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The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians.
Taken together, these two policies—the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed—brought about the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity.
The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.
For if there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, then someone who wished to destroy a national movement might well want to begin by destroying the peasantry. —
From the very beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks assumed that the exploitation of Ukraine was the price that had to be paid in order to maintain control of Russia.
War Communism meant the militarization of all economic relationships. In the countryside, the system was very simple: take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed “essential” by the state.
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.
The cruelty they used was no secret. During a confidential meeting in the summer of 1920, the Soviet “procurements commissars,” the men tasked with organizing the collection of grain, considered the “impact of the requisitions on the population.” After a long debate, they made a decision: “no matter how heavy the requisitions can be for local inhabitants…state interests must anyway come first.”
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.
ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars.
Many decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the grandson of kulaks, described the collective farms as “serfdom.” In order for the memory of collective farms as a “second serfdom” to have had such a long life, it must have been deeply rooted.
One of those sentenced—Maria Skypyan-Basylevych, a party bureaucrat who spent ten years in the Gulag—declared, thirty years later, that “absolutely innocent people had suffered, honest and principled communists.”15 But in 1933 the Orikhiv arrests sent out a strong message: party members themselves were not immune from prosecution. Anybody, however apparently loyal, however good a communist, could now become a scapegoat if he or she dared to disagree with the authorities.
Hanna Sukhenko remembered that it was “popular” to inform, because when a person found someone else’s food, he or she was given up to a third of it as a reward.27
Mykola Mylov remembered a neighbour who came one day and looked around his house. The following day activists arrived and confiscated his food. Mylov asked the neighbour whether he had informed on him: “Of course it was me, do you think I am afraid to confess? I have now received two sacks of wheat, my six children will not go hungry.”30
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. A brigade searching the home of Mykhailo Balanovskyi in Cherkasy province demanded to know “how it is possible that no one in this family has yet died?”
“Those are kulaks, peasants who have not adapted to the regime…there is nothing for them but to die.” There was no need for pity: they would soon be replaced by tractors, which could do the work of ten men.
That spring, “the air was filled with the ubiquitous odour of decomposing bodies. The wind carried this odour far and wide, all across Ukraine.”77
Mass graves of famine victims were covered up and hidden, and it became dangerous even to know where they were located. In 1938 all the staff of the Lukianivske cemetery in Kyiv were arrested, tried and shot as counter-revolutionary insurgents, probably to prevent them from revealing what they knew.84
In March the OGPU in Kyiv province were receiving ten or more reports of cannibalism every day.
Thanks to their work, agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million.
In other words, the regions “normally” most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not “normal.” It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity. And in this, it succeeded.
Between 1959 and 1970 over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn to the republic by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine and purges had created for energetic new residents.
Whereas, in 1921, the Soviet leadership had spoken of starving peasants as victims, in 1933, Stalin switched the vocabulary. Those who were starving were not victims; they were perpetrators. They were not sufferers; they were responsible for their terrible fate. They had caused the famine, and therefore they deserved to die. From this assessment came the logical conclusion: the state was justified in refusing to help them stay alive.
This was the argument that Stalin would advocate for the rest of his life. He never denied, to Sholokhov or to anyone else, that peasants had died from a famine caused by state policy in 1933, and he certainly never apologized.
