Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

By the end of March 1930 the OGPU had recorded 2,000 “mass” protests, the majority of which were exclusively female, in Ukraine alone.

In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the “Great Terror”—the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes—were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.

In July 1930, just a few months after the angriest “March fever” protests, the Politburo itself set new targets: up to 70 per cent of households in the main grain-growing regions, Ukraine among them, were to join collective farms by September 1931. In December 1930, eager to prove their enthusiasm, Politburo members raised that same target to 80 per cent of households.

Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives. Like the serfs of old, they were forced to accept a special legal status, including controls on their movement: all collective farmers, kolkhozniks, would eventually need to seek permission to work outside the village. Instead of deciding when to reap, sow and sell, kolkhozniks had to follow decisions made by the local representatives of Soviet power. They did not earn regular salaries but were paid trudodni or day wages, which often meant payment in kind—grain, potatoes or other products—rather than cash. They lost their ability to govern themselves too, as collective farm bosses and their entourages supplanted the traditional village councils.

“everyday resistance” was not unique to the peasantry.6 Working as little as possible, stealing public property, failing to care for state-owned equipment and machinery—these were the methods by which underpaid, underfed and unmotivated Soviet workers of all kinds got along.

There are many arguments about whether the published figures for that year—and indeed subsequent years—were real, falsified, or simply mistaken. But there is no question that the state claimed, and Stalin appears to have believed, that 1930 was a high point. The official statistics decreed that 83.5 million tonnes of grain had been collected in 1930, a notable rise over 1929—a year of famine and bad weather—when the comparable figure was 71.7 million tonnes.9 Convinced that collectivization was now on the path to success, the Kremlin made what would turn out to be a disastrous and callous decision: to increase the export of grain, as well as of other food products, out of the Soviet Union in exchange for hard currency.

grain was still the most lucrative export, especially since the timber trade had run into trouble; reports (which were accurate) that convict labour produced Soviet timber had led to calls for boycotts in a number of Western countries. The level of grain exports duly rose throughout the 1920s. Britain bought 26,799 tonnes of wheat from the USSR in 1924; by 1926–7 that had risen to 138,486 tonnes. Exports to Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands grew as well. Between 1929 and 1931, Soviet grain exports to Germany tripled.

As exports rose, the Soviet leadership perceived that they brought more than just hard currency. Foreshadowing the future Soviet (and Russian) use of gas as a weapon of influence, the Bolsheviks also began asking for political favours in response to large shipments of relatively low-priced grain. In 1920 they demanded that, in exchange for grain, the Latvians recognize the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. In 1922 the Soviet government told the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that unless Britain signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, it would cut off the supply of grain to British markets. Some speculate that in the late 1920s the Soviet Union began dumping grain at low prices for geopolitical reasons: Stalin hoped to damage Western capitalism. By 1930 one German newspaper was arguing for trade barriers to stop the flood of “cheap Russian produce.”

To meet the extraordinarily ambitious targets of the first Five Year Plan, Soviet factories urgently required machines, parts, tools and other things available only for hard currency. In a letter to Molotov in July 1930, Stalin was already writing of the need to “force the export of grain…this is the key.” In August, fearing that American grain would soon flood the market, he again urged speed: “if we don’t export 130–150 million poods [2.1–2.4 million tonnes] our currency situation may become desperate. Once again: we must force the export of grain with all of our strength.”

The result of this urgent policy directive would be a far higher rate of grain export in 1930—4.8 million tonnes, up from 170,000 tonnes in 1929—and an even higher rate in 1931, 5.2 million tonnes.18 These numbers were a relatively small fraction of the more than 83 million tonnes, with higher totals in future, that Stalin believed should be harvested.

The missing feeling of “responsibility,” destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed. But although this was already clear as early as 1931, it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself. He had staked his leadership of the party on collectivization and he had defeated his rivals in the course of fighting for it. He could not be wrong.

As they so often did when their policies failed, the authorities also blamed “sabotage.” During the Shakhty trial in 1928 they had focused on mining engineers in order to explain production failures in heavy industry. Now they sought agricultural specialists to blame.

the arrest of the “enemy” agronomists and the expulsion of some party members helped explain Ukraine’s failure to meet its quotas, at least to the rest of the party, but it did not produce more grain.

Both threats and persuasion were failing. That left coercion—and in December 1931, Stalin and Molotov made coercion the policy: collective farms that had not met their grain quotas would have to repay any outstanding loans, and return any tractors or other equipment that had been leased to them from the machine tractor stations. Their spare cash—including that intended to buy seeds—would be confiscated. Molotov, dispatched to Kharkiv to explain the new rules, showed little mercy. He pushed aside any complaints about bad weather and a poor harvest. The problem was not lack of grain, he told the Ukrainian party leaders: the problem was that they were incompetent. They were badly organized, they had failed to mobilize, and they had not managed to collect as much grain as they should have done. In the districts he harangued collective farm leaders, calling them “agents of the kulaks.” He repeated Stalin’s threat to take away their tractors while at the same time dangling the promise of more manufactured goods for farms that met the state targets. Upon returning to Moscow, Molotov and Stalin sent another missive to Kosior, who was on vacation in Sochi. They ordered him back to Ukraine and demanded that he force the republic to meet the grain requirements as planned.33

anyone found in possession of any bread or grain at all—even the poorest of peasants—was dragged from his or her home and stripped of their possessions, just as had happened to the kulaks in the months before. But this was unusual: “Very rarely did they find a more or less solid amount, usually the searches finished with the confiscation of the very last few pieces of bread in the smallest possible amount.”37 No one in authority questioned the wisdom of this behaviour: the fact that the OGPU and Communist Party officials allowed journalists, even those loyal to the regime, to observe the confiscation of grain meant that, at the highest levels, they were convinced of the legitimacy of what they were doing.

The use of violence, the smashing of walls and furniture in search of hidden grain—these were a harbinger of what was to come.

In April 1932 the OGPU raised the alarm: more than 40,000 households were not going to plant anything at all.53 As hunger spread, many were too weak to work in the fields. The empty fields were no secret: Visti VUTsVK, the main newspaper of the Ukrainian republican government, openly reported that only about two-thirds of Ukrainian fields had been sown that spring.

In the spring of 1932 a few high-ranking Ukrainian communists finally gathered the courage to call for a drastic change of direction. In February, Hryhorii Petrovskyi—an “Old Bolshevik,” a party member since before the revolution, member of the Ukrainian Politburo and chairman of Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet—wrote a short letter to his colleagues. He did not name scapegoats, and did not seek to explain away shortages as “temporary” or imaginary. Instead, he observed the lack of food in “not only villages but also working-class towns” all across Ukraine, in Kyiv and Vinnytsia provinces as well as Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. Petrovskyi made a list of suggestions: write a letter to the Central Committee, describing the “drastic shortages of produce for the population and feed for livestock”; ask it to halt grain collections in Ukraine and restore free exchange of goods “according to the law”; call upon the Red Cross and other emergency relief organizations to pool their resources, as they had in 1921, in order to rescue people in the worst affected areas, especially children; mobilize organizations within the Ukrainian republic to help out famine-struck regions. Bluntly, he declared that the Soviet state should expect to collect nothing in Ukraine at all in 1932. In order to feed hungry Ukrainian peasants, any food harvested should remain inside the republic.

The ensuing arguments—within the Moscow leadership, the Ukrainian Communist Party in Kharkiv, and between Moscow and Kharkiv—were murky and guarded, even confusing and contradictory. The potential for widespread famine was by now well understood on all sides. But, again, Stalin’s personal responsibility for the collectivization policy—he had conceived and argued for it, backed and stood by it—was perfectly well understood too. To oppose it openly, let alone imply that it had somehow failed, sounded like a criticism of the leader himself. Everyone knew that the provision of food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure—yet if the Ukrainian peasants were not spared their grain and encouraged to sow their crops, everyone also knew that catastrophe would follow.

Stalin lashed out on 26 April in a letter to Kosior: “Judging from this material, it seems that in several places in Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist. Is this really true? Is the situation in the countryside really that terrible? Where are the OGPU organs, what are they doing? Could you verify this case and report back to the Central Committee on what measures you’ve taken?”

Prompted by whatever had provoked his note, Stalin immediately withdrew the millet and other food aid to Ukraine. He also demanded that the Ukrainian Communist Party maintain its policy of confiscating tractors and other equipment from underperforming farms. He did not want any generous gestures to be misinterpreted as an independent action of the Ukrainian leadership, and he certainly didn’t want them to be seen as a “demonstration against Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party.”64 He was deeply concerned about the Ukrainian party’s reliability. Using language that illustrates how far the Soviet state had gone in the direction of personal tyranny, he told Kaganovich and Molotov that the local leaders were insufficiently loyal.

Kaganovich particularly disliked the Ukrainian leader’s criticism of the Soviet Communist Party and, by implication, of Stalin. Nevertheless, he supported their request: it was time to offer some help to Ukraine.69 Molotov also wrote to Stalin and suggested that Soviet grain exports might, for a time, be curtailed, so as to provide Ukraine with some food aid.70 Stalin argued back. From the tone of his letter it is clear that he could not (or did not want to) believe that there really was insufficient grain in Ukraine:

Stalin was of course talking about “giving” grain to Ukraine that had been taken from the country in the first place. But no one challenged him. On 16 June, Kaganovich once again wrote to Stalin that “This year’s harvest campaign will be especially difficult, particularly in Ukraine. Unfortunately, Ukraine is not sufficiently prepared for it.”72 But he did not speak, as his Ukrainian colleagues had done, of sending mass food aid.

Instead, in the summer of 1932, the policies that could have prevented mass famine in Ukraine were quietly abandoned. Some grain was granted to Kyiv and Odessa, though not as much as had been requested. No horses or tractors were included.

Even as hunger spread, the state continued to issue plans and orders designed to maintain the export of grain abroad.

By the year’s end export levels did fall dramatically—from 5.2 million to 1.73 million tonnes.79 The value to the state dropped dramatically as well, from 203.5 million rubles in 1931 to 88.1 million in 1932.80 But the shipments abroad never stopped altogether.

The mood inside the party itself did not improve either. In July, Molotov and Kaganovich again arrived in Ukraine, with the goal once more of overriding any remaining objections. They had direct orders from Stalin, who wrote to them on 2 July, repeating his concerns about Ukraine and its leadership: “Pay more serious attention to Ukraine. Chubar’s deterioration and opportunistic nature, Kosior’s rotten diplomacy…and a criminally reckless approach to affairs will lose Ukraine in the end.”

There is no doubt that Stalin knew, by this point, that 5.8 million tonnes was an unrealistic figure. On 25 July he told Kaganovich that he intended to allow the “suffering” collective farms in Ukraine to get by with reduced quotas. He had, he wrote, avoided speaking of a reduction in grain collection before, because he wanted to avoid “demoralizing” the Ukrainians further or disrupting the harvest. He intended instead to wait until later to make the announcement, hoping to “stimulate” the peasants during the harvest season—and to appear benevolent—by offering a small reduction of 30 million poods (490,000 tonnes) or “as a last resort” (those words were underlined) 40 million poods (655,000 tonnes). Kaganovich wrote back in agreement: “Now is not the time to tell the Ukrainians” about the decrease. It was better to let them worry about meeting an impossible demand.

Before this game could play itself out, Stalin was once again distracted by bad news from across the Soviet Union—and some especially bad news from Ukraine. All through the summer, the OGPU had been reporting growing levels of theft. People were stealing from railroads, shops, enterprises, and above all from collective farms. This was hardly surprising: collective farm workers (and factory workers too) often felt that state property belonged to no one and so there was no harm in taking it. More to the point, they were very hungry.

As so often in the past, Stalin found a political interpretation for these acts of desperation. On vacation in Sochi—having travelled on a “train well-stocked with fine provisions”—he wrote several letters to Kaganovich on the subject.96 The two of them confirmed one another’s views.

The state and its policies were not a danger to the starving peasants—but the starving peasants were a great danger to the state.

A few days later, in another set of letters to Kaganovich and Molotov, he elaborated further, clearly having thought about the matter some more during his seaside holiday. A new law, he now worried, was an insufficient deterrent. In order to get people to stop stealing food, the law must be supported by a propaganda campaign fully grounded in Marxist theory. Capitalism had defeated feudalism because capitalism ensured that private property was protected by the state; socialism, in turn, could defeat capitalism only if it declared public property—cooperative, collective, state property—to be sacred and inviolable too. The very survival of socialism might well depend on whether or not the state could prevent “anti-social, kulak-capitalistic elements” from stealing public property.98 Stalin’s obsessive belief in Marxist theory once again triumphed over what he would have called “bourgeois morality.”

The theft of tiny amounts of food, in other words, could be punished by ten years in a labour camp—or death.

Now, a peasant woman who stole a few grains of wheat from a collective farm would be treated like a military officer who had betrayed the country during wartime.

This extraordinary law took an extraordinary toll. By the end of 1932, within less than six months of the law’s passage, 4,500 people had been executed for breaking it. Far more—over 100,000 people—had received ten-year sentences in labour camps. This preference for long camp sentences over capital punishment, dictated from above, was clearly pragmatic: forced labourers could get to work on the Gulag system’s vast new industrial projects—mines, factories, logging operations—that were just getting underway.

thousands of peasants flooded into the camp system, victims of the 7 August law. According to official figures (which do not reflect all arrests), the number of Gulag inmates nearly doubled between 1932 and 1934, from 260,000 to 510,000. The camp system had neither the resources nor the organizational capacity to cope with this huge influx of people, many of whom arrived already emaciated by hunger. As a result, deaths in the Gulag also climbed from 4.81 per cent in 1932 to 15.3 per cent in 1933.104 Others may have been saved by their incarceration.

Stalin went on to list all the changes that he wanted to make in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He wanted to remove Stanislav Redens, the head of the Ukrainian secret police (and his brother-in-law). He wanted to transfer Balytsky, his reliable ally, back to Ukraine from Moscow, where he had briefly served as deputy leader of the OGPU, an order that would be carried out in October. He wanted Kaganovich himself to take full responsibility for the Ukrainian Communist Party once again: “Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic. We won’t spare money on this task.”109 He believed that this was the moment to revive tactics deployed in the past: “Lenin was right in saying that a person who does not have the courage to swim against the current when necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader…”

For Stalin, who remembered the civil war in Ukraine, the loss of the republic was an exceedingly dangerous prospect. In 1919 a peasant revolt in Ukraine had brought the White Army within a few days’ march of Moscow; in 1920 chaos in Ukraine had brought the Polish army deep into Soviet territory. The USSR could not afford to lose Ukraine again.

Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow party boss, was one of them. Ryutin had been evicted from the party in 1930 for “expounding right-opportunist views,” but unlike Bukharin he had refused to recant. Ryutin was arrested and then released. But he kept in touch with other would-be dissidents, and in the spring of 1932 he invited a dozen of them to help him write a statement of opposition. In August the group met in a Moscow suburb to put the finishing touches to a political platform calling for change, as well as a shorter “Appeal to all Party Members.”10 Both documents were copied and circulated, by hand and by post, in Moscow, Kharkiv and other cities. “Ryutin’s Platform,” as it came to be known, denounced Stalin in no uncertain terms. The authors called him an “unscrupulous political intriguer,” mocked him for his pretensions to be Lenin’s successor, and accused him of having terrorized workers and peasants alike. Above all, Ryutin was angered by Stalin’s attack on the Soviet countryside. The policy of “all-out collectivization,” Ryutin declared, had not been voluntary, as the propaganda claimed, and it was not a success. On the contrary: It is founded on direct and indirect forms of the most severe coercion, designed to force the peasants to join the collective farms. It is founded not on an improvement in their condition, but on their direct and indirect expropriation and massive impoverishment…outcries directed by Stalin at the kulaks at the present time are only a method of te...

That autumn it would still have been possible to turn back. The Kremlin could have offered food aid to Ukraine and the other grain-growing regions of the USSR, as the regime had done in 1921 and as it had begun to do, in fits and starts, already that year. The state could have redistributed all available resources, or imported food from abroad. It could even have asked, as it had also done in 1921, for help from abroad. Instead, Stalin began using stark language about Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus, a Russian province that was heavily Ukrainian. “Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” were Stalin’s words to Kaganovich in August. “Curse out the North Caucasus leadership for their bad work on grain requisitions,” he declared.

By November 1932 it was nevertheless clear that the autumn harvest would not meet the plan. It came in 40 per cent lower than the planners had expected in the USSR as a whole, and 60 per cent lower in Ukraine.19 Intriguingly, the overall drop in production was not as dramatic as it had been in 1921, and over the next few years it remained about the same. All across the USSR the total grain harvest for 1931–2 was 69.5 million tonnes (down from 83.5 million in 1930–1); for 1932–3 the total was 69.9 million tonnes. In 1933–4 the USSR harvested 68.4 million tonnes, and in 1934–5 the total was 67.6 million. But the state’s unrealistic demands on the peasants—the expectation that they meet unattainable goals—created the perception of total failure. The insistence that the peasants deliver grain that Stalin believed should exist created, in turn, a humanitarian catastrophe.

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians. Several sets of directives that autumn, on requisitions, blacklisted farms and villages, border controls and the end of Ukrainization—along with an information blockade and extraordinary searches, designed to remove everything edible from the homes of millions of peasants—created the famine now remembered as the Holodomor. The Holodomor, in turn, delivered the predictable result: the Ukrainian national movement disappeared completely from Soviet politics and public life.

Stalin. Myriad Ukrainian communists had begged for the peasants to be allowed some reserves for their own consumption, as well as some seeds for the next season’s crop, but he assured Stalin that he had stood firm: “We are convinced that this ‘preoccupation’ with reserves, including seed reserves, is seriously hampering and undermining the entire grain procurement plan.”23 Two days later, on 24 December, the Ukrainian Communist Party gave up trying to resist. The leadership conceded completely and gave all underperforming collective farms “five days to ship, without exception, all collective farm reserves, including sowing seeds.”

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

Two and a half weeks later the Soviet government issued another order that seems, at first glance, to have been intended to soften the blow. In an oddly worded statement, the Council of Ministers denounced the irregular methods of food collection that had been used all across the country—the plans, the plan failures, the supplementary plans—and called, instead, for peasants to pay a tax, in the form of a fixed percentage of their production. But there was one caveat: the tax was to take effect only in the summer of 1933. Until then the deadly requisitions would continue.29 In other words, Stalin knew that the methods being used were damaging, and he knew they would fail. But he allowed them to continue for several fatal months, during which time millions died.

Certainly during the winter of 1933 he did not offer any additional food aid, nor did he ease up on grain collection. Grain exports continued to flow out of the USSR, albeit more slowly than in the past. Since the spring of 1932 Soviet foreign trade officials had complained about the drop in the quantity of grain for export.

But the number never fell to zero. Nor did exports of other kinds of food stop either. In 1932 the USSR exported more than 3,500 tonnes of butter and 586 tonnes of bacon from Ukraine alone. In 1933 the numbers rose to 5,433 tonnes of butter and 1,037 tonnes of bacon. In both years Soviet exporters continued to ship eggs, poultry, apples, nuts, honey, jam, canned fish, canned vegetables and canned meat, food that could have helped to feed Ukraine.

Since neither bosses nor workers in state companies had any market incentives to work hard or well, the state created elaborate schemes of reward and punishment. Among other things, many factories began to place the names of their most successful workers on “red boards,” and those of the least successful workers on “black boards.”

In 1932 the blacklist returned as a tool for the reinforcement of grain procurement policy. Although they were used to some degree in all the other grain-producing regions of the USSR, blacklists were applied earlier, more widely and more rigorously in Ukraine. From the beginning of that year, provincial and local authorities had begun to blacklist collective farms, cooperatives and even whole villages that had failed to meet their grain quotas, and to subject them to a range of punishments and sanctions. In late summer local leaders expanded the blacklists. In November the practice became ubiquitous, spreading to include villages and collective farms in almost every district of Ukraine.

by the end of the year there were hundreds and possibly thousands of villages, collective farms and independent farms on blacklists all across the republic.37 At least seventy-nine districts were entirely blacklisted, and 174 districts were partially blacklisted, nearly half of the total in the entire republic.38 Although the names were compiled by local leaders, Moscow took a keen interest in the process. Kaganovich personally pushed for the system of blacklisting to be spread to the Kuban, the historically Cossack and majority Ukrainian-speaking province of the North Caucasus.