Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Many shtetls were burnt to the ground. Many Jewish communities were blackmailed out of all their worldly goods by soldiers who threatened to kill them unless they paid up. In the town of Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi) a riot started by the Bolsheviks led to the deaths of 1,600 people over the course of two day...

When Denikin’s troops left the city in December 1919, some 2,500 Jewish corpses were found in m...

The rebellion also taught them to see Ukraine as a source of future military threats, for it was thanks to the chaos in Ukraine that Denikin’s last campaign nearly succeeded. Following the bloody summer of 1919, Denikin seized Kyiv in August. He took Kursk on 20 September and Orel on 13 October. He came within 200 kilometres of Moscow—so close that he might have taken the city. Had Denikin formed an alliance with Ukrainian national forces he might well have toppled the Bolshevik regime before it really got started. Yet his unpopular land policies, his opposition to Ukrainian institutions, and his officers’ brutal tactics instead provoked Ukrainian partisans to attack his supply lines. His hold on Ukrainian territory weakened rapidly and so he withdrew.

Instead of addressing the problem, the Soviet Communist Party sought to eliminate the dissidents.

THE STARVATION OF a human body, once it begins, always follows the same course. In the first phase, the body consumes its stores of glucose. Feelings of extreme hunger set in, along with constant thoughts of food. In the second phase, which can last for several weeks, the body begins to consume its own fats, and the organism weakens drastically. In the third phase, the body devours its own proteins, cannibalizing tissues and muscles. Eventually, the skin becomes thin, the eyes become distended, the legs and belly swollen as extreme imbalances lead the body to retain water. Small

amounts of effort lead to exhaustion. Along the way, different kinds of diseases can hasten death: scurvy, kwashiorkor, marasmus, pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, and a wide range of infections and skin diseases caused, directly or indirectly, by lack of food.

Some survivors specifically recalled the many diseases of starvation and their different physical side effects. Scurvy caused people to feel pain in their joints, to lose their teeth. It also led to night-blindness: people could not see in the dark, and so feared to leave their homes at night.10 Dropsy—œdema—caused the legs of victims to swell and made their skin very thin, even transparent.

People with swollen legs, covered in sores, could not sit: “When such a person sat down, the skin broke, liquid began to run down their legs, the smell was awful and they felt unbearable pain.”13 Children developed swollen bellies, and heads that seemed too heavy for their necks.14 One woman remembered a girl who was so emaciated that “one could see how her heart was beating beneath the skin.”15 M. Mishchenko described the final stages: “General weakness increases, and the sufferer cannot sit up in bed or move at all. He falls into a drowsy state which may last for a week, until his heart stops beating from exhaustion.”

An emaciated person can die very quickly, unexpectedly, and many did. Volodymyr Slipchenko’s sister worked in a school, where she witnessed children dying during lessons—“a child is sitting at a school desk, then collapses, falls down”—or while playing in the grass outside.17 Many people died while walking, trying to flee. Another survivor remembered that the roads leading to Donbas were lined with corpses: “Dead villagers lay on the roads, along the road and paths. There were more bodies than people to move them.”

Those deprived of food were also liable to die suddenly in the act of eating, if they managed to get hold of something to eat. In the spring of 1933, Hryhorii Simia remembered that a terrible stench arose from wheatfields close to the road: hungry people had crawled into the grain stalks to cut off ears of wheat, eaten them and then died: their empty stomachs could no longer digest anything.19 The same thing happened in the bread lines in the cities. “There were cases when a person bought bread, ate it and died on the spot, being too exhausted with hunger.”20 One survivor was tormented by the memory of finding some beets, which he brought to his grandmother. She ate two of them raw and cooked the rest. Within hours she was dead, as her body could not cope with digestion.

For those who remained alive, the physical symptoms were often just the beginning. The psychological changes could be equally dramatic. Some spoke later of a “psychosis of hunger,” though of course such a thing could not be defined or measured.22 “From hunger, people’s psyches were disturbed. Common sense left them, natural instincts faded,” recalled Petro Boichuk.23 Pitirim Sorokin, who experienced starvation in the 1921 famine, remembered that after only a week of food deprivation, “It was very difficult for me to concentrate for any length of time on anything but food. For short periods, by forcing myself, I was able to chase away the ‘thoughts of hunger’ from my consciousness, but they invariably returned and took possession of it.” Eventually, ideas about food “begin to multiply abundantly in the consciousness, and they acquire a diversity and unprecedented vivacity often reaching the stage of hallucinations.” Other kinds of thoughts “fade from the field of consciousness, become very vague and uninteresting.”

Over and over, survivors have written and spoken about how personalities were altered by hunger, and how normal behaviour ceased. The desire to eat simply overwhelmed everything else—and familial feelings above all. A woman who had always been kind and generous abruptly changed when food began to run short. She sent her own mother out of her house and told her to go and live with another relative: “You’ve lived with us for two weeks,” she told her, “live with him and do not be a burden to my children.”

Another survivor remembered a young boy searching for extra grain in a field. His sister ran to him and told him to go home because their father had died. The boy replied: “To hell with him, I want to eat.”26 A woman told a neighbour that her youngest daughter was dying, and so she had not given the little girl any bread. “I need to try to support myself, the children will die anyway.”27 A five-year-old boy whose father had died stole into an uncle’s house to find something to eat. Furious, the uncle’s family locked him in a cellar where he died as well.28 Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine. One woman told her village that while she would always be able to give birth to other children, she had only one husband, and she wanted him to survive. She duly confiscated the bread her children received at a local kindergarten, and all her children died.29 A couple put their children in a deep hole and left them there, in order not to have to watch them die. Neighbours heard the children screaming, and they were rescued and survived.30 Another survivor remembered her mother leaving the house in order not to hear a younger sibling cry.31 Uliana Lytvyn, aged eighty at the time she was interviewed, remembered these emotional changes, and especially the disappearance of family feelings—maternal and paternal love—above all else: “Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neithe...

to kind and honest peasant farmers. When sometimes I dream of that horror, I still cry through the dream.”

Distrust grew too, and indeed had been growing since the beginning of the collectivization and de-kulakization drives a few years earlier. “Neighbours had been made to spy on neighbours,” wrote Miron Dolot: “friends had been forced to betray friends; children had been coached to denounce their parents; and even family members avoided meeting each other. The warm traditional hospitality of the villagers had disappeared, to be replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Fear became our constant companion: it was an awesome dread of standing helplessly and hopelessly alone before the monstrous power of the State.”

Iaryna Mytsyk remembered that families who had always left their houses open, even during the years of revolution and civil war, now locked their doors: “Centuries-old sincerity and generosity did not exist any more. It disappeared with hungry stomachs.”34 Parents warned their children to beware of neighbours whom they had known all their lives: no one knew who might turn out to be a thief, a spy—or a cannibal. No one wanted others to learn how they had survived either. “Trust disappeared,” wrote Mariia Doronenko: “Anyone who got hold of food, or who discovered a means of obtaining food, kept the secret to themselves, refusing to tell even the closest family members.”

Empathy disappeared as well, and not only among the hungriest. The desperation and hysteria of the starving inspired horror and fear, even among those who still had enough to eat. An anonymous letter that eventually found its way into the Vatican archives described the feeling of being around the starving:

As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel—perhaps could not feel—pity. Instead, they turned their anger on the sufferer.

Propaganda encouraged this feeling: the Communist Party loudly and angrily blamed the Ukrainian peasants for their fate, and so did others too.

Vasily Grossman described this stage of hunger in Forever Flowing:

In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of the house. In its first stage, he is tormented and driven as though by fire and torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape from this home. People dig up worms, collect grass, and even make the effort to break through and get to the city. Away from home, away from home! And then a day comes when the starving person crawls back into his house. And the meaning of this is that famine, starvation, has won. The human being cannot be saved. He lies down on his bed and stays there. Not just because he has no strength, but because he has no interest in life and no longer cares about living. He lies there quietly and does not want to be touched. And he does not even want to eat…all he wants is to be left alone and for things to be quiet…

Public officials were also shocked by the general indifference. As early as August 1932 a police informer told his contacts that a colleague, a bank employee, had confided in him his “complete collapse of faith in a better future.” He explained: “Deep hopelessness can be felt by all urban and rural dwellers, both old and young, party members and non-members of the party. Both intellectuals and the representatives of physical work lose muscle strength and intellectual energy because they think only about how to stop the feeling of hunger in themselves and their children.”67

“People have grown dull, they absolutely do not react,” he wrote. “Not to mortality, not to cannibalism, not to anything.”

Indifference soon spread to death itself. Traditional Ukrainian funerals had combined church and folk traditions, and included a choir, a meal, the singing of psalms, readings from the Bible, sometimes professional mourners. Now all such rites were banned.69 Nobody had the strength anymore to dig a grave, hold a ceremony, or play music. Religious practices disappeared along with churches and priests. For a culture that had valued its rituals highly, the impossibility of saying a proper farewell to the dead became another source of trauma: “There were no funerals,” recalled Kateryna Marchenko. “There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry.”

by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread. Even more extraordinarily, its existence was no secret, not in Kharkiv, Kyiv, or Moscow.

Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation. But although the phenomenon was widespread, it never became “normal,” and—despite the assertion by the machine tractor station official that people were unaffected by cannibalism—it was rarely treated with indifference.

Ukrainian authorities knew about many of the incidents: police reports contained great detail. But Balytsky made special efforts to prevent the stories from spreading. Ukraine’s secret police boss warned his subordinates against putting too much information about the famine into writing: “provide information on the food problems solely to the First Secretaries of the Party Provincial Committees and only orally…This is to ensure that written notes on the subject do not circulate among the officials where they might cause rumours…”

Nevertheless, the secret police, the ordinary criminal police and other local officials did keep records. One police report from Kyiv province in

April 1933 began with “We have an extraordinary case of cannibalism in the Petrovskyi district”: A kulak woman, aged fifty, from the Zelenky, Bohuslavskyi district, hiding in Kuban since 1932, returned to her home town with her (adult) daughter. Along the road from Horodyshchenska station to Korsun, she lured a passing twelve-year-old boy and slit his throat. The organs and other parts of the body she placed in a bag. In the village of Horodyshche, citizen Sherstiuk, an inhabitant of that place, allowed the woman to spend the night. In a dishonest manner, she pretended that the organs came from a calf, and gave it to the old man to boil and to roast the heart. It was used to feed his whole family, and he ate it too. In the night, intending to use some of the meat which was in the bag, the old man discovered the chopped-up parts of the boy’s body. The criminals have been arrested.

Alongside the moral horror, many of the reports also reflect police concern that the stories could spread and have a political impact.

The real cause of this “mental illness,” or these sudden attacks of “socially dangerous” emotions, was perfectly obvious to the police as well: people were starving.

Torgsin hard currency shops.

their peak, in 1933, there were 1,500 Torgsin shops,

The expansion was not accidental: the regime knew that famine would bring gold into the state coffers. Following the Torgsin’s high turnover in 1932—in that year the shops brought in 21 tonnes of gold, one and a half

times the amount mined by Soviet industry—the state greedily set the 1933 target at more than double that number.59 The Torgsin income briefly became a crucial factor in Soviet international trade: during the years 1932–5 the gold and other valuable objects that the state obtained through the Torgsins would pay for a fifth of Soviet hard currency expenditure on machinery, raw materials and technology.60

Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, two demons make a memorable appearance in front of the “glass doors of the Torgsin Store in Smolensk Market,” before entering rooms full of “hundreds of different bolts of richly coloured poplins” where “racks full of shoes stretched into the distance.”63

Away from the capital, most of the Torgsin shops were dark and dirty like other Soviet shops, and operated by rude and angry staff.64 Still, many peasants, misled by their consumer goods and by the presence of hard currency, thought that the shops were “American.”65 Rumours of what the Torgsin might provide drew one man back from Rostov, in Russia, where he had fled to escape collectivization. Having heard that in Ukraine it was possible to exchange gold for bread, he decided, his son remembered, that it was worth the risk to come home just in order to take his tsarist-era gold coins out of their hiding place and trade them for several kilos of buckwheat and a few loaves of bread.66

This long trip was not unusual. Although there were a few mobile Torgsin shops that toured the countryside, hoping to purchase gold, peasants without access to these made major expeditions to reach them in cities and towns.

Thieves hung around Torgsin shops, and robbed or even murdered people as they entered and left. Torgsin staff cheated or mistreated peasants too.

As the famine deepened, some looked for gold wherever they could find it. For centuries Ukrainians had been buried along with their most prized possessions, including jewellery, weapons and crosses. Hunger removed any remaining feeling of respect, and more than one ancient cemetery was robbed, at first only at night but eventually during the daytime too. Since cemeteries were “Christian,” Soviet authorities did not always object to the looting—and in some places they organized it themselves.

“The grain growers in your region (and not only yours) are conducting sabotage and leaving the Red Army without grain.” These men might look like simple farmers, Stalin explained, but they were in fact waging a quiet, bloodless, but nevertheless effective “war against Soviet power.”

those who were starving to death were not innocent. On the contrary, they were traitors, they were saboteurs, they were conspiring to undermine the proletarian revolution. They were waging “a war against Soviet power.”

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. He clearly read Sholokhov’s missives, and took them seriously enough to respond. But he never admitted that any important element of his policy—not collectivization, not grain expropriation, not the searches and shakedowns that had intensified the famine in Ukraine—was wrong. Instead, he placed all responsibility for food shortages and mass deaths firmly onto the shoulders of those who were dying.

the sharpening of contradictions, the creation of greater stress—these were the precursors of revolutionary change. The deaths of millions was not, in other words, a sign that Stalin’s policy had failed. On the contrary, it was a sign of success. Victory had been achieved, the enemy had been defeated. As long as the Soviet Union lasted, that view would never be contested.

the response to the 1933 famine was total denial, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, of any serious food shortage. The aim was to make the famine disappear, as if it had never happened. In an era before television and the internet, before open borders and travel, this was easier to achieve than it would have been in the twenty-first century. But even in 1933 the cover-up required an extraordinary effort on the part of numerous people over many years.

none of the Ukrainian soldiers received mail from home in 1933. Members of his unit eventually found the withheld letters. Only then had they learned the truth about what was happening to their families.4 Other soldiers never received letters from home in 1932 or 1933 at all; some recalled that it was as if their families had just disappeared.5

Both doctors and nurses recall being told to “invent something” for death certificates, or to write down all cases of starvation as the result of “infectious diseases” or “cardiac arrest.”

Fear even affected correspondence between officials. In March the secretary of the local government in Dnipropetrovsk wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, complaining that numerous cases of starvation, swelling and deaths from hunger had received no official attention because lower-level officials had failed to report them: “It was considered to be anti-party, reprehensible even to react to them.” In one case a village party secretary who was himself swollen from hunger had failed to report anything, so afraid was he of censure.

As the emergency passed, official vigilance spread to record-keepers.

the Odessa bosses withdrew death registration books from all village councils, from 1933 “without exception” and from 1932 in some regions as well.11 Similar orders exist for Kharkiv province, where officials also demanded all death registries from November 1932 until the end of 1933, on the grounds that they were in the hands of “class-hostile elements” such as kulaks, Petliurites and special deportees.