Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

To ensure that nobody protested or resisted those orders, Stalin sent a telegram to the Ukrainian Communist Party leaders in Kharkiv on 1 January 1933 demanding that the party use the 7 August law on “theft of state property” to prosecute collective and individual farmers in Ukraine who were allegedly hiding grain.27 The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.28