Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Hrushevsky’s return set the tone for a period of genuine intellectual and cultural ferment in Ukraine. For a few brief years his fellow historians at VUAN produced monographs on nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant rebellions and the history of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment.80 The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church declared itself fully independent in 1921; it rejected the authority of the Moscow patriarchate, decentralized the hierarchy, revived Ukrainian liturgy, and anointed a leader, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyi. Artists and architects in Kharkiv experimented with Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism, just like their counterparts in Moscow and Paris. Ukrainian architects built the first skyscraper complex in Europe, a cluster of buildings that included government offices, a library and a hotel.

Meanwhile, young Ukrainian literati dreamed of inventing whole new forms of artistic experience. One literary group, Hart (“The Tempering”), sought to “unite the proletarian writers of Ukraine” the better to create “one international, communist culture.” Not that its leaders, former Borotbysts, were sure what such a thing would look like in reality: We do not know whether, during Communism, emotions will disappear, whether the human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of the head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being. Therefore we do not know precisely what form art will assume under Communism…

“Kharkiv orthography,” finally published in 1929, proved acceptable to both eastern and western Ukrainians. It was intended to become the standard textbook for those living inside the Ukrainian Republic as well as those outside its borders.

Things became more complicated when some of the national communists grew interested in the nearly 8 million Ukrainian speakers living across their eastern border in Russia, and especially the 915,000 living in the neighbouring North Caucasian district of Kuban. From 1925 onwards the Ukrainian leadership grew more enthusiastic in its pursuit of national links in Russia, agitating for more Ukrainian language schools there and even seeking to change the republic’s eastern border in order to include more Ukrainian-speaking territory.

Although the alarmed authorities in the North Caucasus successfully resisted all but the most minimal border change, they were forced to relent on schools after a Central Committee investigation into the political mood of the Cossacks found evidence of “mass counter-revolutionary work” and general dissatisfaction. To placate them, Moscow granted the Cossacks all across Ukraine and Russia recognition as a national minority. Because the Kuban Cossacks spoke Ukrainian, they too had the right to open Ukrainian language schools.

This “high” cultural activism was accompanied by what was referred to as “low” Ukrainization, meaning the promotion of the Ukrainian language in ordinary life—in the media, in public debate, and above all in schools. Just before the start of the school year in 1923, the republican government decreed that all Ukrainian schoolchildren should be taught in their own language, using a new educational programme designed to “cultivate a new generation of loyal citizens.”88 The idea was to make the peasantry both literate and Soviet. By absorbing Marxist thought in Ukrainian, they would come to feel like an integral part of the USSR. In order to promote the language more widely and faster, Skrypnyk even imported 1,500 schoolteachers from Poland, where Ukrainian-language schools had been in existence for longer and where the teaching of Ukrainian was more entrenched.

The percentage of books published in Ukrainian doubled between 1923 and 1929, and the number of Ukrainian-language newspapers and periodicals grew rapidly as well. So did the number of Ukrainian schools. In 1923 just over half of schools in the republic taught children in Ukrainian. A decade later the figure had risen to 88 per cent.

The party’s failure even to train its own officials in the language hinted at something deeper. By the mid-1920s the USSR had already become a strict police state, one that, if it had wanted to do so, could have cracked down hard on party members who refused to learn Ukrainian. But in truth the police state was already quietly pursuing another set of policies. Even as Hrushevsky, Shumskyi, Skrypnyk and other advocates of an independent Ukrainian identity rose to prominence in cultural and educational ministries, a very different group of officials were rising alongside them. Pro-Soviet, Russian speaking—and, often, Russian, Jewish or even Latvian or Polish by “ethnicity”—Ukraine’s political policemen were far more likely to be devoted to Stalin than to any abstract idea of the Ukrainian nation. As the decade wore on, their allegiances would begin to show.

Of the Ukrainian policemen who came of age in the 1920s, the most loyal, and in many other ways the most notable, was Vsevolod Balytsky.

Balytsky described himself in a 1922 document as “Russian,” though later he changed his national designation to “Ukrainian.” Only much later, at the time of his arrest during the “great terror” of 1937, did he declare himself “Russian” once again.

In fact, Balytsky’s national sympathies had always been less important to him than his political sympathies. He was radicalized as a teenager, and later claimed to have been “in contact with the revolutionary movement in Luhansk” from the age of seventeen. He went to law school in Moscow, and in 1913 joined the Menshevik Party, the Bolsheviks’ rivals, a fact that he later tried to strike out of his biography. He switched sides and became a Bolshevik in 1915, joining the party early enough to count as a true believer. Tall and blonde, he was given to dramatic gestures and radical declarations. After being drafted into the army to fight in the First World War, he conducted “revolutionary agitation” among other soldiers. When the revolution finally broke out in February 1917, he ran one of the bloody “people’s tribunals” in the Caucasus. Perhaps it was there that he acquired his taste for identifying, purging and murdering class enemies. Violence, in Balytsky’s rhetoric, was often associated with cleansing and purifying, with ridding the party of “termites” and “pollution.” Balytsky’s belief in the cleansing power of political violence motivated him to return to Ukraine, and to join the Ukrainian Cheka, in 1919. In February of that year he published a poem in the Ukrainian Izvestiya: There, where even yesterday life was so joyous Flows the river of blood And so? There where it flows There will be no mercy Nothing will save you, nothing!

Eventually, Balytsky returned to Ukraine, where he triumphantly helped Dzerzhinsky “clean up” in the wake of the White Army’s retreat.

After the fighting died down, Balytsky was rewarded for his loyalty. In 1923 he became commander of the Ukrainian Cheka. Taking the lead from his colleagues in Moscow, who were then busy prosecuting the Bolsheviks’ socialist opponents, he helped organize the first trial of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. In this period the courts handed down relatively mild sentences and many of the accused received pardons.

growing. In 1925, at his insistence, the Ukrainian Politburo signed a series of decrees strengthening the Ukrainian secret police, whose name was changed first to GPU—the State Political Directorate—and then to OGPU—the Joint State Political Directorate.101 Among other things he convinced the Politburo to protect the salaries of his departments’ employees. Even as the cultural influence of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was at its height and the power of the peasants was at their greatest, Balytsky, Ukrainian by birth but Russian-speaking and Soviet by sympathy, was building the loyalty of quite a different team, preparing them to play a large role in the future of Ukraine.

This new crisis came as a shock. Food supplies had gradually been improving since the famine of 1921–3. A poor grain harvest in 1924 led once again to widespread hunger, but the peasants still had beets, potatoes, and their cows and pigs to rely upon. The moratorium on enforced grain collection, which was still then in place, meant that peasants were willing to plant during the following spring.

For the Communist Party the crisis threatened to overshadow an important anniversary: ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars. Food of all kinds was obsessively rationed—workers received food coupons according to their status—and very scarce. So sensitive was information about grain production that five months before the anniversary celebrations, in May 1927, the OGPU forbade all Soviet newspapers from writing about any “difficulties or interruptions in the supply of grain to the country as they could…cause panic.”

Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had been organizing support inside the Communist Party, marshalling his forces against Trotsky, his main rival. To do so, he had sided with the “Rightists,” most notably Nikolai Bukharin—who supported the principles of the New Economic Policy, limited free commerce and cooperation with the peasants—against Trotsky’s “Leftists,” who warned that the policy would create a new capitalist class and enrich the kulaks in the countryside. But in 1927 he flipped his politics: having satisfactorily disposed of the “Leftists”—Trotsky was by now in disgrace, and would soon be in exile—Stalin now began preparing an attack on the “Rightists,” Bukharin and the New Economic Policy. In other words, Stalin used the grain crisis, as well as the general economic dissatisfaction, not only to radicalize Soviet policy, but also to complete the destruction of this group of rivals.

At about this time Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership also brought back the phrase chrezvychainye mery, “extraordinary measures,” as well as the chrezvychaishchina, a state of emergency, words still redolent of Tsaritsyn, the Red Terror and the civil war. And along with the language of the civil war, the tactics of the civil war—the violence Stalin had deployed in Tsaritsyn ten years earlier—returned too. In early January, Genrikh Yagoda, now the chairman of the OGPU, issued abrupt instructions to immediately arrest “the most prominent private grain procurement agents and most inveterate grain merchants…who are disrupting set procurement and market prices.” In practice, anyone making a living trading grain was now liable to be reclassified as a criminal. By the middle of the month more than five hundred people had been imprisoned across Ukraine, and more investigations were underway. In Cherkasy, Mariupol and Kharkiv, among other places, police discovered many tonnes of grain that had been kept back because peasants had, quite rationally, been waiting for prices to rise. The police pounced upon this evidence of conspiracy.

a blunt decree on 19 January: anyone who refused to sell grain to the state at the agreed price would be arrested and tried.21 With that order the New Economic Policy effectively came to an end.

peasants were now in an impossible situation. If they worked hard and built up their farms then they became kulaks, “enemies of the people.” But if they took the other option and remained bedniaks, poor peasants—then they were worse off than the “American peasants” with whom they were supposed to be competing.

an impossible choice: ideologically approved poverty on the one hand, or dangerously unacceptable wealth on the other. The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state.

Thus had the Soviet Union comprehensively destroyed the peasants’ incentive to produce more grain.

The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay “in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology. Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became kulaks, and therefore ideologically unacceptable.

What should be done about this? Stalin’s ideology would not let him conclude that successful farmers should be allowed to accumulate more land and build up major estates, as had happened in every other society in history. It was impossible, unimaginable, that a communist state could contain major landowners, or even wealthy farmers. But Stalin also understood that persecution of successful peasants would not lead to higher grain production either. His conclusion: collective farming was the only solution. “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms…for us is the only path.”26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms. The peasants had to give up their privately owned land, pool their resources, and join them.

Collectivization had, as noted, been tried on a small scale and mostly abandoned in 1918–19. But it aligned with several other Marxist ideas and had some advocates in the Communist Party, so the idea had remained in the air. Some hoped that the creation of collectively owned communal farms—kolkhoz—would “proletarianize” the peasantry, making farmers into wage labourers who would begin to think and act like workers. During a discussion of the subject in 1929 one advocate explained that “the large kolkhoz—and this is entirely clear to everyone—must in its type be a production economy similar to our socialist factories and state farms.”27 The collectivization propaganda also contained more than a whiff of the Soviet cult of science and of the machine, the belief that modern technology, increased efficiency and rationalized management techniques could solve all problems. Land would be s...

In 1928 the Soviet government would approve its first “Five-Year Plan,” an economic programme that mandated a massive, unprecedented 20 per cent annual increase in industrial output, the adoption of the seven-day week—workers would rest in shifts, so that factories would never have to close—and a new ethic of workplace competition. Foremen, labourers and managers alike vied with one another to fulfil, or even to over-fulfil, the plan. The massive increase in industrial investment created thousands of new working-class jobs, many of which would be taken by peasants forced off their land. It also created an urgent need for coal, iron and natural resources of all kinds, many of which could only be found in the far north or far east of the USSR. These resources would also be mined by peasants made redundant by collectivization.

This “Great Turnaround” or “Great Upheaval,” as it became known, represented a return to the principles of War Communism and, in practice, a second revolution. Because the new policies represented a clear departure from ideas that Stalin and others had been advocating for several years, and because his main party rivals were bitter opponents of collectivization in particular, he became deeply invested, both personally and politically, in their success. Eventually, Stalin would personally redraft the collectivization orders so as to implement them as radically and rapidly as possible.

Buoyed by these reports, Stalin intensified the argument for collectivization at two tumultuous Central Committee meetings in the spring and summer of 1928. In the speeches he made at the time, it is clear that he was, in part, pushing hard for the policy change precisely because it was opposed by his remaining serious party rivals, especially Bukharin, whom he now denounced as a “Right-Opportunist.” Even apart from its ramifications in the countryside, the collectivization policy was an ideological tool that established Stalin as the indisputable leader of the party. Eventually, the acceptance of his policy would invest him with authority and legitimacy inside the party. His opponents would recant their dissent.

he argued, infamously, that the exploitation of the peasants was the key to the industrialization of the USSR: “You know that for hundreds of years England squeezed the juice out of all its colonies, from every continent, and thus injected extra investment into its industry.” The USSR could not take that same path, Stalin argued. Nor, he declared, could it rely on foreign loans. The only remaining solution was, in effect, for the country to “colonize” its own peasants: squeeze them harder and invest this “internal accumulation” into Soviet industry. To support this transformation, peasants would have to pay “a tribute” so that the Soviet Union could “further develop the rate of industrial growth”: This situation, one must say, is unpleasant. But we wouldn’t be Bolsheviks if we skated over this matter and closed our eyes to the fact that without this additional tax on the peasants, unfortunately, our industry and our country will not be able to manage. As for the “emergency methods” that were causing so much pain, these had already “saved the country from a general economic crisis…we would now have a serious crisis of the whole national economy, starvation in the cities, starvation in the army.” Those who opposed them “are dangerous people.” The once-lauded “tight link” between the peasants and the working class was no longer necessary: “the only class which holds power is the proletariat.”

Stalin’s language was deeply rooted in his Marxist understanding of economics. He had arrived at the “solution” of rapid collectivization not by accident, but after a careful logical process. He had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialize the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land.

Bukharin, for example, believed in voluntary collectivization and raising the price of bread.33 But Stalin’s understanding of Soviet agriculture, his fanatical commitment to his ideology and his own experiences—especially his faith in the efficacy of terror—made mass, forced collectivization appear to him inevitable and unavoidable. He would now stake his personal reputation on the success of this policy.

In order to win over Ukrainian nationalists, the Soviet state was therefore obliged to appoint ethnic Ukrainians to leading positions in the country, to fund the teaching of Ukrainian, and to allow the development of an “authentic” Ukrainian national art and literature that would be regarded as distinct and different from Russian or Soviet culture. But these actions did not placate the nationalists. Instead, they encouraged them to demand more rapid change. Eventually, they encouraged them to question the primacy of Moscow altogether.

The Ukrainian artist Mykhailo Boichuk, a modernist who had been part of the revolutionary avant-garde, had come to a similar conclusion around this time. Ukraine should construct a “great wall” on its border with Russia, as the Chinese had done, “a barrier even for birds,” so that Ukrainian culture stood a chance of developing by itself.

In April 1925, less than two years after the first decree on Ukrainization, the Soviet Communist Party abruptly sacked the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Emmanuel Kviring, who had been an open opponent of Ukrainization, and replaced him with Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest colleagues. Although Kaganovich had been born in Kyiv province, he spoke Ukrainian poorly. He was also Jewish, had spent most of his career in Russia, and was perceived in Ukraine not as a native Ukrainian but as an advocate for the Russian Bolsheviks.

Ostensibly, Kaganovich arrived with a plan to speed up the process of Ukrainization. During his three years in charge of the Ukrainian Communist Party (he was replaced in 1928 by Stanislav Kosior) he would in practice continue to encourage “low” Ukrainization—the elimination of the bureaucratic obstacles to the use of the language—because the Bolsheviks still thought that was necessary to keep Ukrainian speakers loyal to the regime. But his suspicion of “high” Ukrainization—culture, literature, theatre—turned quickly into real antagonism, irritating his new colleagues. Soon after Kaganovich’s appointment, Oleksandr Shumskyi, the Commissar of Education, met with Stalin. He complained about the new Ukrainian party secretary and demanded the appointment of a “real” Ukrainian in Kaganovich’s place. A few months later Shumskyi also complained to the Ukrainian Politburo about unnamed Ukrainian communists—“unprincipled and hypocritical, slavishly two-faced and traitorously sycophantic”—who paid lip service to Ukraine but in truth would do anything to please the Russians in order to “get a position.” Shumskyi’s confidence—in himself, his position, in Moscow’s commitment to Ukrainian culture—was remarkably high, given that the ground was already beginning to shift under his feet. As Kaganovich oriented himself in Ukrainian affairs, he grew increasingly alarmed by what he saw and heard. He was astonished to discover that Hrushevsky, a man who had “served in a series of governments”—...

Vsevolod Balytsky

“If the order is given to shoot into the crowd and you refuse,” he told them at one point, “then I will shoot all of you. You must conform without objection to my commands, I will permit no protests.” At the same time Balytsky worked hard to improve their salaries and privileges, as well as his own. Presumably it was at about this time that he acquired the taste for jewellery and fine art, which would be discovered in his possession at the time of his death.

Kaganovich, who would have read all these reports, concluded that these nationalists, among them the former Borotbysts, had not “come over to our side” because they were true Bolsheviks, but rather because they were “calculating that they would re-orient us.” The Soviet programme of Ukrainization had, he feared, failed to Sovietize Ukraine. Instead, it had emboldened the enemies of the USSR, turning them into a “hostile force” that threatened Soviet society from within: by allowing Ukrainian nationalists to remain in power, the Bolsheviks had nurtured the seeds of a new opposition.44 Balytsky, with the skill of a trained conspiracy theorist, detected an even deeper plot. He suspected that the Ukrainian nationalists were not merely enemies: they were also traitors, a “fifth column” that had infiltrated its way into the Soviet system on behalf of foreign powers.

The attacks on Shumskyi and Khvylovyi were only the loudest manifestations of the political pressure that began to affect other Ukrainian intellectuals as well. Hrushevsky, under heavy surveillance since his return to Kyiv, began to have trouble getting his books published.46 Suddenly, he encountered difficulties in travelling abroad—the informers watching him were convinced he was planning to defect—and an OGPU plot would soon prevent him from becoming president of the Academy of Sciences.

By the end of 1927, Balytsky was ready to proclaim the existence of a broader conspiracy: in Ukraine the Communist Party was facing opposition of an unprecedented kind. Acting both openly and subversively, people with links to anti-Bolshevik parties were working inside Soviet institutions in order to hide their true allegiance. Many remained in contact with “foreigners” who were actively seeking to launch a counter-revolution, just as they had done in 1919.

1928 they found one. In the Russian town of Shakhty—just to the east of Ukraine, in the North Caucasus, on the edge of the Donbas coal basin—the OGPU “discovered” a conspiracy of engineers who allegedly were aiming to destroy the coal industry, in league with manipulative foreign powers. A few of them had indeed come from abroad and in due course more than two dozen German engineers were arrested, along with similar numbers of Soviet colleagues. The secret police also believed they would find connections between members of the workforce and the former owners of factories who had lost their property in the revolution and were supposedly plotting to get it back, as well as links to other foreign powers, including Poland. The result was an elaborate show trial, the first of many. Dozens of foreign journalists attended the court in Shakhty in southwest Russia every day, along with the German ambassador and other prominent guests. The chief prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko—an advocate of “socialist justice,” the theory that politics matter more than rule of law—lectured the spellbound audience about the “vampires” who had sucked the blood of the working class. “This was Revolutionary Justice,” wrote Eugene Lyons, “its flaming eyes wide open, its flaming sword poised to strike.”50 Not all of the testimony went quite the way it was supposed to. One of the witnesses, Nekrasov, failed to appear. His lawyer explained that Nekrasov “was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a p...

inside the Soviet Union almost as much attention was paid to a second show trial: that of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukraïny or SVU, an organization which seems to have been entirely fictional.

But the purge didn’t end there. Between 1929 and 1934 the OGPU in Ukraine would “discover” three more nationalist conspiracies:

All these cases kept acquiring new aspects, and were eventually twisted to include anyone whom the political police wanted to arrest, right to the end of the 1930s.

OGPU officers who “discovered” nationalist conspiracies in Ukraine received promotions. In the spring of 1931 those who specialized in these issues received their own special department within the secret police, the Secret Political Department of the OGPU in Ukraine (the sekretno-politychnyi viddil, or SPV). The SPV then created special sections to monitor the Ukrainian Academy of Science, to track the 60,000 Ukrainians who had moved to the USSR from Poland, and to look into a huge range of literary groups and publishers, university professors, high-school teachers and other “suspicious” groups as well. In 1930 the OGPU even announced that it had discovered a conspiracy of “counter-revolutionary veterinarians and bacteriologists” who were allegedly poisoning wells and murdering livestock.

At a great distance in space and time, the problem of Ukrainian national aspirations might appear to be quite different from the problem of resistance to Soviet grain procurement. The former involved intellectuals, writers and others who felt continued loyalty to the idea of Ukraine as an independent or even semi-independent state. The latter concerned peasants who feared impoverishment at the hands of the USSR. But in the late 1920s there is overwhelming evidence to show that the two became interlinked, at least in the minds of Stalin and the secret police who worked with him. Famously, Stalin had explicitly linked the “national question” and the “peasant question” more than once. In his memorable 1925 speech he had declared that “the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army.”

Although he did not specifically mention Ukraine by name, Ukraine was the Soviet republic which, at the time, had the largest national movement and the most numerous peasantry, as Stalin well knew.

Stalin saw the danger of “peasant armies” united behind a national banner. His Bolshevik colleague Mikhail Kalinin made the same point, though Kalinin also repeated a solution offered by the advocates of collectivization: turn the peasants into a proletariat. That way they would lose their attachment to a particular place or nation: “The national question is purely a peasant question…the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers…which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.”

Under economic pressure, the peasants had erupted in revolt in 1918–20. Now, as collectivization loomed, the same provinces were about to be put under economic pressure again. Unsurprisingly, the OGPU feared a repeat of those years, so much so that its officers, echoing Stalin, also began using language lifted straight out of the civil war era.70 In a certain sense the OGPU’s fears were well founded.

Even more worrying was the evidence that some peasants, frightened by the constant drumbeat of war propaganda, were hoping that an invasion might save them from a new round of grain requisitions.