Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

accusations cooked up by Balytsky and the OGPU chief, Genrikh Yagoda, weren’t designed to reflect the truth. The discovery of this vast political conspiracy provided an explanation: why the harvest was failing, why people were hungry, why the Soviet agricultural policy, so closely and intimately linked with Stalin, was failing. To reinforce the point, Stalin personally sent out a letter at the end of December to the members and candidate members of the Central Committee, as well as to party leaders at the republican, provincial and local levels. Attached were lengthy, wordy, legal documents detailing the “sabotage of the grain collection in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk provinces” as well as the activity of “wrecking groups in Kuban.” Lists of guilty officials, with their crimes, were tacked on to the end.27 The tale of the conspiracy also provided those who remained in the party with an ideological justification for what they were about to do. The deadly new decrees could not be enforced by Moscow alone. The policy would require local collaborators. Within a few weeks thousands of people would be required to carry out policies leading to the starvation of their neighbours. They would need multiple motivations: fear of arrest, fear of starvation—as well as hysteria, suspicion and hatred of their enemies.