Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

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. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger—holod—and extermination—mor.

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. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word “genocide,” spoke of Ukraine in this era as the “classic example” of his concept: “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”

The central subject is more concrete: what actually happened in Ukraine between the years 1917 and 1934? In particular, what happened in the autumn, winter and spring of 1932–3? What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible? How does this terrible episode fit into the broader history of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian national movement?

Just as importantly: what happened afterwards?

This book begins in 1917, with the Ukrainian revolution and the Ukrainian national movement that was destroyed in 1932–3. It ends in the present, with a discussion of the ongoing politics of memory in Ukraine. It focuses on the famine in Ukraine, which, although part of a wider Soviet famine, had unique causes and attributes.

this book discusses the Soviet-wide famines between 1930 and 1934—which also led to high death rates, especially in Kazakhstan and particular provinces of Russia—but focuses more directly on the specific tragedy of Ukraine.

The book also reflects a quarter-century’s worth of scholarship on Ukraine.

Robert Conquest compiled everything then publicly available about the famine, and the book he published in 1986, The Harvest of Sorrow, still stands as a landmark in writing about the Soviet Union.

in the three decades since the end of the USSR and the emergence of a sovereign Ukraine, several broad national campaigns to collect oral history and memoirs have yielded thousands of new testimonies from all over the country.7 During that same time period, archives in Kyiv—unlike those in Moscow—have become accessible and easy to use; the percentage of unclassified material in Ukraine is one of the highest in Europe. Ukrainian government funding has encouraged scholars to publish collections of documents, ...

have produced multiple books and monographs, including collections of reprinted documents as well as oral history.

have at last begun to do the difficult work of establishing the numbers of victims.

Terry Martin was the first to reveal the chronology of the decisions Stalin took in the autumn of 1932—and Timothy Snyder and Andrea Graziosi were among the first to recognize their significance. Serhii Plokhii and his team at Harvard have launched an unusual effort to map the famine, the better to understand how it happened.

nation.”2 The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.

Ukraine—the word means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish—belonged to the Russian empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to that, the same lands belonged to Poland, or rather the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which inherited them in 1569 from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Earlier still, Ukrainian lands lay at the heart of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval state in the ninth century formed by Slavic tribes and a Viking nobility, and, in the memories of the region, an almost mythical kingdom that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians all claim as their ancestor.

Ukrainian peasants spoke a language that the Poles called “Ruthenian,” and were always described as having different customs, different music, different food.

emancipation of the serfs across imperial Russia under Tsar Alexander II in 1861.

Freedom for the peasants was, in effect, freedom for Ukrainians, and a blow to their Russian and Polish masters. The pressure for a more powerful Ukrainian identity was, even then, also pressure for greater political and economic equality,

Industrialization deepened the pressure for Russification as well, since the construction of factories brought outsiders to Ukrainian cities from elsewhere in the Russian empire.

The discovery of coal and the rapid development of heavy industry had a particularly dramatic impact on Donbas, the mining and manufacturing region on the eastern edge of Ukraine.

John Hughes, a Welshman, founded the city now known as Donetsk, originally called “Yuzivka” in his honour.

Across the imperial border in Galicia, the mixed Ukrainian-Polish province of the Austro-Hungarian empire,

Between 1914 and 1918 the army of the Russian tsar had contained more than 3 million Ukrainian conscripts, and the Austro-Hungarian army had included an additional 250,000.

In his satirical

novel White Guard (1926), Mikhail Bulgakov,

the Bolsheviks believed themselves to be the “vanguard of the proletariat”; they would call their regime the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They sought absolute power, and eventually abolished all other political parties and opponents through terror, violence and vicious propaganda campaigns.

very bloody counter-revolution, one that had to be immediately defeated. The subsequent civil war forced them to create an army, a political police force and a propaganda machine.

the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry,” as a recent biographer has written.40 Born in Georgia, educated in a seminary, his reputation in the underground rested on his talent for robbing banks. He had been in and out of prison several times. At the time of the February revolution in 1917, he was in exile in a village north of the Arctic Circle. When Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, Stalin returned to Petrograd (the name of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, had been Russified in 1914, and would be changed to Leningrad in 1924).

The Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 unseated the Provisional Government and brought Stalin his first, glorious taste of real political power.41 As the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, he was a member of the first Bolshevik government. In that role he was directly responsible for negotiating with all the non-Russian nations and peoples who had belonged to the Russian empire—and, more importantly, for convincing, or forcing, them to submit to Soviet rule. In his dealings with Ukraine he had two clear and immediate priorities, both dictated by the extremity of the situation. The first was to undermine the national movement, clearly the Bolsheviks’ most important rival in Ukraine. The second was to get hold of Ukrainian grain. He embarked on both of those tasks only days after the Bolsheviks took power.

“all Ukrainian workers and the poorest section of the peasantry” opposed the Central Rada, he claimed, which was hardly the truth either.42

Stalin followed up his public denunciations of the Central Rada with what would later be termed “active measures,” intended to destabilize the Ukrainian government. Local Bolsheviks tried to establish so-called independent “Soviet republics” in Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, Odessa, Tavriia and the Don province—tiny, Moscow-backed mini-states, which were of course not independent at all.43 The Bolsheviks also attempted to stage a coup in Kyiv; after that failed, they created an “alternative” Central Executive Committee

of Ukraine and then a “Soviet government” in Kharkiv, a more reliably Russian-speaking city. Later, they would make Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine, even though, in 1918, only a hand...

The Bolshevik obsession with food was no accident: The Russian empire had been struggling with food supplies ever since the outbreak of the First

World War. At the beginning of the conflict with Germany, imperial Russia centralized and nationalized its food distribution system, creating administrative chaos and shortages. A Special Council for Discussing and Coordinating Measures for Food Supply, a state food distribution organization and a clear precedent for the Soviet organizations that followed, was put in control. Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to “eliminate middlemen” and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.

The resulting food shortages sparked the February revolution in 1917 and propelled the Bolsheviks to power a few months later.

“War Communism.”

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.

In 1918 many would have found this system familiar. The Russian imperial government, tormented by wartime food shortages, had begun to confiscate grain at gunpoint—a policy known as prodrazvyorstka—as early as 1916. In March 1917 the Provisional Government had also decreed that peasants should sell all grain to the state at prices dictated by the state, with the exception of what they needed for their own sowing and consumption.63 The Bolsheviks followed suit. In May 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars followed up on tsarist policy and established a “food-supply dictatorship.” The Commissariat of Food Supply created a “food-supply army,” which was to be deployed on the “food-supply front.”

But despite the militarized language, 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.

During those years these illegal markets gave many people access to food, especially individuals not on special government lists. But the Bolsheviks not only refused to accept these street bazaars, they blamed them for the continuing crisis. 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. In January 1919, Lenin himself would denounce them as ideological enemies:

All talk on this theme [private trade], all attempts to encourage it are a great danger, a retreat, a step back from the socialist construction that the Commissariat of Food is carrying out amid unbelievable difficulties in a struggle with millions of speculators left to us by capitalism.

But words were not enough. Faced with widespread hunger, the Bolsheviks took more extreme measures.

whom Lenin accused of holding back surplus grain for their own purposes. To force the peasants to give up their grain and to fight the counter-revolution, Lenin also eventually created the chrezvychainaia komissiia—the “extraordinary commission,” also known as the Che-Ka, or Cheka. This was the first name given to the Soviet secret police, later known as the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD and finally the KGB.

the brutal tactics he used to procure grain in Tsaritsyn presaged those he would employ to procure grain in Ukraine more than a decade later. Within days of arriving in the city Stalin created a revolutionary military council, established a Cheka division, and began to “cleanse” Tsaritsyn of counter-revolutionaries. Denouncing the local generals as “bourgeois specialists” and “lifeless pen-pushers, completely ill-suited to civil war,” he took them and others into custody and placed them on a barge in the centre of the Volga.74 In conjunction with several units of Bolshevik troops from Donetsk, and with the help of Klement Voroshilov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, two men who would remain close associates, Stalin authorized arrests and beatings on a broad scale, followed by mass executions. Red Army thugs robbed local merchants and peasants of their grain; the Cheka then fabricated criminal cases against them—another harbinger of what was to come—and caught up random people in the sweep as well.

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.

anti-semitism was rife throughout the imperial army in 1914, as indeed it was rife throughout Russian society, even at the very highest levels. Tsar Nicholas II was a particularly enthusiastic anti-semite, for whom Jews symbolized everything hateful about the modern world.

During his reign the okhrana, the imperial secret police, had produced the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious forgery that depicted a Jewish plot to govern the world.

The state had also had a hand in inspiring a wave of pogroms across Russia in 1905. Given that general attitude, it is not surprising that the army leadership in 1914 suspected Jews of “consorting with the enemy through the use of underground telephones and airplanes” and supplying German troops with gold smuggled across the front line in the stomachs of cattle and the eggs of geese.29 Swirling conspiracy theories about Jewish treachery supplied a plausible explanation for unpalatable facts: the defeat of a unit, the loss of a division, the poor performance of the entire army.

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...