Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

in 1933 the Soviet state suddenly faced a drastic shortage of labour in the Ukrainian countryside,

in late 1933, it launched a resettlement programme. Its practical result, in many parts of Ukraine, was the replacement of Ukrainians with Russians,

many of those settlers sent to Ukraine in this first wave of resettlement did indeed return home within the year. Presumably as a consequence, new waves of deportation followed. But this second group did not contain volunteers.

resettlement campaigns were understood to be a form of Russification.

Dramatic as these emergency movements between 1933 and 1936 must have been, they are far less important, in terms of numbers and influence, than the slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine, and into depleted Ukrainian republican institutions, in subsequent years and decades.

Some of them arrived to shore up the Ukrainian Communist Party, which had never recovered from the sweeping arrests of 1933. During and after the famine, the state purged, arrested and even executed tens of thousands of Ukrainian party officials.

at the time of the outbreak of war in 1939 none of the Ukrainian Communist Party leadership had any connection with or sympathy for the national movement or even national communism.

Between 1959 and 1970 over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn to the republic by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine and purges had created for energetic new residents.

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.

Whereas, 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.

He never denied, to Sholokhov or to anyone else, that peasants had died from a famine caused by state policy in 1933, and he certainly never apologized.

he never admitted that any important element of his policy—not collectivization, not grain expropriation, not the searches and shakedowns that had intensified the famine in Ukraine—was wrong.

Instead, he placed all responsibility for food shortages and mass deaths firmly onto the should...

The deaths of millions was not, in other words, a sign that Stalin’s policy had failed. On the contrary, it was a sign of success. Victory had been achieved, the enemy had been defeated. As long as the Soviet Union lasted, that view would never be contested.

in the official, Soviet world the Ukrainian famine, like the broader Soviet famine, did not exist. It did not exist in the newspapers, it did not exist in public speeches. Neither national leaders nor local leaders mentioned it—and they never would.

Students and workers sent to the countryside to help bring in the 1933 harvest were often told bluntly not to speak of what they had seen. Out of fear many obeyed.

The taboo on speaking of the famine in public affected medical workers too. Both doctors and nurses recall being told to “invent something” for death certificates, or to write down all cases of starvation as the result of “infectious diseases” or “cardiac arrest.”

At the highest levels the cover-up functioned as a form of party discipline: it was a means of controlling officials, even testing their loyalty. To prove their dedication, party members had to accept and endorse the official falsehoods.

The victims were harder to banish. Even after the bodies had been buried in unmarked mass graves, and even after the death registries were altered, there still remained the problem of Soviet statistics.

In 1937 the Soviet census bureau set out to count and measure the Soviet population, a vast task made urgent by the need to coordinate central planning.

The total population figure of the USSR came to 162 million—meaning that (for those who expected 170 million) some eight million people were “missing.” That inexact number included victims of the famine and their unborn children.

Rather than accept the result, Stalin abolished it. Meetings were called; expert panels were created. A special Central Committee resolution declared the census badly organized, unprofessional, and a “gross violation of the basic fundamentals of statistical science.”

The publication of the 1937 census was halted immediately, and the results never appeared. The statisticians themselves paid the price.

By November an entirely new cadre of officials had replaced these men, every one of whom now understood that it was extremely dangerous to produce accurate numbers.

in March 1939, before the final tally was complete, he announced, with great fanfare, that the Soviet population had indeed reached 170 million.

In due course the statisticians found ways to make the numbers match the rhetoric.

Overall, they boosted the population by at least 1 per cent. For decades afterwards the 1939 census was held up as a model piece of statistical research.

Violence, repression and the census falsification successfully quelled discussion of the famine inside the USSR.

Information was not so easily controlled outside the Soviet Union. Information did cross borders, as did people.

Although the Vatican continued to receive information about the famine, the Holy See mostly kept silent in public.

Hitler’s January 1933 electoral victory created a political trap: the hierarchy feared that strong language about the Soviet famine would make it seem as if the Pope favoured Nazi Germany.

Similar arguments took hold elsewhere, shaped by similar political constraints. Many European foreign ministries had superb information about the famine, as it was happening, in real time.

the manipulation of the foreign press corps in Moscow required a good deal more sophistication. Their movements and conversations could not be completely controlled—and they could not be ordered what to write.

the more established, more influential Moscow-based journalists had to be careful if they wanted to keep their jobs.

At the time, Moscow correspondents needed the state’s permission not only to remain in residence but also to file their articles. Without a signature and the official stamp of the press department, the central telegraph office would not send any dispatches abroad.

To win that permission, journalists regularly bargained with Foreign Ministry censors over which words they could use, and they kept on good terms with Konstantin Umanskii, the Soviet official responsible for the foreign press corps.

Everyone knew—yet no one mentioned it. Hence the extraordinary reaction of both the Soviet establishment and the Moscow press corps to the journalistic escapade of Gareth Jones.

Jones declared that a major famine was unfolding across the Soviet Union

On 31 March, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the headline of The New York Times.

“Russians Hungry But Not Starving” became the accepted wisdom. It also coincided nicely with the hard political and diplomatic considerations of the moment. As 1933 turned into 1934 and then 1935, Europeans grew even more worried about Hitler.

IN THE YEARS that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened.

stories became an alternative narrative, an emotionally powerful “true history” of the famine, an oral tradition that grew and developed alongside the official denials.

From 1933 until the late 1980s the silence inside Ukraine was total—with one glaring, painful and complicated exception.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

Not knowing what was to come next, many Ukrainians, even Jewish Ukrainians, at first welcomed the German troops.

one woman recalled. “We were all so happy to see them. They were going to save us from the Communists who had t...

De-kulakization, collectivization, mass terror and the Bolshevik attacks on the Church encouraged a naively optimistic view of what the Wehrmacht might bring.

The uproar ended quickly—and anyone who hoped for a better life under German occupation had their expectations swiftly dashed.

The Holocaust began immediately, unfolding not in distant camps but in public.

Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war—between 800,000 and a million people—a