More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This was one of the first Soviet uses of mass violence and mass movement of people for the purposes of social engineering.
border in Poland. Shumskyi served as liaison to the Communist Party of western Ukraine, meaning the territories that then belonged to Poland.
In order to promote the language more widely and faster, Skrypnyk even imported 1,500 schoolteachers from Poland, where Ukrainian-language schools had been in existence for longer and where the teaching of Ukrainian was more entrenched.89 These decisions had a significant impact.
As we have seen, the state approved of the idea that Soviet Ukraine should begin to exercise influence on Ukrainian speakers abroad, particularly in Poland.
he traced the origins of this secret force to the coup carried out by Piłsudski in Poland in May 1926.
At a special plenum in the spring of 1927, Skrypnyk, who had now replaced Shumskyi as Commissar of Education, echoed the general paranoia about foreign enemies and denounced both Shumskyi and Khvylovyi for collaborating with “fascist” Poland.49
The secret police also believed they would find connections between members of the workforce and the former owners of factories who had lost their property in the revolution and were supposedly plotting to get it back, as well as links to other foreign powers, including Poland.
A group with a similar name had been founded in Lviv in 1914—it later developed small branches in Vienna and Berlin before fading away—and had propagated the Ukrainian cause among prisoners of war.
Yefremov had already been under public attack for many months, on the grounds that he had published an article in a Ukrainian-language newspaper based across the Polish border in Lviv.
The indictment accused the SVU of plotting the overthrow of Soviet power in Ukraine, “with the assistance of a foreign bourgeois state”—Poland—so as to “restore the capitalist order in the form of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.”
The UVO and OUN were real organizations—both were active across the border in Poland, where they resisted Polish rule in western Ukraine—but their influence in Ukraine was vastly exaggerated.
The SPV then created special sections to monitor the Ukrainian Academy of Science, to track the 60,000 Ukrainians who had moved to the USSR from Poland, and to look into a huge range of literary groups and publishers, university professors, high-school teachers and other “suspicious” groups as well.
Rumours that the Poles were soon to cross the border inspired peasants in the village of Mykhailivka to start stockpiling food, emptying the local cooperative shop of its provisions.
“The Poles are already in Velykyi Bobryk!” “Bobryk has already been taken!” “They are advancing directly on Mykhailivka!” No one knows what to do—flee or stay.75
Secret police reports recorded peasants telling one another that “in two months the Poles will arrive in Ukraine, and that will be the end of grain requisitions”
Polish, German and Jewish residents of Ukraine meanwhile began plotting to leave. “The Germans in Russia are outcasts; we need to go to America,” members of that minority told one another: “It is better to be a good farmer in America than a bad one in Russia and be called a kulak.” Ethnic Poles were reportedly excited by news that the Polish army was conducting military exercises across the border, and taking “malicious pleasure at the prospect of an impending change of government.”76
Despite the fact that Symon Petliura himself was now dead—murdered two years earlier by an assassin’s bullet in Paris—the memory of how his forces had once conquered Kyiv, backed by Polish forces, was never far from the two officers’ thoughts: Notably reanimated in recent days are the Petliurists, who are trying to make Ukraine into a beachhead for a future imperialist campaign in the USSR. There is no doubt that the government of Piłsudski stands behind the Petliurist UNR [Ukrainian People’s Republic movement] but it would be incorrect to explain the revival of Petliurists in the Ukrainian
...more
Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 1937
The definition, infinitely adaptable, seemed to expand most easily to encompass the smaller ethnic groups who lived in the USSR, including Poles and Germans, both of whom had a distinct presence in Ukraine.
Already in January 1930 guards caught three peasants in the Kamianets-Podilskyi border province trying to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border.22 A month later, a group of 400 peasants from several villages marched towards the border shouting “We don’t want collectives, we’re going to Poland!” Along the way they attacked and beat up anyone who stood in their way, until they were finally stopped by border guards. The following day another crowd from the same group of villages marched towards the border, also shouting that they would ask for help from the Poles. They too were stopped by guards,
...more
become the “ideologists” of such a revolution. Anybody with any foreign links—especially links to Poland—was suspicious because they might receive “active assistance” from abroad.
organizations (mainly Petliurite) liquidated in Ukraine…were tightly linked to Poland.”
on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.
affected the foreigners living in Ukraine too. The Polish consul in Kyiv cabled to Warsaw his observations of “severe food shortages” in many villages. He had seen people collapsing on the streets from starvation in Vinnytsia and Uman.
Maria Błażejewska, an ethnic Pole, entered Poland from Ukraine in October 1932 by pretending to be a washerwoman. While laundering clothes in the Zbruch River, which then served as the border, she slipped across to the other side.
By December 1932 the Polish Interior Ministry had established a special commission for Ukrainian refugees, including a representative of the Red Cross and one from the League of Nations.60
All across the Soviet Union, in the far north and far east, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of Poland and in Ukraine itself, itinerant Ukrainians were not only spreading news of the famine, they were bringing their allegedly counter-revolutionary attitudes along with them. As their numbers increased dramatically, the Soviet government finally declared there could no longer be any doubt: “the flight of villagers and the exodus from Ukraine last year and this year is [being] organized by the enemies of the Soviet government…and agents of Poland with the goal of spreading propaganda among
...more
By the end of the year, the “conspiracy” had acquired international aspects too. In late December, Balytsky revealed the existence of a plot, a “Polish-Petliurite insurgent underground encompassing 67 local districts in Ukraine.” In February 1933 he wrote again of the “counter-revolutionary insurgent underground, linked to foreigners and foreign espionage, mainly the Polish general staff.”
They had also found “23 Polish-Petliurite representatives”; a “widely established insurgent underground” in the western districts of Ukraine as well as Donbas, supposedly linked to a “Warsaw-based” Ukrainian government in exile;
While the low-level party resistance had been real, these vast international connections were, even by OGPU standards, absurd. Poland had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932.26 The White Army generals named in the reports were already semi-retired and living in Paris, old men with no real reach or influence in the USSR. Petliura was long dead.
Nikita Khrushchev became the first party secretary in Ukraine in 1939.
As he explained years later, he had, like the Twenty-Five Thousanders before him, deliberately allowed himself to succumb to a form of intellectual blindness. Kravchenko spoke for many when he described it: “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind. You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”62 The language of the propaganda also helped mask reality: We communists, among ourselves, steered around the subject; or we dealt with it in the high-flown euphemisms of party lingo. We
...more
She and others like her believed they had no choice, or were afraid that refusal would mean arrest or even death. The majority of the thousands of long prison sentences handed out to Ukrainian communists at that time were for people who had failed, sometimes deliberately, to put pressure on their neighbours to give up all their food. By the time of the grain collections, Balytsky’s purge of the Ukrainian Communist Party had begun, and leaders at every level knew that they were at risk of arrest and execution.
Jews, Germans and Poles had another advantage too: they were not perceived to be part of the Ukrainian national movement, and thus were not particular targets of the repressive wave of 1932–3, though those groups would become targets later on.
Vinnytsia and Moldova, the two provinces bordering on Poland and Romania,
as well as “nationalistic and anti-Soviet elements.” Many were from regions of western Ukraine that bordered on foreign countries, including large numbers of ethnic Germans and Poles. The “fifth column” that the OGPU had described so many times was now removed from the border region for good.
distant destinations beyond eastern Ukraine. Some 15,000 Polish and German households—by some accounts 70,000 people—found themselves assigned to Kazakhstan, where famine had also devastated the countryside.33
In May 1933 a Ukrainian newspaper in Lviv (then a Polish city) published an article denouncing the famine as an attack on the Ukrainian national movement: The eastern side of the Zbruch River [the border] now looks like a real military camp that is difficult for a citizen to cross even at night, as in wartime. We are informed of this by refugees who recently managed to wade across the Zbruch…they arrived as living skeletons because the famine there is terrible. Even dogs are being killed, and today’s slaves of the collective farms are being fed dog meat, for in fertile Ukraine neither bread
...more
Ethnic Ukrainian politicians brought up the famine at sessions of the Polish parliament, and described it in the Ukrainian-language press.31 In October 1933, Mykola Lemyk, a member of a Ukrainian nationalist organization in Poland, murdered the secretary of the Soviet consul in Lviv. During his trial in a Polish court, Lemyk, who had been hoping to kill the consul himself, described the murder as revenge for the famine.32 At the end of that month the Ukrainian community in Poland tried to organize a mass demonstration in protest against the famine, but they were stopped by the Polish
...more
Preserved in the church diocese archive in Vienna, these are still the only verified photographs taken in Ukraine of famine victims in 1933.40
Polish diplomats were deeply shocked by the famine—so much so that their accounts were dismissed. Stanislaw Kosnicki, the head of the Kyiv consulate, was rebuked in January 1934 for including too much “information about famine, misery, persecution of the population, the fight against Ukrainianness etc.” Polish diplomats, like their colleagues, nevertheless had no doubt that the famine and the repressions were part of a plan: “Mass arrests and persecutions cannot be explained or justified by peril on the part of the Ukrainian national movement…the real cause of the action lies in the planned,
...more
New York Evening Post (“Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying, Idle on Rise Says Briton”) and the Chicago Daily News (“Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George”).
The Poles, who had very detailed information on the famine from multiple sources, also remained silent. They had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932; their policy of truce and cold peace with their Soviet neighbours would backfire badly in 1939.87
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By November the Wehrmacht had occupied most of Soviet Ukraine.
Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war—between 800,000 and a million people—a substantial part of the millions
To mark the tenth anniversary of the famine, in 1942–3—coincidentally the high-water mark of Nazi power in Ukraine—many newspapers published material aimed at winning peasant support.
also be heard in the privacy of people’s homes. Because the Soviet and German invasions had effectively united western Ukraine (Galicia, Bukovyna and western Volhynia) with the rest of the country, many western Ukrainians managed to travel east for the first time, recording what they saw and heard.
Even the Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia found it hard to grapple with the idea of a state-sponsored famine: “Frankly, we found it difficult to believe that a government could do such a thing.”31
The mix of emotive peasant memoir with semi-scholarly essays did not appeal to professional American historians.
in Lviv, the formerly Polish territory incorporated into Soviet Ukraine in 1939—
