Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

In reality, both types of document conformed to an identical formula, probably the result of an order from the Ukrainian authorities, and both were intended to destroy evidence of the famine.13 Although mortality numbers compiled at the provincial and national level did remain in statistical archives, at the village level many records were physically destroyed. Eyewitnesses from Zhytomyr and Chernihiv provinces have described the disappearance of death registries from their villages in 1933–4.14 In Vinnytsia, Stepan Podolian recalled that his father had been asked to burn the village registry books and rewrite them, eliminating references to hunger.

At the highest levels the cover-up functioned as a form of party discipline: it was a means of controlling officials, even testing their loyalty. To prove their dedication, party members had to accept and endorse the official falsehoods.

Soviet officials used euphemisms.

“there are food shortages but no famine.”

1937 the Soviet census bureau set out to count and measure the Soviet population,

Even so, the final result of the 1937 census was shocking.

Overall, the projections were optimistic. In 1934 census officials estimated that the population of the USSR stood at 168 million. In 1937 they estimated 170 million or even 172 million.

The real numbers, when they finally arrived, were quite different. The total population figure of the USSR came to 162 million—meaning that (for those who expected 170 million) some eight million people were “missing.” That inexact number included victims of the famine and their unborn children. It also reflected the genuine chaos of the famine years. The peasants dying by the roadsides, the mass migration, the deportations, the impossibility of keeping accurate statistics in villages where everyone was starving, including public officials—all of these things made the census-takers’ job more difficult.21 In truth, nobody was absolutely sure how many people had really died and how many lived, counted or uncounted. The census-takers had erred on the side of caution.

Rather than accept the result, Stalin abolished it. Meetings were called; expert panels were created. A special Central Committee resolution declared the census badly organized, unprofessional, and a “gross violation of the basic fundamentals of statistical science.”22 The journal Bolshevik declared that the census had been “disrupted by contemptible enemies of the people—Trotsky-Bukharinite spies and traitors to the motherland, having slipped at that time into the leadership of the Central Directo...

The publication of the 1937 census was halted immediately, and the results never appeared. The statisticians themselves paid the price. The head of the census bureau, Ivan Kraval, at the time a resident of the House on the Embankment, the most exclusive party residence in Moscow, was arrested and executed by firing squad

His closest colleagues were also put to death. Repression cascaded downwards to Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as the Russian provinces, where hundreds of lower-level census officials were sacked from their jobs and sometimes arrested and executed as

well. The list of the repressed included not only those directly responsible for the census, but also statisticians who might have had access to the original numbers. Mykhailo Avdiienko, the Kyiv editor of Soviet Statistics, was arrested in August and executed in September. Oleksandr Askatin, the head of ...

By November an entirely new cadre of officials had replaced these men, every one of whom now understood that it was extremely dangerous to produce accurate numbers.25 A new census was duly commissioned. This time Stalin did not wait for the result. Even before the census had taken place, he declared victory:

Under the sun of the Great Socialist Revolution an astonishingly rapid, never-before-seen increase in population is taking place. Mighty socialist industry has called into life new professions. Tens of thousands of people, who yesterday were unskilled labourers, today have become qualified masters in the most diverse branches of production. Yesterday’s Stakhanovites today have become technicians and engineers. Millions of peasant smallholders, eking out a beggarly life, have become prosperous collective farmers, creators of socialist harvests…The all-Union census of the population must show all the great changes that have happened in the life of the people, the growth of the cultural and material level of the masses, the increase in the qualification of factory workers and office workers…

Stalin got what he ordered: at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, before the final tally was complete, he announced, with great fanfare, that the Soviet population had indeed reached 170 million.

In due course the statisticians found ways to make the numbers match the rhetoric. They massaged data to mask the high number of prisoners in the north and east of the USSR—the years 1937–9 were a time of major Gulag expansion—and, of course, to hide the ravages of the famine. Census forms for more than 350,000 people residing elsewhere were assigned to Ukraine. Another 375,000 dead souls were allotted to Kazakhstan. As well

as altering the totals, the census-takers erased some small national and ethnic groups, and changed the balance of the population in ethnically divided regions to suit Soviet policy. Overall, they boosted the population by at least 1 per cent. For decades afterwards the 1939 census was held up as a model piece of statistical research.

With publication of the 1939 census the great famine vanished not only from the newspapers but from Soviet demography, politics and bureaucracy. The Soviet state never kept any record of the victims, their lives or their deaths. For as long as it existed, it never accepted that they had died at all.

Violence, repression and the census falsification successfully quelled discussion of the famine inside the USSR. But the cover-up of the famine abroad required different tactics. Information was not so easily controlled outside the Soviet Union. Information did cross borders, as did people. In May 1933 a Ukrainian newspaper in Lviv (then a Polish city) published an article denouncing the famine as an attack on the Ukrainian national movement:

The eastern side of the Zbruch River [the border] now looks like a real military camp that is difficult for a citizen to cross even at night, as in wartime. We are informed of this by refugees who recently managed to wade across the Zbruch…they arrived as living skeletons because the famine there is terrible. Even dogs are being killed, and today’s slaves of the collective farms are being fed dog meat, for in fertile Ukraine neither bread nor potatoes are to be had.

But in 1933 the problem for the Church was not evidence, but politics. A debate broke out inside the Vatican—one faction wanted to send a famine relief mission to the USSR, another preached diplomatic caution. The argument for caution won. Although the Vatican continued to receive information about the famine, the Holy See mostly kept silent in public. Among other things, Hitler’s January 1933 electoral victory created a political trap: the hierarchy feared that strong language about the Soviet famine would make it seem as if the Pope favoured Nazi Germany.

Polish diplomats were deeply shocked by the famine—so much so that their accounts were dismissed.

British diplomats, on the other hand, had no trouble believing the worst stories they heard. They had a whole network of informants, including the Canadian agricultural expert Andrew Cairns, who travelled through Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932 on behalf of the Empire Marketing Board. Cairns reported seeing “rag-clad hungry peasants, some begging for bread, mostly waiting, mostly in vain, for tickets, many climbing on to the steps or joining the crowds on the roof of each car, all filthy and miserable and not a trace of a smile anywhere.”47 He also concluded that the government’s grain export plan was “ridiculous” and could not be fulfilled.

Gareth Jones.

As for Jones himself, he was kidnapped and murdered by Chinese bandits while reporting in Manchukuo in 1935.84

Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war—between 800,000 and a million people—a substantial part of the millions more who died all across the continent.

Hitler’s Soviet victims also included more than 2 million Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom died of disease or starvation, many of them on Ukrainian territory. Cannibalism haunted Ukraine once again: at Stalag 306 in Kirovohrad guards reported prisoners eating dead comrades. A witness at Stalag 365 in Volodymyr Volynskyi reported the same.

During the course of the war Nazi troops sent more than 2 million Ukrainians to do forced labour in Germany.11

Like every occupying power in Ukraine, the Nazis ultimately had only one real interest: grain. Hitler had long claimed that “the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry,” and that Ukrainian territory would ensure “no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.”

Since the late 1930s his government had been planning to transform that aspiration into reality. Herbert Backe, the sinister Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture, conceived a “Hunger Plan” whose goals were straightfor...

from Russia in the third year of the war.” But he also concluded that the entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet po...

This famine would not be accidental: the goal was for some 30 million people to “die out.”

The Nazis never had time to fully implement the “Hunger Plan” in Ukraine. But its influence could be felt in their occupation policy. Spontaneous de-collectivization was quickly halted, on the grounds that it would be easier to requisition grain from collective farms.

The Ninth Circle

Woropay, like Sosnovyi a few years earlier, argued that the famine had been organized deliberately, that Stalin had planned it carefully, and that it was intended from the start to subdue and to “Sovietize” Ukraine.

Moscow understood that all this marked the beginning of a further Ukrainian war, and she was afraid, remembering the liberation struggle of 1918–1921. She knew, too, how great a threat an economically independent Ukraine would be to communism—especially as there still remained in the Ukrainian villages a considerable element which was both nationally conscious and morally strong enough to cherish the idea of an independent, unified Ukraine…Red Moscow therefore adopted a most ignominious plan to break the power of resistance of the thirty-five million strong Ukrainian nation. The strength of Ukraine was to be undermined by famine.

Other members of the diaspora concurred. Spontaneously, wherever they found themselves, they began to organize around the famine, to mark it and to commemorate it as a turning point in the history of Ukraine. In 1948, Ukrainians in Germany, many in displaced persons camps, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the famine; in Hanover they organized a demonstration as well as leaflets describing the famine as a “mass murder.”36 In 1950 a Ukrainian newspaper in Bavaria reprinted the Sosnovyi article first published in occupied Kharkiv, and repeated its conclusion: the famine had been “organized” by the Soviet regime.

Semen Pidhainy

Pidhainy initiated the founding of the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror. He also became a prominent émigré organizer and often spoke to émigré groups, encouraging them to write down their memories, not only of the famine but of life in the USSR. Other émigré institutions did, or had already done, the same. The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg, founded in 1944, held a memoir-writing competition in 1947. Although aimed at collecting material about the Second World War, many of the memoirs submitted concerned the famine, and the Centre eventually built up a substantial collection.38 The Ukrainian community around the world also responded to an appeal from a diaspora newspaper in Munich for memoirs that would “serve as a severe accusation of Bolshevik arbitrariness in Ukraine.”

The Black Deeds of the Kremlin,

a book edited by Pidhainy.

Black Deeds contained dozens of memoirs as well as analysis of the famine and other repressive aspects of the Soviet regime. Among the authors was Sosnovyi. This time his arguments were shortened and translated into English. Entitled “The Truth about the Famine,” his essay began bluntly: “The famine of 1932–33 was needed by the Soviet government to break the backbone of the Ukrainian opposition to complete Russian domination. Thus, it was a political move and not the result of natural causes.”

The editors sent The Black Deeds of the Kremlin to libraries across the country. But like The Ninth Circle, the newspaper articles in Canada and the leaflets in Germany, it was studiously ignored by most Soviet scholars and mainstream academic journals.43 The mix of emotive peasant memoir with semi-scholarly essays did not appeal to professional American historians. Paradoxically, the Cold War did not help the Ukrainian émigré cause either. The language many of them were using—“black deeds” or “famine as a political weapon”—sounded too political to many scholars in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The authors were easily dismissed as “Cold Warriors” telling tales.

The active suppression of the famine story by Soviet authorities also had, inevitably, a powerful impact on Western historians and writers. The total absence of any hard information about the famine made the Ukrainian claims seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible. Surely if there had been such a famine then the Soviet government would have reacted to it? Surely no government would stand by while its own people starved?

The Ukrainian diaspora was also undermined by the status of Ukraine itself. Even to serious scholars of Russian history, the notion of “Ukraine” seemed, in the post-war era, more dubious than ever. Most outsiders knew little of U...

even less of the peasant rebellions of 1919 and 1930. Of the arrests and repressions of 1933 they knew nothing at all. The Soviet government encouraged outsiders as well as its own ...

The émigrés could be dismissed as “notoriously biased,” their accounts scorned as “dubious atrocity tales.” The Black Deeds compilation would eventually be described by one prominent scholar of Soviet history as a Cold War “period piece” with no academic value.45 But then events began to evolve in Ukraine itself.

In 1962 a Soviet literary magazine published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first honest depiction of the Soviet Gulag.

Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, the most visible fruit of the Harvard documentation project, a few months later. The book (like this one) was written in collaboration with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Conquest did not have the archives available today. But he worked with Mace to pull together the existing sources: official Soviet documents, memoirs, oral testimony of survivors in the diaspora. Harvest of Sorrow finally appeared in 1986 and was reviewed in all major British and American newspapers and in many academic journals—unprecedented, at the time, for a book about Ukraine. Many reviewers expressed astonishment that they knew so little about such a deadly tragedy. In The Times Literary Supplement the Soviet scholar Geoffrey Hosking was shocked to discover “just how much material has accumulated over the years, most of it perfectly accessible in British libraries”: “almost unbelievably, Dr. Conquest’s book is the first historical study of what must count as one of the greatest man-made horrors in a century full of them.” Frank Sysyn put it simply: “No book dealing with Ukraine had ever received such wide notice.”55

Harvest of Sorrow would eventually find an echo inside Ukraine itself, although the authorities tried to block it. Just as the Harvard research project was launching in 1981, a delegation from the UN Mission of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic visited the university and asked the Ukrainian Research Institute to abandon the project. In exchange, the Institute was offered access to Soviet archives, a great rarity at the time. Harvard refused. After excerpts from Conquest’s book appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the first secretary to the Soviet Embassy wrote an angry letter to the editor: Yes, some had starved, he claimed, but they were the victims of drought and kulak sabotage.57 Once the book was published, it proved impossible to keep it away from Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1986 it was read aloud on Radio Liberty, the American-backed, Munich-based radio station, to its listeners inside the USSR.