Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

in practice War Communism meant that most people went hungry. To obtain any food at all, in the years between 1916 and 1918 the majority of Russians and Ukrainians used the black market, not the non-existent state companies.

Year after year the Soviet leadership was surprised by the hunger and shortages that their “confiscate and redistribute” system had created. But because state intervention was supposed to make people richer, not poorer, and because the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers—“speculators”—who made their living by physically carrying food from farms into towns.

the workers of Moscow and Petrograd were down to one ounce of bread per day. Morgan Philips Price observed that Soviet authorities were barely able to feed the delegates during the Congress of Soviets in the winter of 1918: “Only a very few wagons of flour had arrived during the week at the Petrograd railway stations.”70 Worse, “complaints in the working-class quarters of Moscow began to be loud. The Bolshevik regime must get food or go, one used to hear.”

Russia did have a tradition of communal agriculture, and the majority of Russian peasants held land jointly in rural communes (known as the obschina, or mir). But only a quarter of Ukrainian peasants followed the same custom. Most were individual farmers, either landholders or their employees, who owned their land, houses and livestock.

When spontaneously offered the chance to join collective farms in 1919, very few Ukrainian peasants accepted.

The Bolsheviks, with their rigid Marxist training and hierarchical way of seeing the world, insisted on more formal markers. Eventually they would define three categories of peasant: kulaks, or wealthy peasants; seredniaks, or middle peasants; and bedniaks, or poor peasants. But at this stage they sought mainly to define who would be the victims of their revolution and who would be the beneficiaries.

Under his direction, Red Army soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village, recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbours. In exchange, these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the “grain surpluses” of their neighbours. These mandatory grain collections—or prodrazvyorstka—created overwhelming anger and resentment, neither of which ever really went away.

These two newly created village groups defined one another as mortal enemies.

by telling the poor peasants’ committees that their welfare depended on robbing the kulaks, Shlikhter knew that he was instigating a vicious class war.

A decade later Stalin would use the same rhetoric. But even in 1919 the Bolsheviks were actively seeking to deepen divisions inside the villages, to use anger and resentment to further their policy.

The list of Bolshevik enemies also included the neighbouring Don and Kuban Cossacks, whose territory straddled Russia and Ukraine and who, like the Zaporozhian Cossacks in southern Ukraine, had always enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. Many Cossack stanitsas—the name given to their self-governing communities—sided with the White Russian imperial armies during the revolution, and some reacted even more radically.

In January 1919, after the Red Army entered the Don province, the Bolshevik leadership issued an order designed to dispose of the Cossack problem altogether. Soldiers received orders “to conduct mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror against all those Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power…To confiscate grain and compel storage of all surpluses at designated points.”

it was a massacre: some 12,000 people were murdered after being “sentenced” by revolutionary tribunals consisting of a troika of officials—a Red Army commissar and two party members—who issued rapid-fire death sentences. A form of ethnic cleansing followed the slaughter: “reliable” workers and peasants were imported in order to “dilute” the Don Cossack identity further.97 This was one of the first Soviet uses of mass violence and mass movement of people for the purposes of social engineering. It was an important precedent for later Soviet policy, especially in Ukraine. The term “de-cossackization” itself may have been the inspiration for “de-kulakization,” which would be so central to Soviet policy a decade later.

Shlikhter only managed to dispatch some 8.5 million poods of grain—139,000 metric tonnes—to Russia, a tiny fraction of what Lenin had demanded.99 The Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.

the Ukrainian peasants had wanted one form of revolution, but had got something else altogether.

the word “kulak” had already acquired a broader meaning, well beyond “rich peasant.” As early as 1919, anyone who had extra stores of grain—and anyone who opposed Soviet power—could be damned by it. A decade later, Stalin would not need to invent a new word for the same sort of enemy.

The word “chaos” fails to explain or encompass what happened next. Makhno and Hryhoriev fought the Red Army, the White Army, the Directory—and eventually one another. A meeting of rebel forces turned into a shootout in July after Makhno’s deputy pulled a gun on Hryhoriev, murdering him along with several aides. Anton Denikin, the White general, began a new campaign, first taking Stalin’s beloved Tsaritsyn and then advancing into Ukraine, capturing Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) in June. A month later he took Poltava too. Meanwhile, Petliura’s forces advanced from the west and retook Kyiv, only to lose the city again soon afterwards. All told, Kyiv changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919 alone.

In Odessa, Bolshevik leaders armed 2,400 criminals, put them under the control of the city’s most famous crime boss,

This same belief in Jewish treachery, common enough before the February revolution, laid the groundwork for a series of appalling massacres in the years that followed. Between 1918 and 1920 combatants on all sides—White, Directory, Polish and Bolshevik—murdered at least 50,000 Jews in more than 1,300 pogroms across Ukraine, according to the most widely accepted studies,

Petliura is not known to have used anti-semitic language. He was a former member of the Central Rada, which had deliberately included Jews among its leaders; more than once he went out of his way to discourage anti-semitism in his own ranks: “Because Christ commands it, we urge everyone to help the Jewish sufferers,” he declared. During his brief tenure in power his government had granted autonomous status to the Jews of Ukraine, encouraged Jewish political parties, and funded Yiddish publications.

But his Directory soldiers felt varying levels of loyalty to their commander, and the results on the ground were often different. A Red Cross committee met one of Petliura’s generals in Berdychiv in 1921: “In a cynical fashion he abused the whole of Jewry and accused them of lending support to the Bolsheviks.”33 The same committee told another general that the Directory leadership had ordered a halt to the pogroms. In response, he replied that “the Directory was a puppet in the hands of the diplomats, most of whom were Jews,” and that he would do as he pleased.

But the violence was greatest in areas that were not under any political control at all. The worst damage was inflicted by disintegrating military units or bandits with little sense of allegiance to anybody.

The violence against Jews left its mark on those who witnessed it, perpetrated it or experienced it. The pogroms, like the civil war itself, contributed to the brutalization of the population, which quickly learned to conform to the will of men with guns. The methods used in the pogroms would also find echoes in the drive to collect grain in 1921, when Lenin proposed to take hostages in order to force peasants to hand over their supplies. They also haunted the collectivization campaign a decade later, when the kulaks were terrorized using exactly the same methods that had been used in 1919. Like the Jews, kulaks would be rounded up, stripped to their underclothes, blackmailed out of their possessions, mocked and humiliated, and sometimes shot.

The pogroms also foreshadowed later events in another sense. Much as they would one day use history, journalism and politics to cover up the famine and to twist the facts of Ukrainian history, Soviet propagandists also sought to use the pogroms to discredit the Ukrainian national movement.

they linked Ukrainian nationalism to looting, killing and above all pogroms. Great efforts were made to gather “testimony” against Petliura and the generals who were associated with him, and to publish it in different languages.40 Petliura himself was murdered in Paris in 1926 by a Russian Jew, Sholom Schwartzbard, who claimed to be taking revenge for the pogroms. Even if Schwartzbard wasn’t a direct Soviet agent, as many thought at the time, he was certainly inspired by Soviet propaganda that demonized Petliura.

The Ukrainian peasant uprising devastated the countryside and created divisions that would never heal. It also altered, profoundly, the Bolshevik perceptions of Ukraine. If the Bolsheviks had previously been inclined to dismiss Ukraine as “Southwest Russia,” a province of no real interest except for its rich soil and abundant food, the experiences of 1919 taught them to see Ukraine as potentially dangerous and explosive, and Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals as threats to Soviet power. The rebellion also taught them to see Ukraine as a source of future military threats, for it was thanks to the chaos in Ukraine that Denikin’s last campaign nearly succeeded. Following the bloody summer of 1919, Denikin seized Kyiv in August. He took Kursk on 20 September and Orel on 13 October. He came within 200 kilometres of Moscow—so close that he might have taken the city. Had Denikin formed an alliance with Ukrainian national forces he might well have toppled the Bolshevik regime before it really got started. Yet his unpopular land policies, his opposition to Ukrainian institutions, and his officers’ brutal tactics instead provoked Ukrainian partisans to attack his supply lines. His hold on Ukrainian territory weakened rapidly and so he withdrew.

But Deniken’s offensive also paved the way for one more attack on Bolshevik power. As the White Army pulled back, Petliura prepared one last stand in concert with Józef Piłsudski, the Polish national leader who had just helped his own country re-establish sovereignty. Unlike Denikin, Piłsudski did not seek to occupy central or eastern Ukraine. Although he did incorporate what is now western Ukraine into the new Polish republic, he also hoped to establish a strong Ukrainian state that would serve as a counterweight to Soviet Russia. The agreement made by the two leaders began “with the deep conviction that every nation possesses the right to determine its own fate and to decide upon its relationship with its neighbours.”42 Piłsudski himself issued a proclamation to the Ukrainians, using language that the Bolsheviks would long remember: The armies of the Polish Republic, on my orders, have advanced deep into Ukraine. I want the inhabitants of this country to know that Polish troops will remove from your lands the invader against whom you have risen up in arms to defend your homes against violence, conquest and pillage. Polish troops will remain in Ukraine only until the rightful Ukrainian government assumes power.43 The Poles and the Ukrainians began their joint campaign in the spring of 1920 and at first faced little resistance. On 7 May, Piłsudski’s army occupied Kyiv, which was so poorly defended that his soldiers entered the city riding tram cars. Belatedly, another Whit...

Their occupation was short. On 13 June the Red Army forced Polish troops to retreat. By early August it was just outside Warsaw. Piłsudski pushed them back, following a battle remembered later as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” Polish troops again advanced into Ukraine, but ultimately failed to create an independent Ukrainian state. Piłsudski signed an armistice in October and concluded a border treaty between Poland and the Soviet Union the following year.44 But even after the Poles withdrew and the remnants of the White Army, stranded in Crimea, scrambled onto boats and sailed across the Black Sea, the problem of Ukraine loomed large in the Bolshevik imagination. Trotsky, in a letter to his colleagues, explained that peace would be difficult to enforce there. For although the Red Army had won a military victory, there had been no ideological revolution in Ukraine: “Soviet power in Ukraine has held its ground up to now (and it ha...

Ukrainian nationalism had been defeated militarily, but it remained attractive to the Ukrainian-speaking middle class, intelligentsia and a large part of the peasantry. Worse, it threatened the unity of the Soviet state, which was still struggling to find ways of accommodating national differences. Most ominously of all, nationalism had the power to attract foreign allies, particularly across the border in Poland.

Millions of Ukrainian peasants had wanted a socialist revolution, but not a Bolshevik revolution—and certainly not one directed from Moscow. Although their leaders represented a wide range of views, from anarchist to monarchist, villagers across the country expressed a coherent set of beliefs. They wanted to vote for their own representatives, not for communists. They wanted big landowners dispossessed, but they wished to farm that land themselves. They did not want to return to the “second serfdom” represented by collective farms. They sought respect for their religion, language and customs. They wanted to be able to sell their grain to traders, and they hated the enforced requisition of their produce.46 This critique—socialist but not authoritarian, communist but not Bolshevik—would resonate strongly throughout the 1920s, finding a spokesman, among others, in Trotsky himself. But the first and most damaging appearance of the anti-Soviet “left” was in Ukraine. The “cruel lesson of 1919,” as the Ukrainian peasant revolt came to be called, loomed over the Bolsheviks for many years afterwards.

the great grain collections of 1920 spared nobody. Lenin’s instructions explicitly called for the requisitioning of all grain, even that needed for immediate consumption and for planting next year’s harvest, and there were many people willing to carry out his orders.13

In response, the peasants’ enthusiasm for growing, sowing and storing grain plunged. Their ability to produce would have been very low in any case: across Ukraine and Russia, up to a third of young men had been mobilized to fight in the First World War. Even more had joined the armies of the civil war, on one side or another, and hundreds of thousands had not returned. Many villages lacked sufficient numbers of men fit to work the fields. But even those who had returned and could work had no incentive to produce extra grain that they knew would be confiscated.

The twenty most productive agricultural provinces in imperial Russia had annually produced 20 million tonnes of grain before the revolution. In 1920 they produced just 8.45 million tonnes, and by 1921 they were down to 2.9 million.

In other words, some 95 per cent of the normal harvest had failed to materialize.

in one extremely important sense this first Soviet famine did differ from the famine that was to follow a decade later: in 1921 mass hunger was not kept secret. More importantly, the regime tried to help the starving. Pravda itself announced the existence of famine when on 21 June it declared that 25 million people were going hungry in the Soviet Union. Soon after, the regime sanctioned the creation of an “All-Russian Famine Committee” made up of non-Bolshevik political and cultural figures. Local self-help committees were created to assist the starving.26 International appeals for aid followed, most prominently from the writer Maxim Gorky, who led a campaign addressed “To All Honest People,” in the name of all that was best in Russian culture.

This public, international appeal for help, the only one of its kind in Soviet history, produced fast results. Several relief organizations, including the International Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC, or simply “Joint”), would eventually contribute to the relief effort, as would the Nansen Mission, a European effort put together by the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. But the most important source of immediate aid was the American Relief Administration (ARA), which was already operating in Europe in the spring of 1921. Founded by future president Herbert Hoover, the ARA had successfully distributed more than $1 billion in food and medical relief across Europe in the nine months following the 1918 armistice.29 Upon hearing Gorky’s appeal, Hoover, an astute student of Bolshevik ideology, leapt at the opportunity to expand his aid network into Russia.

Before entering the country, he demanded the release of all Americans held in Soviet prisons, as well as immunity from prosecution for all Americans working for the ARA. Hoover worried that ARA personnel had to control the process or aid would be stolen. He also worried, not without cause, that Americans in Russia could be accused of espionage (and they were indeed collecting information, sending it home and using diplomatic mail to do so).30 Lenin fumed and called Hoover “impudent and a liar” for making such demands and raged against the “rank duplicity” of “America, Hoover and the League of Nations Council.” He declared that “Hoover must be punished, he must be slapped in the face publicly, for all the world to see,” an astonishing statement given how much aid he was about to receive. But the scale of the famine was such that Lenin eventually yielded.

By the summer of 1922 the Americans were feeding 11 million people every day and delivering care packages to hundreds of thousands. To stop epidemics they provided $8 million worth of medicine as well.33 Once their efforts were underway, the independent Russian famine relief committee was quietly dissolved: Lenin didn’t want any Russian organization not directly run by the Communist Party to gain credibility by participating in the distribution of food. But the American aid project, amplified by contributions from other foreign organizations, was allowed to go ahead, saving millions of lives.

Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership—just as it would a decade later—never relinquished its desire for hard currency. Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery. By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread and foreign aid was still coming in.34 This was no secret: Hoover fulminated against the cynicism of a government that knew people were starving, and yet exported food in order to “secure machinery and materials for the economic improvement of the survivors.”35 A few months afterwards the ARA left Russia for precisely this reason.

In November, Lenin specifically ordered “harsh revolutionary methods,” including the taking of hostages, to be used against peasants who refused to hand over their grain. This form of blackmail, used with such powerful effect against the Jews during the civil war and the pogroms, was now deployed to facilitate collection of this precious commodity. Lenin gave the grain collection teams and komnezamy a clear order: “In every village take between 15 and 20 hostages, and, in case of unmet quotas, put them all up against the wall.” If that tactic failed, hostages were to be shot as “enemies of the state.”

Eventually, aid reached Ukraine, food became more available, and death rates slowed. By the end of 1923 the crisis seemed to be under control. But the delay in the delivery of aid had caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Many wondered, both at the time and later, why it had happened. The ARA’s members discussed it among themselves and wrote about it years later. Most believed that the initial Soviet opposition to their relief programme in Ukraine was politically inspired. Southern Ukraine, one of the worst-hit regions in the whole of the USSR, had also been a Makhno and Cossack stronghold.

More recently, some Ukrainian scholars have offered an even more pointed political explanation: perhaps the Soviet authorities actually used the famine instrumentally, as they would in 1932, to put an end to the Ukrainian peasant rebellion.50 This thesis cannot be proven: there is no evidence of a premeditated plan to starve the Ukrainian peasants in 1920–1.

Certainly the regime did use the famine—as it would a decade later—to strike hard at the Ukrainian religious hierarchy. In the name of famine relief, the state forced Ukrainian churches to give gold objects, icons and other valuables to the state.

Lenin wrote, have an important political impact: Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of [reactionary] clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force.54

This, Lenin explained, was a time to teach the peasants, the clergy and other political opponents a “lesson,” so that “for the coming decades they will not dare think about any resistance.”55 But the extent of the famine did frighten the Bolsheviks. Food shortages might possibly have helped to end peasant rebellions in Ukraine, but elsewhere they fuelled them. In the Russian province of Tambov, food requisitioning sparked the Antonov rebellion, one of the most serious anti-Bolshevik uprisings of the era. Food shortages also helped inspire the infamous Kronstadt rebellion, during which the Red Army fired on sailors who had played an important role in the revolution. Over the course of three years some 33.5 million people were affected by famine or food shortages—26 million in Russia, 7.5 million in Ukraine—though precise death rates are difficult to calculate because nobody was keeping track of the numbers.56 In Ukraine the best guesses put the number of deaths between 250,000 and 500,000 for southern Ukraine, the hardest-hit region.57 In the USSR as a whole the ARA estimated that 2 million people had died; a Soviet publication produced soon after the famine concluded that 5 million had died.

These numbers shook the regime’s confidence. The Bolsheviks feared that they were blamed for the disaster—and indeed they were.

the regime changed course and adopted two dramatically new policies, both intended to win back the support of the recalcitrant Soviet peasants, and especially recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants with nationalist sentiments. Lenin’s “New Economic Policy,” which put an end to compulsory grain collection and temporarily legalized free trade, is the better remembered of the two. But in 1923, Moscow also launched a new “indigenization” policy (korenizatsiia) designed to appeal to the Soviet federal state’s non-Russian minorities. It gave official status and even priority to their national languages, promoted their national culture, and offered what was in effect an affirmative-action policy, replacing Russian cadres from Moscow with ethnic nationals. The policy was known in Ukraine as “Ukrainization,” a word that had actually been coined by Hrushevsky, who had called for the Ukrainization of the Russian-speaking state apparatus back in 1907.60 Hrushevsky (who was long gone from politics by the early 1920s) had wanted to use the language to solidify support for national independence. The goal of Lenin’s 1923 policy was precisely the opposite: he hoped to make Soviet power seem less foreign to Ukrainians, and thus reduce their demands for sovereignty. To the purists, both of these strategies represented a step “backwards,” away from Marxist-Leninist ideals, and many refused to believe that they would be permanent. One senior Bolshevik, Grigorii Zinoviev, called the New Economic Polic...

To those who had believed in a unified, homogenized, Russian-speaking workers’ state, the very notion of “Ukrainization” was similarly disheartening. Rakovsky, who was still leader of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars in 1921, declared that widespread use of the Ukrainian language would mean a return to the “rule of the Ukrainian petit-bourgeois intelligentsia and the Ukrainian kulaks.”

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...

Class solidarity, not national solidarity, was supposed to guide the way. As another communist leader put it: “I think that if we concern ourselves with the culture of every nation individually, then this will be an unhealthy national vestige.”