Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Beneath their fears of the “reactionary” and “kulak” Ukrainian language, Rakovsky, Lebed and the other Russophone Bolsheviks in Ukraine had a mixed set of motives. Once again, there was an element of Russian chauvinism in all of their thinking: Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else. Ukrainian, to many of them, was a “barnyard” language. As the Ukrainian communist Volodymyr Zatonskyi complained, “it is an old habit of comrades to look upon Ukraine as Little Russia, as part of the Russian empire—a habit that has been drummed into you throughout the millennia of the existence of Russian imperialism.”64 Others had deeper objections and argued that Ukrainian was actually a “counter-revolutionary language.” Scarred by the peasant revolt, they had a well-founded fear of Ukrainian nationalism, which they identified with the Ukrainian language. Zatonskyi again explained: “Precisely in the year 1919…there was a certain suspicion regarding the Ukrainian language. Such feelings were widespread, even in circles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry of undeniably proletarian origin.”65 Their prejudice against all things Ukrainian of course had an ideological source too: the Bolsheviks were committed to a heavily centralized state and the destruction of independent institutions, whether economic, political or cultural. Intuitively, they understood that the autonomy of any Soviet province or r...