Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

A complete ban on trade came next. Earlier in 1932 an edict had forbidden peasants from trading grain and meat products if their farms had not met requisition quotas. Now, districts which had failed to meet the grain procurement targets—and this included most of Ukraine—could no longer legally trade grain, seeds, flour or bread in any form at all. Anyone caught trading anything was liable to be arrested.

The blacklists also served as a lesson in the folly of resistance in Ukraine. Unlike Russia and Belarus, where the term “blacklist” was confined to grain producers, in Ukraine it could be applied to almost any entity. Whole districts were blacklisted. Machine tractor stations, timber companies and all kinds of provincial enterprises only distantly connected to grain production were blacklisted. As one historian has written, “the blacklist became a universal weapon aimed at all rural residents” in Ukraine.

Blacklisting affected not just peasants but artisans, nurses, teachers, clerks, civil servants, anyone who lived in a blacklisted village or worked in a blacklisted enterprise.

Like everyone in the regions that had not met the grain targets, those on the blacklists were prohibited from receiving any manufactured goods whatsoever—including, thanks to Molotov, kerosene, salt and matches. The activists also forced them to hand back to the central authorities any manufactured goods—clothes, furniture, tools—they had stored in shops and warehouses.

The state prohibited the milling of grain, making it impossible to prepare flour (even if any grain could be obtained) in order to bake bread. Blacklisted farms could not receive the services of the machine tractor stations, which meant that all farm work had to be done by hand or with livestock.44 In some places the blacklists were enforced by special brigades or teams of soldiers or secret policemen who blocked trade to the village, farm or district.

Ostensibly, the blacklists were designed to persuade the peasants sanctioned by them to work harder and produce more grain. In practice, they had quite a different impact. With no grain, no livestock, no tools, no money and no credit, with no ability to trade or even to leave their places of work, the inhabitants of blacklisted villages could not grow, prepare or purchase anything to eat at all.

As Ukrainian peasants grew more hungry, another problem arose: how to prevent starving people from leaving their homes in search of something to eat.

What really concerned the Soviet authorities was the political significance of this mass movement of people. All across the Soviet Union, in the far north and far east, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of Poland and in Ukraine itself, itinerant Ukrainians were not only spreading news of the famine, they were bringing their allegedly counter-revolutionary attitudes along with them. As their numbers increased dramatically, the Soviet government finally declared there could no longer be any doubt: “the flight of villagers and the exodus from Ukraine last year and this year is [being] organized by the enemies of the Soviet government…and agents of Poland with the goal of spreading propaganda among the peasants.”

A solution was found. In January 1933, Stalin and Molotov simply closed the borders of Ukraine. Any Ukrainian peasant found outside the republic was returned to his or her place of origin. Train tickets were no longer sold to Ukrainian villagers. Only those who had permission could leave home—and permission was, of course, denied.66 The borders of the heavily Ukrainian North Caucasus district were also closed, and in February the Lower Volga district was also blocked.67 The border closures remained in place throughout the famine.

To preserve a semblance of order, policemen also began to remove any peasants who had made it into the cities.

“The passport system laid an administrative and judicial cornerstone for the new serfdom [and] tied down the peasantry as it had been before the emancipation of 1861.”

Just as it was publicly publishing the new decrees on food requisition and blacklists, the Politburo also issued, on 14 and 15 December respectively, two secret decrees that explicitly blamed Ukrainization for the requisitions failure.

In the context of the broader, 1932–3 Soviet famine, these two decrees are unique, as are the events that followed them. There were, it is true, other regions that received special treatment. Suspicion of their loyalty probably contributed to higher death rates among peasants in the Volga provinces, where some of the policies used in Ukraine, including mass arrests of communist leaders, were also deployed, though not at the same level as in Ukraine.2 In Kazakhstan the regime blocked traditional nomadic routes and requisitioned livestock to feed the Russian cities, creating terrible suffering among the ethnic Kazakh nomads. More than a third of the entire population, 1.5 million people, perished during a famine that barely touched the Slavic population of Kazakhstan. This assault on the nomads, sometimes called “sedentarization,” was another form of Sovietization and a clear attack on a recalcitrant ethnic group.3 But nowhere else were agricultural failures linked so explicitly to questions of national language or culture as they were in both Ukraine and in the North Caucasus, with its large Ukrainian-speaking population.

The second decree echoed the first but extended the ban on Ukrainization further, to the Far East, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Central Black Earth province and “other areas of the USSR” that might have been infected with Ukrainian nationalism. The Soviet government issued this supplement in order to “condemn the suggestions made by individual Ukrainian comrades about the mandatory Ukrainization of entire areas of the USSR” and to authorize an immediate halt to any Ukrainization anywhere. The regions named were ordered to stop printing Ukrainian newspapers and books immediately, and to impose Russian as the main language of school instruction.

The two decrees provided an explanation for the grain crisis and named scapegoats. They also set off an immediate mass purge of Ukrainian Communist Party officials, as well as verbal and then physical attacks on university professors, schoolteachers, academics and intellectuals—anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian national idea. During the following year all of the institutions connected to Ukrainian culture were purged, shut down, or transformed: universities, academies, galleries, clubs.

The decrees established a direct link between the assault on Ukrainian national identity and the famine. The same secret police organization carried them out. The same officials oversaw the propaganda that described them. From the point of view of the state, they were part of the same project.

Hundreds of Ukrainian party members regularly and repeatedly opposed the grain requisitions and the blacklists, both verbally and in practice. At times, their pleas were emotional. One party member in the town of Svatove declared his views openly in a long letter to his local party committee. “I remember how from my first day in the Komsomol, in 1921, I yearned and went to work with a feeling that the party line is right and I am right,” he wrote. But in 1929 he had begun to have doubts. And when people began to starve, he felt he had to protest: “The general party line is wrong and its implementation led to poverty in the countryside, to forced proletarianization in agriculture, which is confirmed by our train stations and the appearance in the cities of entire masses of homeless orphans.”7 Others clearly perceived the new requisitions as an attack on the republic itself. “They could make mistakes in 10 or 20 districts,” one local party secretary was heard to say, “but to make mistakes in all districts of Ukraine—this means that something is wrong.”

Such expressions of doubt unsettled the Soviet leadership. For if communists no longer supported the official policy, then who would carry it out? Nobody took this problem more seriously than Stalin himself. After consulting with Balytsky, whom he met twice in November 1932, Stalin sent out a letter addressed to all party leaders, national, regional and local, all across the country, declaring war on the traitors inside the party. “An enemy with a party card in his pocket should be punished more harshly than an enemy without a party card,” he proclaimed:

In the winter of 1932–3 he launched a new wave of investigations, prosecutions and arrests of the low-level Ukrainian Communist Party members who had dared to protest. The result of this purge, which took place at the same time as the famine, was to make the Ukrainian Communist Party a tool of Moscow, with no autonomy or any ability to take decisions on its own.

On 18 November, the same day the Ukrainian Politburo called for the confiscation of all remaining stores of grain, it also issued a decree “on the liquidation of counter-revolutionary nests and the defeat of kulak groups.” In blacklisted villages, “kulaks, Petliurites, pogromists and other counter-revolutionary elements” were slated for arrest.16 Four days later the Soviet Politburo in Moscow resolved to establish death sentences for party and collective farm leaders who had failed to meet grain targets.

A special “troika” of Ukrainian officials, including Kosior, received the authority to order executions. They were also under instructions to report their decisions to Moscow every ten days.17 They moved quickly. Within four days the OGPU discovered not only widespread dissatisfaction but evidence of a “kulak-Petliurite” conspiracy in 243 Ukrainian districts.18 The secret police arrested 14,230 people in November 1932 alone; the total number of arrests for that year was 27,000, enough to eviscerate the party at the grassroots level.19 Even young people who were not yet members of the party fell under a cloud: between late 1932 and early 1934 the Komsomol expelled 18,638 of its members.

The fictitious “conspiracy” also grew denser, more complex, and more closely linked to the rebellions of the past. Many of those arrested, especially in November and December, were the chairmen or leaders of collective farms; others were accountants or clerks. The names of the arrested were often listed with their real or imagined links and credentials too: “former Petliurite commander”; “son of a trader, whose mother has been sent to the North”; “former landowner”; “former active participant in Petliurite and Makhno bands.” Their “crimes” always involved the supposed theft of bread, criticism of the grain collection campaign, or other activities that somehow explained the harvest failure in Ukraine.22 Yet their motives were described not merely as political but also as counter-revolutionary.

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.

the orders linking Ukrainization to grain requisition also marked the end of the Ukrainian national movement in the Soviet Union.

In January 1933 the party abolished the Ukrainian history and language courses that Skrypnyk had established in Ukraine’s universities. In February, Skrypnyk was forced to defend himself against the charge that he had tried to “Ukrainize” Russian children by force. In March, while the famine was raging in the countryside, Postyshev, in his role as Stalin’s de facto spokesman in Ukraine, forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children.29

in the course of two years, 1932 and 1933—the years of the famine—the same Soviet secret police responsible for overseeing the hunger in the countryside would arrest nearly 200,000 people in the republic of Ukraine.38 But even this figure, as large as it is, underrates the catastrophic impact of this targeted purge on specific institutions and branches of society, especially education, culture, religion and publishing. In essence, the 200,000 represented an entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians.

In the Ukrainian context this 1932–3 purge was similar in scale to the “Great Terror” of 1937–8, which eradicated most of the Soviet leadership and would take many Ukrainian victims too.

During the crucial years 1932–3 whole institutions—the Polish pedagogical institute, a German secondary school—were shut down or else cleansed entirely of faculty and staff.40 University faculties and publishing houses were shut down. Forty staff employed by the Ukrainian National Library were arrested as “national-fascist wreckers.”41 All the remaining departments of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were liquidated.42 The Ukrainian Academy of Agricultural Sciences lost between 80 and 90 per cent of its presidium. Other organizations similarly wiped out in 1933 included the editorial board of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, the Geodesic Administration, the Cinema Studio, the Chamber of Weights and Measures, the Institute of Soviet Law in Kharkiv and many others. Two hundred “nationalistic” Ukrainian plays were banned, along with a couple of dozen “nationalistic” Ukrainian translations of world classics.

in practice the Russian language returned to dominance in both higher education and public life. Millions assumed that any association with Ukrainian language or history was toxic, even dangerous, as well as “backwards” and inferior. The city government of Donetsk dropped its use of Ukrainian; factory newspapers that had been publishing in Ukrainian switched to Russian.45 The universities of Odessa, which had recently adopted Ukrainian, also went back to teaching in Russian. Ambitious students openly sought to avoid studying Ukrainian, preferring to be educated in Russian, the language that gave them greater access and more career opportunities.

A similar wave of repression washed over the Church.

Between 1931 and 1936 thousands of churches—three-quarters of those in the country—ceased to function altogether. Many would be physically demolished: between 1934 and 1937 sixty-nine churches were destroyed in Kyiv alone. Both churches and synagogues were converted to other uses. The buildings, hungry peasants were told, were needed to serve as “granaries.” The result was that by 1936 services took place in only 1,116 churches in the entire Ukrainian Republic. In many large provinces—Donetsk, Vinnytsia, Mikolaiv—there were no Orthodox churches left at all. In others—Luhansk, Poltava, Kharkiv—there was but a single church in use.

Once the people and the monuments were out of the way, the attack on their books followed. On 15 December 1934 the authorities published a list of banned authors, decreeing that all their books, for all years and in all languages, must be removed from libraries, shops, educational institutions and warehouses. Eventually, four such lists would be published, containing works by Ukrainian writers, poets, critics, historians, sociologists, art historians, and anyone else who had been arrested. In other words, the extermination of the intellectual class was accompanied by the extermination of their words and ideas.

The abolition of the dictionary led to linguistic changes in official and academic documents, in literature and school textbooks. The Ukrainian letter “g” (Ґ) was dropped, a change that made the language seem “closer” to Russian. Foreign words were given Russian forms instead of Ukrainian ones. Ukrainian periodicals received lists of “words not to be used” and “words to be used,” with the former including more “Ukrainian” words, and the latter sounding more Russian.

The situation would be stabilized somewhat after Nikita Khrushchev became the first party secretary in Ukraine in 1939. But by then the experts were imprisoned or dead; neither their books nor their carefully produced grammars were ever revived in Soviet Ukraine.

a remarkably consistent oral history record shows a sharp change in activists’ behaviour on the eve of the Holodomor.

That winter the teams operating in villages all across Ukraine began to search not just for grain but for anything and everything edible. They were specifically equipped to do so with special tools, long metal rods, sometimes topped by hooks, that could be used to prod any surface in search of grain.

activists broke all the millstones in the village of Tymoshivka.

As the weeks dragged on, just being alive attracted suspicion: if a family was alive, that meant it had food. But if they had food, then they should have given it up—and if they had failed to give it up, then they were kulaks, Petliurites, Polish agents, enemies.

on 11 November 1932 the Ukrainian Communist Party called for the creation of no fewer than 1,100 new activist brigades by 1 December—that is, within three weeks. That was the first of what would be several attempts to increase the numbers of people dedicated to enforcing the requisitions policy. As time went on, extra manpower would be required not only to collect food but to protect fields and crops from starving peasants, to prevent people from entering train stations or crossing borders, and eventually to bury the dead.

Their task was also different from what it had been in 1930. These new brigades were not carrying out an agricultural reform, or even pretending to do so: they were taking food away from starving families, as well as anything valuable that could have been exchanged for food, and, in some cases, any implements that could be used to prepare it. For that reason their nature and their motivation require closer examination.

fresh activists were also deliberately sent from outside the republic at this time. In December 1932, Kaganovich visited Voznesensk in southern Ukraine and told a group of party activists that they were not tough enough: “A Ukrainian saying has it that ‘you should twist, but not overtwist.’ ” But they have decided “not to twist at all.” The goal, he explained frankly, was to put villages in such a panic “that the peasants themselves give away their hiding places.”

That same month Kaganovich also sent Stalin a telegram complaining about the “unreliability” of the Ukrainian members of the grain collection brigades, and calling for Russians from the Russian Republic to help.

Lev Kopelev

Propaganda also helped persuade many activists to think of the peasants as second-class citizens, even second-class human beings—if they were even human beings at all. Peasants already seemed alien to most city-dwellers. Now their deep poverty and even their starvation made them unlikeable, inhuman. Bolshevik ideology implied they would soon disappear.

There was no need for pity: they would soon be replaced by tractors, which could do the work of ten men. The brave new world would not have space for so many useless people.

But the vast majority of members of the brigades that searched villages for food in 1932–3 were not outsiders. Nor were they motivated by hatred of Ukrainian peasants, because they were Ukrainian peasants themselves. More importantly, they were the neighbours of the people whose food they stole: local collective farm bosses, members of the village council, teachers and doctors, civil servants, Komsomol leaders, former members of the “poor peasants’ committees” from 1919, former participants in de-kulakization. As in other historic genocides, they were persuaded to kill people whom they knew extremely well.

many did collaborate, in different ways and at different levels, and out of a mix of motives. Some had no choice.

The highest party officials also had ration cards, which enabled them to make purchases that were impossible for others. Privileges were also extended to their children, as those less fortunate remembered: “There was a special school for the children of the bosses. There was a canteen inside…breathtaking

Whether they were locals or outsiders, all those who carried out orders to confiscate food did so with a sense of impunity.

they were also certain that their actions were sanctioned at the very highest levels.