Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and party activists, motivated by hunger, fear and a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets. 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.4

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 history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place.

in 1991 Stalin’s worst fear came to pass. Ukraine did declare independence. The Soviet Union did come to an end, partly as the result of Ukraine’s decision to leave it. A sovereign Ukraine came into being for the first time in history, along with a new generation of Ukrainian historians, archivists, journalists and publishers.

The Maidan revolution of 2014, Yanukovych’s decision to shoot at protesters and then flee the country, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and the accompanying Russian propaganda campaign—all unexpectedly put Ukraine at the centre of international politics while I was working on this book.

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.

During the Russian empire’s first great educational reform in 1804, Tsar Alexander I permitted some non-Russian languages to be used in the new state schools but not Ukrainian, ostensibly on the grounds that it was not a “language” but rather a dialect.14 In fact, Russian officials were perfectly clear, as their Soviet successors would be, about the political justification for this ban—which lasted until 1917—and the threat that the Ukrainian language posed to the central government. The governor-general of Kyiv, Podolia and Volyn declared in 1881 that using the Ukrainian language and textbooks in schools could lead to its use in higher education and eventually in legislation, the courts and public administration, thus creating “numerous complications and dangerous alterations to the unified Russian state.”15

Lenin authorized the first Soviet assault on Ukraine in January 1918, and briefly set up an anti-Ukrainian regime in Kyiv in February, of which more later. This first Soviet attempt to conquer Ukraine ended within a few weeks when the German and Austrian armies arrived and declared they intended to “enforce” the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Instead of saving the liberal legislators of the Central Rada, however, they threw their support behind Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Ukrainian general who dressed in dramatic uniforms, complete with Cossack swords and hats.

the Bolsheviks had particular political reasons for disliking the idea of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine was still overwhelmingly a peasant nation, and according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset.

Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders. This explained why “not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism.”34 This idea—that the smallest landowners, later called kulaks, were a fundamentally counter-revolutionary, capitalist force—would have great consequences some years later.

By 1919, Lenin’s telegram—“For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!!!”—had become the single most important description of Bolshevik attitudes and practice in Ukraine.

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 Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.

Much as they would one day use history, journalism and politics to cover up the famine and to twist the facts of Ukrainian history, Soviet propagandists also sought to use the pogroms to discredit the Ukrainian national movement. For decades, Soviet historians characterized Petliura as little more than an anti-semite. They denied the Bolshevik role in pogroms; they denied that either the Directory or the Central Rada before it had ever represented a real national movement at all. Instead, they linked Ukrainian nationalism to looting, killing and above all pogroms.

By 1922 the Bolsheviks knew that they were unpopular in the countryside and especially the Ukrainian countryside. The expropriation of food had led to shortages, protest and finally starvation, all across the nascent USSR. Their rejection of everything that looked or sounded “Ukrainian” had helped keep nationalist, anti-Bolshevik anger alive in Ukraine.

Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else. Ukrainian, to many of them, was a “barnyard” language. As the Ukrainian communist Volodymyr Zatonskyi complained, “it is an old habit of comrades to look upon Ukraine as Little Russia, as part of the Russian empire—a habit that has been drummed into you throughout the millennia of the existence of Russian imperialism.”

Stalin saw the danger of “peasant armies” united behind a national banner. His Bolshevik colleague Mikhail Kalinin made the same point, though Kalinin also repeated a solution offered by the advocates of collectivization: turn the peasants into a proletariat. That way they would lose their attachment to a particular place or nation: “The national question is purely a peasant question…the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers…which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.”69

to the agitators, anyone who didn’t join the collective farm must by definition be part of the counter-revolution, part of the defeated Ukrainian national movement, part of one of the many “enemies” of the Soviet regime.

As de-kulakization began in earnest, the vicious language had practical consequences: once a peasant was named a “kulak,” he was automatically a traitor, an enemy and a non-citizen. He lost his property rights, his legal standing, his home and his place of work. His possessions no longer belonged to him; expropriation often followed. The aktiv, in conjunction with the agitators and the police, could and did confiscate kulak homes, tools and livestock with impunity.

In time, the large numbers of deported kulaks would fuel the rapid expansion of the Soviet forced labour system, the chain of camps that eventually became known as the Gulag. Between 1930 and 1933 at least 100,000 kulaks were sent directly into the Gulag, and the system grew, in part, in order to accommodate them.

collectivization left the peasants economically dependent on the state. Once the collective farms were established, nobody who lived on them had any means of earning a salary.

collectivization need not have led to a famine on the scale of the one that took place in 1932–3. But the methods used to collectivize the peasants destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order. Old values—respect for property, for dignity, for human life—disappeared. In their place the Bolsheviks had instilled the rudiments of an ideology that was about to become lethal.

In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the “Great Terror”—the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes—were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.

The missing feeling of “responsibility,” destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed. But although this was already clear as early as 1931, it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself.

For Stalin, who remembered the civil war in Ukraine, the loss of the republic was an exceedingly dangerous prospect. In 1919 a peasant revolt in Ukraine had brought the White Army within a few days’ march of Moscow; in 1920 chaos in Ukraine had brought the Polish army deep into Soviet territory. The USSR could not afford to lose Ukraine again.

SOMETIME IN THE early hours of 9 November 1932—two days after the solemn celebrations of the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution—Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, shot herself with a small pistol. She died instantly. A few hours later a doctor examined her corpse and declared the cause of death to be “an open wound to the heart.” Soon afterwards, after exchanging a few sharp words with Molotov and Kaganovich, the doctor changed his mind. On her death certificate he listed the cause of death as “acute appendicitis.” The politics behind this change would have been perfectly clear to Stalin’s inner circle: in the autumn of 1932 all of them knew that Nadya’s suicide, whatever its real causes, would be interpreted as a form of political protest—even as an anguished outcry against the spreading famine.

“Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” were Stalin’s words to Kaganovich in August. “Curse out the North Caucasus leadership for their bad work on grain requisitions,” he declared.

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.

By any standard the number of victims was very large: 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.

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.49

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.

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.

estimates of the numbers of dead have in the past ranged widely, from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, 7 million or even 10 million. But in recent years a team of Ukrainian demographers have looked again at the numbers that were tabulated at the district and provincial level, then passed on to Kharkiv and Moscow, and have come up with better answers.2 Arguing that “there was some falsification of cause of death in death certificates, but the number of registered deaths was not tampered with,” they have sought to establish reliable numbers of “excess deaths,” meaning the number of people who died above an expected average. They have also looked at “lost births,” or the numbers of births that did not occur, by comparison to what would have been expected, because of the famine.3 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. These figures include all victims, wherever they died—by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages—and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards. The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number.4 The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per ...

Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years. By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.6 These extreme statistics reflect, simply, the very high death rates in that year of children.

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. As the Soviet economy industrialized, a network of Russian-speaking industry bosses recruited colleagues from the north. Universities, hospitals and other institutions did the same. At the same time almost all the other minorities still living in Ukraine—the Jews who remained, the Germans, Belarusians, Bulgarians and Greeks—assimilated into the Russian-speaking majority. Peasants who moved from the devastated countryside into the cities often switched from Ukrainian to Russian, in order to get on. As in the nineteenth century, the Russian language offered opportunities and advancement. Ukrainian became simply a “backwards” language of the provinces.

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.

But in the official, Soviet world the Ukrainian famine, like the broader Soviet famine, did not exist. It did not exist in the newspapers, it did not exist in public speeches. Neither national leaders nor local leaders mentioned it—and they never would. Whereas the response to the 1921 famine was a prominent and widely heeded call for international aid, 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.

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 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 in September. His closest colleagues were also put to death.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By November the Wehrmacht had occupied most of Soviet Ukraine. Not knowing what was to come next, many Ukrainians, even Jewish Ukrainians, at first welcomed the German troops. “Girls would offer the soldiers flowers and people would offer bread,” one woman recalled. “We were all so happy to see them. They were going to save us from the Communists who had taken everything and starved us.”

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 straightforward: “the war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed 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 population were completely deprived of food. As Backe explained in his “Economic Policy Guidelines” issued in May, as well as in a memorandum circulated to a thousand German officials in June 1941, “unbelievable hunger” would soon grip Russia, Belarus and the industrial cities of the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad as well as Kyiv and Kharkiv. This famine would not be accidental: the goal was for some 30 million people to “die out.”12 The guidelines for the Economics Staff East, which was to be responsible for exploiting conquered territory, put it starkly:

Just before Kyiv was captured in September, Hermann Göring, the Reich Minister of the Economy, held a meeting with Backe. The two agreed that the city’s population should not be allowed to “devour” food: “Even if one wanted to feed all the inhabitants of the newly conquered territory, one would be unable to do so.” A few days later Heinrich Himmler of the SS told Hitler that the inhabitants of Kyiv were racially inferior and could be discarded: “One could easily do without eighty to ninety percent of them.”16

The end of the Second World War did not quite bring a return to the status quo. Inside Ukraine the war altered the language of the regime. Critics of the USSR were no longer mere enemies but “fascists” or “Nazis.” Any talk of the famine was “Hitlerite propaganda.” Memoirs about the famine were buried even deeper in drawers and closets, and discussion of the subject became treasonous.

The Canadian interview project evolved into a major documentary: Harvest of Despair won awards at film festivals and appeared on Canadian public television in the spring of 1985. In the United States the public broadcaster’s initial reluctance to show the film—it was feared to be too “right wing”—became controversial. PBS finally broadcast the film in September 1986 as a special episode of “Firing Line,” the programme produced by the conservative columnist and National Review editor William Buckley, and followed the broadcast with a debate between Buckley, the historian Robert Conquest, and the journalists Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times and Christopher Hitchens, then of The Nation.

An even greater wave of interest accompanied the publication of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, the most visible fruit of the Harvard documentation project, a few months later.

Everyone who lived within twenty miles of Chernobyl had abandoned their homes and farms, indefinitely. The death toll, officially listed as thirty-one, actually soared into the thousands, as the men who had shovelled concrete and flown helicopters over the reactor began to die of radiation sickness in other parts of the USSR.

Chernobyl destroyed the myth of Soviet technical competence—one of the few that many still believed. If the USSR had promised its citizens that communism would guide them into the high-tech future, Chernobyl led them to question whether the USSR could be trusted at all. More importantly, Chernobyl reminded the USSR, and the world, of the stark consequences of Soviet secrecy, even causing Gorbachev himself to reconsider his party’s refusal to discuss its past as well as its present.

The sixtieth anniversary of the famine, in the autumn of 1993, was like no other that had preceded it. Two years earlier, Ukraine had elected its first president and voted overwhelmingly for independence; the government’s subsequent refusal to sign a new union treaty had precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Ukraine, in one of its last memorable acts before giving up power, had passed a resolution blaming the 1932–3 famine on the “criminal course pursued by Stalin and his closest entourage.”

The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism…Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin—one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the process of “union” that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the “Soviet Man,” the “Soviet Nation” and to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe. Raphael Lemkin, “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine,” 19531