Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Taken together, these two policies—the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed—brought about the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity.

The Sovietization of Ukraine did not begin with the famine and did not end with it. Arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders continued through the 1930s. For more than half a century after that, successive Soviet leaders continued to push back harshly against Ukrainian nationalism in whatever form it took, whether as post-war insurgency or as dissent in the 1980s. During those years Sovietization often took the form of Russification: the Ukrainian language was demoted, Ukrainian history was not taught. Above all, the history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place.

The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.

Ukraine—the word means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish—belonged to the Russian empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to that, the same lands belonged to Poland, or rather the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which inherited them in 1569 from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Earlier still, Ukrainian lands lay at the heart of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval state in the ninth century formed by Slavic tribes and a Viking nobility, and, in the memories of the region, an almost mythical kingdom that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians all claim as their ancestor.

The troops of the Russian tsar fought those of the Austro-Hungarian emperor in 1914 in Galicia.

Ever since Europeans began to debate the meaning of nations and nationalism, historians, writers, journalists, poets and ethnographers have argued over the extent of Ukraine and the nature of the Ukrainians. From the time of their first contacts in the early Middle Ages, Poles always acknowledged that the Ukrainians were linguistically and culturally separate from themselves, even when they were part of the same state. Many of the Ukrainians who accepted Polish aristocratic titles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained Orthodox Christians, not Roman Catholics; Ukrainian peasants spoke a language that the Poles called “Ruthenian,” and were always described as having different customs, different music, different food.

Russian scholars and bureaucrats treated the Ukrainian language as “a dialect, or half a dialect, or a mode of speech of the all-Russian language, in one word a patois, and as such had no right to an independent existence.”

The black-earth district encompasses about two-thirds of modern Ukraine—spreading from there into Russia and Kazakhstan—and, along with a relatively mild climate, makes it possible for Ukraine to produce two harvests every year. “Winter wheat” is planted in the autumn, and harvested in July and August; spring grains are planted in April and May, and harvested in October and November.

neither the Poles nor the Russians wanted to concede that their agricultural breadbasket had an independent identity.

But because the borders between all of the regional powers shifted many times, members of both faiths lived, and still live, on both sides of the dividing line between former Russian and former Polish territories. By the nineteenth century, when Italians, Germans and other Europeans also began to identify themselves as peoples of modern nations, the intellectuals debating “Ukrainianness” in Ukraine were both Orthodox and Catholic, and lived in both “eastern” and “western” Ukraine. Despite differences in grammar and orthography, language unified Ukrainians across the region too. The use of the Cyrillic alphabet kept Ukrainian distinct from Polish, which is written in the Latin alphabet. (At one point the Habsburgs tried to impose a Latin script, but it failed to take hold.) The Ukrainian version of Cyrillic also kept it distinct from Russian, retaining enough differences, including some extra letters, to prevent the languages from becoming too close. For much of Ukraine’s history, Ukrainian was spoken mostly in the countryside. As Ukraine was a colony of Poland, and then Russia and Austria-Hungary, Ukraine’s major cities—as Trotsky once observed—became centres of colonial control, islands of Russian, Polish or Jewish culture in a sea of Ukrainian peasantry. Well into the twentieth century, the cities and the countryside were thus divided by language: most urban Ukrainians spoke Russian, Polish or Yiddish, whereas rural Ukrainians spoke Ukrainian. Jews, if they did not speak...

These divisions also meant the promotion of “Ukrainianness” created conflict with Ukraine’s colonial rulers, as well as with the inhabitants of the Jewish shtetls who had made their home in the territory of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Middle Ages. Khmelnytsky’s uprising included a mass pogrom, during which thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of Jews were murdered. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ukrainians rarely saw the Jews as their most important rivals—Ukrainian poets and intellectuals mostly reserved their anger for Russians and Poles—but the widespread anti-semitism of the Russian empire inevitably affected Ukrainian-Jewish relations too.

The link between the language and the countryside also meant that the Ukrainian national movement always had a strong “peasant” flavour. As in other parts of Europe, the intellectuals who led Ukraine’s national awakening often began by rediscovering the language and customs of the countryside. Folklorists and ...

Although not taught in state schools, Ukrainian became the language of choice for a certain kind of rebellious, anti-establishment Ukrainian writer or artist. Patriotic private Sunday schools began to teach it too. It was never employed in official transactions...

The importance of the peasantry also meant that from the very beginning the Ukrainian national awakening was synonymous with populist and what would later be called “left wing” opposition to the Russian and Polish-speaking merchants, landowners and aristocracy. For that reason, it rapidly gathered strength following the emancipation of the serfs across imperial Russia under Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Freedom for the peasants was, in effect, freedom for Ukrainians, and a blow to their Russian and Polish masters. The pressure for a more powerful Ukrainian identity was, even then, also pressure for greater political and economic equality, as the imperial ruling class well understood.

During the Russian empire’s first great educational reform in 1804, Tsar Alexander I permitted some non-Russian languages to be used in the new state schools but not Ukrainian, ostensibly on the grounds that it was not a “language” but rather a dialect.14 In fact, Russian officials were perfectly clear, as their Soviet successors would be, about the political justification for this ban—which lasted until 1917—and the threat that the Ukrainian language posed to the central government. The governor-general of Kyiv, Podolia and Volyn declared in 1881 that using the Ukrainian language and textbooks in schools could lead to its use in higher education and eventually in legislation, the courts and public administration, thus creating “numerous complications and dangerous alterations to the unified Russian state.”

The restrictions on the use of Ukrainian limited the impact of the national movement. They also resulted in widespread illiteracy. Many peasants, educated in Russian, a language they barely understood, made little progress.

for everybody who lived in Ukraine—Jews, Germans and other national minorities as well as Ukrainians—the path to higher social status was a Russian-speaking one. Until the 1917 revolution, government jobs, professional jobs and business deals required an education in Russian, not Ukrainian. In practice, this meant that Ukrainians who were politically, economically or intellectually ambitious needed to communicate in Russian.

The sharp hostility to Ukrainian media and Ukrainian civil society later espoused by the Soviet regime—and, much later, by the post-Soviet Russian government as well—thus had a clear precedent in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Industrialization deepened the pressure for Russification as well, since the construction of factories brought outsiders to Ukrainian cities from elsewhere in the Russian empire. By 1917 only one-fifth of the inhabitants of Kyiv spoke Ukrainian.19 The discovery of coal and the rapid development of heavy industry had a particularly dramatic impact on Donbas, the mining and manufacturing region on the eastern edge of Ukraine. The leading industrialists in the region were mostly Russians, with a few notable foreigners mixed in:

Russian became the working language of the Donetsk factories. Conflicts often broke out between Russian and Ukrainian workers, sometimes taking the “most wild forms of knife fights” and pitched battles.

Across the imperial border in Galicia, the mixed Ukrainian-Polish province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the nationalist movement struggled much less. The Austrian state gave Ukrainians in the empire far more autonomy and freedom than did Russia or later the USSR, not least because they regarded the Ukrainians as (from their point of view) useful competition for the Poles.

But even inside the Russian empire, the years just before the revolution of 1917 were in many ways positive for Ukraine. The Ukrainian peasantry took part enthusiastically in the early twentieth-century modernization of imperial Russia.

A wave of peasant revolts ricocheted across both Ukraine and Russia in 1902; peasants played a major role in the 1905 revolution as well. The ensuing riots set off a chain reaction of unrest, unsettled Tsar Nicholas II, and led to the introduction of some civil and political rights in Ukraine, including the right to use the Ukrainian language in public.

After a brief but bloody Polish-Ukrainian military conflict that cost 15,000 Ukrainian and 10,000 Polish lives, the multi-ethnic territory of western Ukraine, including Galicia as well as Lviv, its most important city, was integrated into modern Poland. There it remained from 1919 to 1939.

When the politicians gathered at Versailles in 1919 drew the borders of new states—among them modern Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia—Ukraine would not be among them. Still, the moment would not be entirely lost.

From the nineteenth century onwards, Ukrainian historians, like their counterparts in many of Europe’s smaller nations, had deliberately set out to recover and articulate a national history that had long been subsumed into that of larger empires. From there, it was a short step to actual political activism.

all across Europe: before they attained statehood, poets, artists and writers had played important roles in the establishment of Polish, Italian and German national identity. Inside the Russian empire, both the Baltic States, which became independent in 1918, and Georgia and Armenia, which did not, experienced similar national revivals. The centrality of intellectuals to all of these national projects was fully understood at the time by their proponents and opponents alike. It explains why imperial Russia had banned Ukrainian books, schools and culture, and why their repression would later be of central concern to both Lenin and Stalin.

Between 1914 and 1918 the army of the Russian tsar had contained more than 3 million Ukrainian conscripts, and the Austro-Hungarian army had included an additional 250,000. Many of these peasant-soldiers had shot at one another across the muddy trenches of Galicia.8 But after the war ended, some 300,000 men who had been serving in “Ukrainianized” battalions, composed of Ukrainian peasants, declared their loyalty to the new state. Some brought back weapons and joined the new Central Rada militia.

the revival of the Ukrainian language was also popular, especially among the peasantry. As it had in the past, Ukrainian again became synonymous with economic and political liberation: once officials and bureaucrats began to speak Ukrainian, peasants had access to courts and government offices.

During its brief existence, the Ukrainian government also had some diplomatic successes, many of which subsequently faded from memory. Following its declaration of independence on 26 January 1918, the Ukrainian Republic’s twenty-eight-year-old Foreign Minister, Oleksandr Shulhyn (also a historian by training), won de facto recognition for his state from all of the main European powers, including France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey and even Soviet Russia. In December the United States sent a diplomat to open a consulate in Kyiv.14 In February 1918 a delegation of Ukrainian officials at Brest-Litovsk concluded a peace treaty with the Central Powers, a deal separate from the better-known one signed by the new leaders of Soviet Russia a few weeks later.

But it was insufficient: the spread of national consciousness, foreign recognition and even the Brest-Litovsk treaty were not enough to build the Ukrainian state. The Central Rada’s proposed reforms—especially its plans to take land from estate owners without compensation—brought about confusion and chaos in the countryside. The public parades, the flags and the freedom that Hrushevsky and his followers greeted with so much optimism in the spring of 1917 did not lead to the creation of a functioning bureaucracy, a public administration to enforce its reforms or an army effective enough to repel invasion and protect its borders. By the end of 1917 all the military powers of the region, including the brand-new Red Army, the White Armies of the old regime, and troops from Germany and Austria, were making plans to occupy Ukraine. To different degrees, each of them would attack Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian nationalism and even the Ukrainian language along with Ukrainian land.

the greatest political divide—and the one that would shape the course of the subsequent decades—was between those who shared the ideals of the Ukrainian national movement and those who supported the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary group with a very different ideology altogether.

At the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks were a small minority party in Russia, the radical faction of what had been the Marxist Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. But they spent the year agitating in the Russian streets, using simple slogans such as “Land, Bread and Peace” designed to appeal to the widest numbers of soldiers, workers and peasants. Their coup d’état in October (7 November according to the “new calendar” they later adopted) put them in power amidst conditions of total chaos.

In early 1917 the Bolsheviks had even fewer followers in Ukraine. The party had 22,000 Ukrainian members, most of whom were in the large cities and industrial centres of Donetsk and Kryvyi Rih. Few spoke Ukrainian. More than half considered themselves to be Russians. About one in six was Jewish. A tiny number, including a few who would later play major roles in the Soviet Ukrainian government, did believe in the possibility of an autonomous, Bolshevik Ukraine.

disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution. In large part this was simply because all of the leading Bolsheviks, among them Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Piatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, were men raised and educated in the Russian empire, and the Russian empire did not recognize such a thing as “Ukraine” in the province that they knew as “Southwest Russia.” The city of Kyiv was, to them, the ancient capital of Kyivan Rus’, the kingdom that they remembered as the ancestor of Russia. In school, in the press and in daily life they would have absorbed Russia’s prejudices against a language that was widely described as a dialect of Russian, and a people widely perceived as primitive former serfs.

All Russian political parties at the time, from the Bolsheviks to the centrists to the far right, shared this contempt. Many refused to use the name “Ukraine” at all.31 Even Russian liberals refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Ukrainian national movement. This blind spot—and the consequent refusal of any Russian groups to create an anti-Bolshevik coalition with the Ukrainians—was ultimately one of the reasons why the White Armies failed to win the civil war.

according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset. In an 1852 essay Marx famously explained that they were not a “class” and thus had no class consciousness: “They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”

Although Marx believed that peasants had no important role in the coming revolution, Lenin, who was more pragmatic, modified these views to a degree. He thought that the peasants were indeed potentially revolutionary—he approved of their desire for radical land reform—but believed that they needed to be guided by the more progressive working class. “Not all peasants fighting for land and freedom are fully aware of what their struggle implies,” he wrote in 1905. Class-conscious workers would need to teach them that real revolution required not just land reform but the “fight against the rule of capital.” Ominously, Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders. This explained why “not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism.”34 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. Marx understood that the democratic revolutions of 1848 had been inspired in part by national feelings, but he believed these “bourgeois nationalist” sentiments to be a temporary phenomenon, a mere stage on the road to communist internationalism. As the state faded away, so, somehow, would nations and national sentiments.

Lenin also argued for cultural autonomy and national self-determination, except when it didn’t suit him. Even before the revolution, he disapproved of non-Russian language schools, whether Yiddish or Ukrainian, on the grounds that they would create unhelpful divisions within the working class.36 Although he theoretically favoured granting the right of secession to the non-Russian regions of the Russian empire, which included Georgia, Armenia and the Central Asian states, he seems not to have seriously believed it would ever happen. Besides, recognition of the “right” of secession didn’t mean that Lenin supported secession itself. In the case of Ukraine, he approved of Ukrainian nationalism when it opposed the tsar or the Provisional Government in 1917, and disapproved of it when he thought it threatened the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat.

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, and that comrades “must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds.”38 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: “The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army…”39 That argument, which clearly reflected his observation of events in Ukraine, would become more significant later. 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 revolution also quickly forced them to defend their power, presenting them not just with ideological counter-revolutionaries but with a real and very bloody counter-revolution, one that had to be immediately defeated. The subsequent civil war forced them to create an army, a political police force and a propaganda machine. Above all, the civil war taught the Bolsheviks lessons about nationalism, economic policy, food distribution and violence, upon which they later drew. The Bolsheviks’ experiences in Ukraine were also very different from their experiences in Russia, including a spectacular defeat that nearly toppled their nascent state. Many subsequent Bolshevik attitudes towards Ukraine, including their lack of faith in the loyalty of the peasantry, their suspicion of Ukrainian intellectuals, and their dislike of the Ukrainian Communist Party, have their origins in this period. Indeed, the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself.

The Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 unseated the Provisional Government and brought Stalin his first, glorious taste of real political power.

Although the Bolsheviks controlled Kyiv for just a few weeks, this first occupation also gave Lenin a taste of what Ukraine could bring to the communist project. Desperate to feed the revolutionary workers who had brought him to power, he immediately sent the Red Army to Ukraine accompanied by “requisition detachments,” teams of men instructed to confiscate the peasants’ grain.

Moreover, whatever ideas they had about Ukraine’s economic development were also quickly overwhelmed by another priority. 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.

At the beginning of the conflict with Germany, imperial Russia centralized and nationalized its food distribution system, creating administrative chaos and shortages. A Special Council for Discussing and Coordinating Measures for Food Supply, a state food distribution organization and a clear precedent for the Soviet organizations that followed, was put in control. Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to “eliminate middlemen” and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.56 The resulting food shortages sparked the February revolution in 1917 and propelled the Bolsheviks to power a few months later.

hunger, at least in its early stages, made people “more rapacious.” The lack of food led people to question the system, to demand change, even to call for violence.

all sides also realized that constant shortages made food supplies a hugely significant political tool. Whoever had bread had followers, soldiers, loyal friends. Whoever could not feed his people lost support rapidly.

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. As one of them wrote years later, “the fate of the revolution depended on our ability to reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread.”

The urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, known then and later as “War Communism.” Launched in Russia in 1918 and brought to Ukraine after the second Bolshevik invasion in early 1919, 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.