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In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger—holod—and extermination—mor.
Led by Lenin, a paranoid, conspiratorial and fundamentally undemocratic man, the Bolsheviks believed themselves to be the “vanguard of the proletariat”; they would call their regime the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They sought absolute power, and eventually abolished all other political parties and opponents through terror, violence and vicious propaganda campaigns.
disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution.
In the spring of 1918 these conditions inspired Lenin’s first chrezvychaishchina—a phrase translated by one scholar as “a special condition in public life when any feeling of legality is lost and arbitrariness in power prevails.”
The peasants’ resistance infuriated the Bolsheviks, not least because it confounded their historical determinism: the poor were supposed to support them, not fight against them.
A complete explanation for this infamous wave of anti-semitic violence is beyond the scope of this book, especially since so much of the evidence was long ago cherry-picked by authors seeking to prove a case for or against the Bolsheviks, the White Army or the Directory. From a wide range of sources it is clear that there were perpetrators on all sides.
By the mid-1920s the USSR had already become a strict police state,
For the Communist Party the crisis threatened to overshadow an important anniversary: ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars.
Ivanisov, like many others, faced an impossible choice: ideologically approved poverty on the one hand, or dangerously unacceptable wealth on the other. The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state.
Balytsky, with the skill of a trained conspiracy theorist, detected an even deeper plot.
With the rest of my generation, I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.”
Kaganovich, no longer head of the Ukrainian Communist Party but still keenly interested in Ukrainian affairs, declared that women had played the “most ‘advanced’ role in the reaction against the collective farm.”
In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the “Great Terror”—the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes—were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine.
The Communist Party waited—and then pressed ahead. The temperate language of Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success” article turned out to be just that: language. The same policies continued, and even grew harsher.
The missing feeling of “responsibility,” destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed. But although this was already clear as early as 1931, it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself.
This preference for long camp sentences over capital punishment, dictated from above, was clearly pragmatic: forced labourers could get to work on the Gulag system’s vast new industrial projects—mines, factories, logging operations—that were just getting underway.
Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.
From their very earliest days in power, the Bolsheviks had grappled with the problem of low productivity. Since neither bosses nor workers in state companies had any market incentives to work hard or well, the state created elaborate schemes of reward and punishment.
In other words, the extermination of the intellectual class was accompanied by the extermination of their words and ideas.
“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.”
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.
Secret police files contain multiple records of cannibals who were subsequently imprisoned, executed, or lynched.
Timothy Snyder has described how state institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, when they were still functioning, could rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and a parallel story can be told about Stalin’s Soviet Union.39 While the Bolsheviks had systematically destroyed independent institutions, including churches, charities and private companies, state institutions remained—schools, hospitals, orphanages—and some of them were in a position to help.
History, culture, family and identity were destroyed by the famine too, sacrificed in the name of survival.
“My son, it’s time to get up, The sun has risen over the field We cannot lie peacefully in our graves, We, the dead, are unable to rest. Who will care for the precious ears of grain In the fields, my dear son?”
Although mortality statistics were recorded as accurately as possible in 1933, the authorities, as the next chapter will explain, later altered death registries across Ukraine to hide the numbers of deaths from starvation, and in 1937 scrapped an entire census because of what it revealed.
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 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.
most influential journalists of his time. Many of the men who would become part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” were looking for new economic ideas and had a deep interest in the Soviet experiment; several had visited Moscow in 1927, where they were granted a six-hour interview with Stalin.
Duranty’s accounts chimed with their general worldview and attracted wide attention: in 1932 his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize.
“When we believed in God we were happy and lived well. When they tried to do away with God, we became hungry.” Another man told him he had not eaten meat for a year.
In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.
IN THE YEARS that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened. They were afraid to mourn publicly. Even if they had dared to do so, there were no churches to pray in, no tombstones to decorate with flowers. When the state destroyed the institutions of the Ukrainian countryside, it struck a blow against public memory as well.
“I want to defend the Motherland, but I don’t want to defend Stalin, that traitor to the revolution.”
Then, as now, the historical argument about Ukraine was shaped by domestic American politics. Although there is no objective reason why the study of the famine should have been considered either “right wing” or “left wing” at all, the politics of Cold War academia meant that any scholars who wrote about Soviet atrocities were easily pigeonholed.
The commission concluded that “the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was caused by the extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population” and not, in other words, by “bad weather” or “kulak sabotage.”
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.
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
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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.
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.
That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.
Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s—the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers—continues to matter.
The political passivity in Ukraine, the tolerance of corruption, and the general wariness of state institutions, even democratic ones—all of these contemporary Ukrainian political pathologies date back to 1933.
Thanks to Russian pressure, the nation is unifying behind the Ukrainian language as it has not done since the 1920s.
Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were “enemies of the people,” dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.
As in the past, the Kremlin uses language to set people against one another, to create first- and second-class citizens, to divide and distract.
The Ukrainian street revolution of 2014 represented the Russian leadership’s worst nightmare: young people calling for the rule of law, denouncing corruption and waving European flags. Such a movement could have been contagious—and so it had to be stopped by whatever means possible. Today’s Russian government uses disinformation, corruption and military force to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty just as Soviet governments did in the past.
The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending. But the history of Ukraine is not a tragedy. Millions of people were murdered, but the nation remains on the map. Memory was suppressed, but Ukrainians today discuss and debate their past. Census records were destroyed, but today the archives are accessible.
