Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

This idea—that the smallest landowners, later called kulaks, were a fundamentally counter-revolutionary, capitalist force—would have great consequences some years later.

Both Marx and Lenin had convoluted and constantly evolving views of nationalism, which they sometimes saw as a revolutionary force and at other times as a distraction from the real goal of universal socialism.

Lenin also argued for cultural autonomy and national self-determination, except when it didn’t suit him.

To this complicated ideological puzzle, Stalin would add his own thoughts. He was the party’s expert on nationalities, and was initially far less flexible than Lenin.

Stalin’s essay, “Marxism and the National Question,” had argued in 1913 that nationalism was a distraction from the cause of socialism,

By 1925 his thoughts had evolved further into an argument about nationalism as an essentially peasant force. National movements, he declared, needed peasants in order to exist:

For if there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, then someone who wished to destroy a national movement might well want to begin by destroying the peasantry.

the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself.

As the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, he was a member of the first Bolshevik government.

In that role he was directly responsible for negotiating with all the non-Russian nations and peoples who had belonged to the Russian empire—and, more importantly, for convincing, or forcing, them to submit to Soviet rule.

In his dealings with Ukraine he had two clear and imm...

The first was to undermine the national movement, clearly the Bolsheviks’ most im...

The second was to get hold of Ukr...

In the wake of his first defeat in Ukraine, Lenin had simply decided to adopt different tactics. Using the methods of what would (much later, though in a similar context) be called “hybrid warfare,” he ordered his forces to re-enter Ukraine in disguise.

They were to hide the fact that they were a Russian force fighting for a unified Bolshevik Russia. Instead, they called themselves a “Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement,” precisely in order to confuse nationalists.

The idea was to use nationalist rhetoric cynically, in order to convince people...

No considerations of Marxist theory, no arguments about nationalism or sovereignty, mattered as much to the Bolsheviks in that year as the need to feed the workers of Moscow and Petrograd.

By 1919, Lenin’s telegram—“For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!!!”—had become the single most important description of Bolshevik attitudes and practice in Ukraine.

The Bolshevik obsession with food was no accident: The Russian empire had been struggling with food supplies ever since the outbreak of the First World War.

constant shortages made food supplies a hugely significant political tool.

From the very beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks assumed that the exploitation of Ukraine was the price that had to be paid in order to maintain control of Russia.

The urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, known then and later as “War Communism.”

War Communism meant the militarization of all economic relationships. In the countryside, the system was very simple: take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed “essential” by the state.

But despite the militarized language, in practice War Communism meant that most people went hungry.

To obtain any food at all, in the years between 1916 and 1918 the majority of Russians and Ukrainians used the black market, not the non-existent state companies.

illegal markets gave many people access to food, especially individuals not on special government lists.

the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers—“speculators”—who

To force the peasants to give up their grain and to fight the counter-revolution, Lenin also eventually created the chrezvychainaia komissiia—the “extraordinary commission,” also known as the Che-Ka, or Cheka. This was the first name given to the Soviet secret police, later known as the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD and finally the KGB.

The Bolsheviks, with their rigid Marxist training and hierarchical way of seeing the world, insisted on more formal markers. Eventually they would define three categories of peasant: kulaks, or wealthy peasants; seredniaks, or middle peasants; and bedniaks, or poor peasants.

Very quickly, the kulaks became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution.

The list of Bolshevik enemies also included the neighbouring Don and Kuban Cossacks,

Soldiers received orders “to conduct mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror against all those Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power…To confiscate grain

Josef Reingold, the Chekist in charge, euphemistically referred to this program as “de-cossackization.”

The term “de-cossackization” itself may have been the inspiration for “de-kulakization,” which would be so central to Soviet policy a decade later.

But the policy backfired. By mid-March, Cossacks in the Veshenskaia stanitsa, many of whom had originally cooperated with the Red Army, were in full revolt.

The Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.

Evidently the word “kulak” had already acquired a broader meaning, well beyond “rich peasant.” As early as 1919, anyone who had extra stores of grain—and anyone who opposed Soviet power—could be damned by it. A decade later, Stalin would not need to invent a new word for the same sort of enemy.

All told, Kyiv changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919 alone. Richard Pipes has memorably described that year in Ukraine as “a period of complete anarchy”:

The tragedies of those terrible years would remain in local memory for decades afterwards, feeding the desire for revenge on all sides.

anti-semitism was rife throughout the imperial army in 1914, as indeed it was rife throughout Russian society, even at the very highest levels.

Swirling conspiracy theories about Jewish treachery supplied a plausible explanation for unpalatable facts: the defeat of a unit, the loss of a division, the poor performance of the entire army.

This same belief in Jewish treachery, common enough before the February revolution, laid the groundwork for a series of appalling massacres in the years that followed.

Between 1918 and 1920 combatants on all sides—White, Directory, Polish and Bolshevik—murdered at least 50,000 Jews in more than 1,300 pogroms across Ukraine, according to the most widely accepted studi...

The pogroms, like the civil war itself, contributed to the brutalization of the population, which quickly learned to conform to the will of men with guns.

Like the Jews, kulaks would be rounded up, stripped to their underclothes, blackmailed out of their possessions, mocked and humiliated, and sometimes shot.

Soviet propagandists also sought to use the pogroms to discredit the Ukrainian national movement.

they linked Ukrainian nationalism to looting, killing and above all pogroms.

The Ukrainian peasant uprising devastated the countryside and created divisions that would never heal. It also altered, profoundly, the Bolshevik perceptions of Ukraine.

The rebellion also taught them to see Ukraine as a source of future military threats,

THE TRUCE WITH Piłsudski as well as the defeat of Denikin, the Directory and a wide array of rebels, finally allowed the Bolsheviks to force an uneven peace on Ukraine in the course of 1920–1.