide’, as defined by the UN documents, came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust.

  The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation. Although Lemkin later argued for an expansion of the term, and even described the Sovietization of Ukraine as the ‘classic example of Soviet genocide’, it is now difficult to classify the Ukrainian famine, or any other Soviet crime, as genocide in international law.9 This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as ‘genocide’.

  The difficulty of classifying the Holodomor as a genocide in international law has not stopped a series of Ukrainian governments from trying to do so. The first attempt followed the Orange Revolution of 2004 – a series of street protests in Kyiv against a stolen election, corruption and perceived Russian influence in Ukrainian politics. Those protests led to the election of Viktor Yushchenko, the first president of Ukraine without a Communist Party pedigree. Yushchenko had an unusually strong mandate from the Ukrainian national movement and he used it to promote the study of the famine. He made references to the Holodomor in his inaugural speech and created a National Memory Institute with Holodomor research at its heart. He also lobbied for the United Nations, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe and other international institutions to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. Under Yushchenko’s government, funding for research into the famine expanded dramatically. Dozens of local groups – teachers, students, librarians – joined a national effort to create a Book of Memory, for example, a complete list of famine victims.10 In January 2010 a Ukrainian court found Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior and others guilty of ‘perpetrating genocide’. The court terminated the case on the grounds that the accused were all deceased.11

  Yushchenko understood the power of the famine as a unifying national memory for Ukrainians, especially because it had been so long denied. He undoubtedly ‘politicized’ it, in the sense that he used political tools to draw more attention to the story. Some of his own statements about the famine, particularly his claims about the number of casualties, were exaggerated. But he stopped short of using the famine to antagonize Ukraine’s Russian neighbours, and he did not describe the famine as a ‘Russian’ crime against Ukrainians. Indeed, at the seventy-fifth anniversary Holodomor commemoration ceremony in 2008, as on other occasions, Yushchenko went out of his way to avoid blaming the Russian nation for the tragedy:

  We appeal to everyone, above all the Russian Federation, to be true, honest and pure before their brothers in denouncing the crimes of Stalinism and the totalitarian Soviet Union … We were all together in the same hell. We reject the brazen lie that we are blaming any one people for our tragedy. This is untrue. There is one criminal: the imperial, communist Soviet regime.12

  Yushchenko’s words were not always heeded by his compatriots. Of course, he was right to blame the famine on Soviet Communist Party policy, not Russian policy: there was no ‘Russia’, or at least no sovereign Russian state, in 1933. Yet because the Communist Party’s 1933 headquarters had been in Moscow, and because Moscow, the capital of post-Soviet Russia, assumed many of the assets of the USSR after 1991, some in Ukraine do now blame ‘Russia’ for the famine.

  The Russian political establishment, which was by the mid-2000s recovering its own imperial ambitions in the region, confused the issue further by choosing to hear Yushchenko’s campaign as an attack on Russia, not an attack on the USSR. Pro-Russian groups inside Ukraine followed the Russian state’s lead: in 2006 a group of Russian nationalist thugs, led by a member of the local Communist Party, entered the office of Volodymyr Kalinichenko, a historian who wrote about the famine in the Kharkiv region, kicked at locked doors and shouted threats.13 In 2008 the Russian press denounced the Holodomor commemorations as ‘Russop
hobic’ and the Russian president, then Dmitry Medvedev, turned down an invitation to attend, dismissing talk of the ‘so-called Holodomor’ as ‘immoral’.14 Behind the scenes Medvedev threatened leaders in the region, advising them not to vote for a motion designating the Holodomor as a ‘genocide’ at the United Nations. According to Prince Andrew of Great Britain, Medvedev told the president of Azerbaijan that he could ‘forget about Nagorno-Karabakh,’ a region disputed by Azerbaijan and Armenia, unless he voted against a proposal to call the Holodomor a genocide.15

  The campaign was not just diplomatic. It was accompanied by the emergence of a Russian historical narrative that did not deny the famine, but emphatically downplayed it. There is almost no commemoration of either the Ukrainian or the wider Soviet famine in Russia and very little public debate. To the extent that it is mentioned at all, it is usually part of an argument that clearly denies any particular Ukrainian suffering. In 2008 the Russian scholar Viktor Kondrashin published the most eloquent version of this counter-narrative. The Famine of 1932–33: The Tragedy of the Russian Village detailed the horrors of those years in the Russian province of Penza, in the Volga region. Kondrashin did not deny that there had been mass starvation in Ukraine. On the contrary, his work showed that Stalin had launched the brutal process of collectivization, and confirmed that he had ordered the ‘thoughtless’ confiscation of grain in 1932–3, knowing full well that millions of peasants would die. But Kondrashin also argued that the Ukrainian estimates of Ukrainian death rates were too high, that estimates of famine deaths in the Volga regions had generally been too low, and that Stalin’s policies had affected everyone alike. The ‘mechanism of the creation of famine was the same’, in Russia and Ukraine, he told an interviewer: ‘there were no national differences’.16