Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

The shaky “peace” did not bring prosperity either. Waves of violence had displaced people and destroyed villages, towns, roads and railroads. The politics and policies of the Bolsheviks had rendered the economy nearly dysfunctional.

At the national level, Trotsky called for the militarization of the economy, the use of forced labour brigades and requisitioning, the same tactics deployed in the months following the 1917 revolution.

But the renewed language of War Communism held no attraction for Soviet peasants, and “officers of labour” offering lessons in the “new economy” could hardly have inspired them either.

In response, the peasants’ enthusiasm for growing, sowing and storing grain plunged.

As a result, the peasants sowed far less land in both Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 1920 than they had at any time in the recent past.

By itself, the bad weather would certainly have caused hardship, as bad weather had in the past. But when combined with the confiscatory food collection policies, the absence of able-bodied men and the acres of unsown land, it proved catastrophic.

in the spring of 1921 there was no surplus grain: it had all been confiscated. Instead, food shortages quickly resulted in famine in the Russian Volga provinces—the wide swath of territory along the middle and lower part of the Volga River—in the Urals and southern Ukraine.

peasants began to eat dogs, rats and insects; they boiled grass and leaves; there were incidents of cannibalism.

But in one extremely important sense this first Soviet famine did differ from the famine that was to follow a decade later: in 1921 mass hunger was not kept secret. More importantly, the regime tried to help the starving.

Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership—just as it would a decade later—never relinquished its desire for hard currency.

Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery.

By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread an...

By the end of 1923 the crisis seemed to be under control.

Over the course of three years some 33.5 million people were affected by famine or food shortages—26 million in Russia, 7.5 million in Ukraine—though

In the USSR as a whole the ARA estimated that 2 million people had died; a Soviet publication produced soon after the famine concluded that 5 million had died.

These numbers shook the regime’s confidence. The Bolsheviks feared that they were blamed for the disaster—and indeed they were.

By 1922 the Bolsheviks knew that they were unpopular in the countryside and especially the Ukrainian countryside.

In response, the regime changed course and adopted two dramatically new policies, both intended to win back the support of the recalcitrant Soviet peasants, and especially recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants with nationalist sentiments.

Lenin’s “New Economic Policy,” which put an end to compulsory grain collection and temporarily legalized free trade, is the better remembered of the two.

But in 1923, Moscow also launched a new “indigenization” policy (korenizatsiia) designed to appeal to the Soviet federal state’s non-Russian minorities. It gave official status and even priority to their national languages, promoted their national culture, and offered what was in effect an affirma...

By the mid-1920s the USSR had already become a strict police state,

Pro-Soviet, Russian speaking—and, often, Russian, Jewish or even Latvian or Polish by “ethnicity”—Ukraine’s political policemen were far more likely to be devoted to Stalin than to any abstract idea of the Ukrainian nation.

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.

The renewed food crisis also came at a critical moment in the Communist Party’s own internal power struggle. Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had been organizing support inside the Communist Party, marshalling his forces against Trotsky, his main rival.

Stalin used the grain crisis, as well as the general economic dissatisfaction, not only to radicalize Soviet policy, but also to complete the destruction of this group of rivals.

The grain traders were useful scapegoats. But in truth, Soviet economic policy in the 1920s had rested on a fundamental contradiction,

The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state.

Perhaps not all of the Bolsheviks understood this contradiction. But Stalin certainly did, and in the winter of 1928 he and his most senior comrades decided to take it on directly.

kulaks—rich farmers—were so much more productive than their poor neighbours because they had held on to bigger properties.

The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay “in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology.

Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became...

collective farming was the only solution. “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms…for us is the only path.”26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms.

Collectivization and centrally planned agriculture also matched Stalin’s plans for Soviet industry. In 1928 the Soviet government would approve its first “Five-Year Plan,” an economic programme that mandated a massive, unprecedented 20 per cent annual increase in industrial output,

the collectivization policy was an ideological tool that established Stalin as the indisputable leader of the party.

He had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialize the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land.

Someone, after all, had to be blamed for the slow pace of Soviet growth—and it would not be Stalin.

In 1927 the OGPU had begun looking for a “case” that could launch a new campaign against the saboteurs and foreign agents who were allegedly holding back the USSR.

Anyone with education, expertise, technical experience was now under suspicion.

In the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred any criticism of the Communist Party or any of its policies, including its agricultural policies, could be used as evidence that the critic was a nationalist, a fascist, a traitor, a saboteur or a spy.

the problem of Ukrainian national aspirations might appear to be quite different from the problem of resistance to Soviet grain procurement.

But in the late 1920s there is overwhelming evidence to show that the two became interlinked, at least in the minds of Stalin and the secret police who worked with him.

The Bolsheviks’ own experience of revolution taught them that revolutions emerge from the link between intellectuals and workers. So why shouldn’t a new revolution now emerge from the link between Ukrainian nationalist-intellectuals and peasants?

the Soviet secret police and Soviet leadership already perceived any Ukrainian resistance to grain collection as evidence of a political plot against the USSR.

the OGPU now identified another potential scapegoat: the Ukrainian Communist Party itself.

In practice, Moscow was also accumulating the evidence it might need in the future. Collectivization was coming. And if it failed in Ukraine, Moscow could force the Ukrainian Communist Party to shoulder the blame.

In the week starting 10 November 1929 the party’s Central Committee met in Moscow and resolved to “speed-up the process of collectivization of peasant households” by sending party cadres into the villages to set up new communal farms and persuade peasants to join them.

Ten years after the revolution, many people were disappointed. They needed an explanation for the hollowness of the Bolshevik triumph. The Communist Party offered them a scapegoat, and urged them to feel no mercy.

Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary.

The objective was to talk individual peasants into joining the collective farm; to make sure that the collective farm was ready to begin sowing; and, most important, to find out where and by whom state grain was being hidden…We

the beginning of “de-kulakization”—the ugly, bureaucratic term that was shorthand for the “elimination of the kulaks as a class.”