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For Stalin, who remembered the civil war in Ukraine, the loss of the republic was an exceedingly dangerous prospect.
The USSR could not afford to lose Ukraine again.
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.
Several sets of directives that autumn, on requisitions, blacklisted farms and villages, border controls and the end of Ukrainization—along with an information blockade and extraordinary searches, designed to remove everything edible from the homes of millions of peasants—created the famine now remembered as the Holodomor.
The party issued a resolution declaring that “the full delivery of grain procurement plans is the principal duty of all collective farms,” to be prioritized above and beyond anything else, including the collection of grain reserves, seed reserves, animal fodder and, ominously, daily food supplies.
But in the autumn of 1932 underperforming private farmers and collective farms not only had to give up their seed reserves, they also had to pay a meat penalty—a “fifteen-month quota of meat from collectivized and privately owned livestock”—as well as a potato penalty, comprising a “one-year potato quota.”
Stalin knew that the methods being used were damaging, and he knew they would fail. But he allowed them to continue for several fatal months, during which time millions died.
In November and December 1932, as the significance of the new “unconditional” requisition orders was sinking in, the Ukrainian Communist Party enlarged and formalized the republic’s system of blacklists.
From the beginning of that year, provincial and local authorities had begun to blacklist collective farms, cooperatives and even whole villages that had failed to meet their grain quotas, and to subject them to a range of punishments and sanctions.
With no grain, no livestock, no tools, no money and no credit, with no ability to trade or even to leave their places of work, the inhabitants of blacklisted villages could not grow, prepare or purchase anything to eat at all.
As Ukrainian peasants grew more hungry, another problem arose: how to prevent starving people from leaving their homes in search of something to eat.
In January 1933, Stalin and Molotov simply closed the borders of Ukraine. Any Ukrainian peasant found outside the republic was returned to his or her place of origin. Train tickets were no longer sold to Ukrainian villagers.
Separately, work continued on an internal passport system, which was finally set up in December 1932. In practice, this meant that anyone who resided in the city needed a special passport, a residence document—and peasants were explicitly prevented from obtaining them.
Just as it was publicly publishing the new decrees on food requisition and blacklists, the Politburo also issued, on 14 and 15 December respectively, two secret decrees that explicitly blamed Ukrainization for the requisitions failure.
They also set off an immediate mass purge of Ukrainian Communist Party officials, as well as verbal and then physical attacks on university professors, schoolteachers, academics and intellectuals—anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian national idea.
During the following year all of the institutions connected to Ukrainian culture were purged, shut down, or transformed: universities, academies, galleries, clubs.
The result of this purge, which took place at the same time as the famine, was to make the Ukrainian Communist Party a tool of Moscow, with no autonomy or any ability to take decisions on its own.
in the course of two years, 1932 and 1933—the years of the famine—the same Soviet secret police responsible for overseeing the hunger in the countryside would arrest nearly 200,000 people in the republic of Ukraine.
Although the Ukrainization policy continued to exist on paper, in practice the Russian language returned to dominance in both higher education and public life. Millions assumed that any association with Ukrainian language or history was toxic, even dangerous, as well as “backwards” and inferior.
Unlike the other measures aimed at Ukraine in 1932–3, no written instructions governing the behaviour of activists have ever been found.
Nevertheless, a remarkably consistent oral history record shows a sharp change in activists’ behaviour on the eve of the Holodomor.
the activists “came and took everything.
starvation was used to make peasants complicit.
Some recalled that, in addition to taking the food, brigades went out of their way to spoil it.
As the weeks dragged on, just being alive attracted suspicion: if a family was alive, that meant it had food.
But if they had food, then they should have given it up—and if they had failed to give it up, then they were kulaks, Petliurites, Polish agents, enemies.
the brigades in the autumn of 1932 and winter of 1933 were almost always composites. As in 1930, they often included members from different organizations: the local party leadership and the provincial government, the Komsomol, the civil service, the secret police.
These new brigades were not carrying out an agricultural reform, or even pretending to do so: they were taking food away from starving families, as well as anything valuable that could have been exchanged for food, and, in some cases, any implements that could be used to prepare it.
Propaganda also helped persuade many activists to think of the peasants as second-class citizens, even second-class human beings—if they were even human beings at all.
Soviet newspapers had explained that food shortages in the cities were not caused by collectivization, but rather by greedy peasants who were keeping their produce to themselves.
But the vast majority of members of the brigades that searched villages for food in 1932–3 were not outsiders. Nor were they motivated by hatred of Ukrainian peasants, because they were Ukrainian peasants themselves.
As in other historic genocides, they were persuaded to kill people whom they knew extremely well.
Whether they were locals or outsiders, all those who carried out orders to confiscate food did so with a sense of impunity.
Over and over again they had been told that their starving neighbours were kulak agents, dangerous enemy elements.
grain collectors not only did not fear punishment for their behaviour, they expected rewards.
Sexual coercion was also used as a weapon: one brigade member told several women that in exchange for sex with him, they would not have to give up their grain.
the party leadership, at the very highest levels, sanctioned extreme cruelty and supported the removal of food and possessions from the peasantry.
For those who remained alive, the physical symptoms were often just the beginning. The psychological changes could be equally dramatic.
Over and over, survivors have written and spoken about how personalities were altered by hunger, and how normal behaviour ceased. The desire to eat simply overwhelmed everything else—and familial feelings above all.
In these circumstances the rules of ordinary morality no longer made sense. Theft from neighbours, cousins, the collective farm, workplaces became widespread. Among those who suffered, stealing was widely condoned.
This transformation of honest people into thieves was only the beginning. As the weeks passed, the famine literally drove people crazy, provoking irrational anger and more extraordinary acts of aggression.
In the cities, where the authorities still wanted to conceal the horror occurring in the countryside, the men of the OGPU often collected bodies at night and buried them in secret.
The horror, the exhaustion, the inhuman indifference to life and constant exposure to the language of hatred left their mark.
by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread. Even more extraordinarily, its existence was no secret, not in Kharkiv, Kyiv, or Moscow.
Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation.
agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million.
The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number.
The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban.
the famine touched Russia far less than Ukraine, with an overall 3 per cent “excess deaths” in rural Russia, as against 14.9 per cent in rural Ukraine.
the regions “normally” most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not “normal.” It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity.
