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.

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 Soviet state destroyed local archives, made sure that death records did not allude to starvation, even altered publicly available census data in order to conceal what had happened.

1986, The Harvest of Sorrow, still stands as a landmark in writing about the Soviet Union.

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.

nineteenth-century Russians often had the same paternalistic attitude to Ukraine that northern Europeans at the time had towards Italy. Ukraine was an idealized, alternative nation, more primitive and at the same time more authentic, more emotional, more poetic than Russia.4

Memorably (certainly later generations of Russian and Soviet leaders never forgot it), Ukrainian Cossacks joined the Polish army in its march on Moscow in 1610 and again in 1618, taking part in a siege of the city and helping ensure that the Polish-Russian conflict of that era ended, at least for a time, advantageously for Poland.

For much of Ukraine’s history, Ukrainian was spoken mostly in the countryside. As Ukraine was a colony of Poland, and then Russia and Austria-Hungary, Ukraine’s major cities—as Trotsky once observed—became centres of colonial control, islands of Russian, Polish or Jewish culture in a sea of Ukrainian peasantry. Well into the twentieth century, the cities and the countryside were thus divided by language: most urban Ukrainians spoke Russian, Polish or Yiddish, whereas rural Ukrainians spoke Ukrainian. Jews, if they did not speak Yiddish, often preferred Russian, the language of the state and of commerce. The peasants identified the cities with wealth, capitalism and “foreign”—mostly Russian—influence. Urban Ukraine, by contrast, thought of the countryside as backward and primitive.

When both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, unexpectedly, in 1917 and 1918 respectively, many Ukrainians thought they would finally be able to establish a state. That hope was quickly extinguished in the territory that had been ruled by the Habsburgs. After a brief but bloody Polish-Ukrainian military conflict that cost 15,000 Ukrainian and 10,000 Polish lives, the multi-ethnic territory of western Ukraine, including Galicia as well as Lviv, its most important city, was integrated into modern Poland. There it remained from 1919 to 1939.

At the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks were a small minority party in Russia, the radical faction of what had been the Marxist Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. But they spent the year agitating in the Russian streets, using simple slogans such as “Land, Bread and Peace” designed to appeal to the widest numbers of soldiers, workers and peasants. Their coup d’état in October (7 November according to the “new calendar” they later adopted) put them in power amidst conditions of total chaos. Led by Lenin, a paranoid, conspiratorial and fundamentally undemocratic man, 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.

Ukraine, he explained, was not a “distinct economic region.” More to the point, Russia relied on Ukraine’s sugar, grain and coal, and Russia was Piatakov’s priority.30 The sentiment was not new: disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution. In large part this was simply because all of the leading Bolsheviks, among them Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Piatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, were men raised and educated in the Russian empire, and the Russian empire did not recognize such a thing as “Ukraine” in the province that they knew as “Southwest Russia.” The city of Kyiv was, to them, the ancient capital of Kyivan Rus’, the kingdom that they remembered as the ancestor of Russia. In school, in the press and in daily life they would have absorbed Russia’s prejudices against a language that was widely described as a dialect of Russian, and a people widely perceived as primitive former serfs.

In addition to their national prejudice, 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. In an 1852 essay Marx famously explained that they were not a “class” and thus had no class consciousness: “They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”33

Class-conscious workers would need to teach them that real revolution required not just land reform but the “fight against the rule of capital.” Ominously, 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.

To this complicated ideological puzzle, Stalin would add his own thoughts. He was the party’s expert on nationalities, and was initially far less flexible than Lenin. Stalin’s essay, “Marxism and the National Question,” had argued in 1913 that nationalism was a distraction from the cause of socialism, and that comrades “must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds.”38 By 1925 his thoughts had evolved further into an argument about nationalism as an essentially peasant force. National movements, he declared, needed peasants in order to exist: “The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army…”39 That argument, which clearly reflected his observation of events in Ukraine, would become more significant later. 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.

In the end, ideology would matter less to the Bolsheviks than their personal experiences in Ukraine, and especially of the civil war there. For everyone in the Communist Party, the civil war era was a true watershed, personally as well as politically. At the beginning of 1917 few of them had much to show for their lives. They were obscure ideologues, unsuccessful by any standard. If they earned any money, it was by writing for illegal newspapers; they had been in and out of prison, they had complicated personal lives, they had no experience of government or management.

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.

In the wake of his first defeat in Ukraine, Lenin had simply decided to adopt different tactics. Using the methods of what would (much later, though in a similar context) be called “hybrid warfare,” he ordered his forces to re-enter Ukraine in disguise. They were to hide the fact that they were a Russian force fighting for a unified Bolshevik Russia. Instead, they called themselves a “Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement,” precisely in order to confuse nationalists. The idea was to use nationalist rhetoric cynically, in order to convince people to accept Soviet power.

The urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, known then and later as “War Communism.” Launched in Russia in 1918 and brought to Ukraine after the second Bolshevik invasion in early 1919, 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.

From there, he needed to make only a short logical leap to the denunciation of the peasants who sold grain to these “speculators.” Lenin, already suspicious of the peasantry as an insufficiently revolutionary class, was perfectly clear about the danger of urban-rural trade: The peasant must choose: free trade in grain—which means speculation in grain; freedom for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and starve; the return of the absolute landowners and the capitalists; and the severing of the union of the peasants and workers—or delivery of his grain surpluses to the state at fixed prices.68

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.

But the grain was put on trains for the north—which meant that, from Stalin’s point of view, this particularly brutal form of War Communism was successful. The populace of Tsaritsyn paid a huge price and, at least in Trotsky’s view, so did the army.76 After Trotsky protested against Stalin’s behaviour in Tsaritsyn, Lenin eventually removed Stalin from the city. But his time there remained important to Stalin, so much so that in 1925 he renamed Tsaritsyn “Stalingrad.”

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.

Under his direction, Red Army soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village, recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbours. In exchange, these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the “grain surpluses” of their neighbours. These mandatory grain collections—or prodrazvyorstka—created overwhelming anger and resentment, neither of which ever really went away.

Nobody in Moscow was listening. The harsh rhetoric continued. The grain collection policy remained in place. It was unsuccessful: Shlikhter only managed to dispatch some 8.5 million poods of grain—139,000 metric tonnes—to Russia, a tiny fraction of what Lenin had demanded.99 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.

Evidently the word “kulak” had already acquired a broader meaning, well beyond “rich peasant.” As early as 1919, anyone who had extra stores of grain—and anyone who opposed Soviet power—could be damned by it. A decade later, Stalin would not need to invent a new word for the same sort of enemy.

Massacre followed massacre in repetitive cycles. The peasants’ resistance infuriated the Bolsheviks, not least because it confounded their historical determinism: the poor were supposed to support them, not fight against them. Conscious that they were a minority fighting against the majority, the Bolsheviks increased their brutality, sometimes demanding the murder of hundreds of peasants in exchange for one dead communist, or calling for the entire adult male population of a village to be wiped out.26

By itself, the bad weather would certainly have caused hardship, as bad weather had in the past. But when combined with the confiscatory food collection policies, the absence of able-bodied men and the acres of unsown land, it proved catastrophic. The twenty most productive agricultural provinces in imperial Russia had annually produced 20 million tonnes of grain before the revolution. In 1920 they produced just 8.45 million tonnes, and by 1921 they were down to 2.9 million.

Intuitively, they understood that the autonomy of any Soviet province or republic could become an obstacle to total power. Class solidarity, not national solidarity, was supposed to guide the way.

We do not know whether, during Communism, emotions will disappear, whether the human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of the head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being. Therefore we do not know precisely what form art will assume under Communism…82

Even as the cultural influence of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was at its height and the power of the peasants was at their greatest, Balytsky, Ukrainian by birth but Russian-speaking and Soviet by sympathy, was building the loyalty of quite a different team, preparing them to play a large role in the future of Ukraine.

The OGPU ended all this activity with a blunt decree on 19 January: anyone who refused to sell grain to the state at the agreed price would be arrested and tried.21 With that order the New Economic Policy effectively came to an end.

Instead, wrote Ivanisov, he and his fellow peasants were now in an impossible situation. If they worked hard and built up their farms then they became kulaks, “enemies of the people.” But if they took the other option and remained bedniaks, poor peasants—then they were worse off than the “American peasants” with whom they were supposed to be competing.

The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state. Even Maurice Hindus, the American journalist who generally admired the USSR, could see the problem: “When therefore a man came into possession of two or three horses, as many or a few more cows, about half a dozen pigs, and when he raised three or four hundred poods of rye or wheat, he fell into the category of kulak.”23 Once a peasant became wealthy and successful he became an enemy. Farmers who were too efficient or effective immediately became figures of suspicion.

The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay “in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology. Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became kulaks, and therefore ideologically unacceptable. What should be done about this? Stalin’s ideology would not let him conclude that successful farmers should be allowed to accumulate more land and build up major estates, as had happened in every other society in history. It was impossible, unimaginable, that a communist state could contain major landowners, or even wealthy farmers. But Stalin also understood that persecution of successful peasants would not lead to higher grain production either. His conclusion: collective farming was the only solution. “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms…for us is the only path.”26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms. The peasants had to give up their privately owned land, pool their resources, and join them.

In 1928 the Soviet government would approve its first “Five-Year Plan,” an economic programme that mandated a massive, unprecedented 20 per cent annual increase in industrial output, the adoption of the seven-day week—workers would rest in shifts, so that factories would never have to close—and a new ethic of workplace competition. Foremen, labourers and managers alike vied with one another to fulfil, or even to over-fulfil, the plan.

Some of the parties and leaflets may also have been produced by the secret police themselves. One of their techniques, learned from their tsarist predecessors, was to create fake opposition movements and organizations designed to tempt potential dissidents into exposing themselves by joining them.

Some peasants would remain in their houses, but others would eventually live in houses or barracks owned by the collective, and would eat all of their meals in a common dining room.9 None of them would own anything of importance, including tractors, which were to be leased from centralized, state-owned Machine Tractor Stations that would manage their purchase and upkeep.

Komsomol members received direct orders to participate, and may have believed that it was impossible to refuse.32 One later remembered, “once all of the students and teachers who were Komsomol and party members were ordered to surround one of the villages to prevent anyone from escaping while [secret police vans] drove the peasants out of the village to the heated box-cars of the trains waiting to deport them.”33 A teacher recalled that “all teachers were considered helpers in the socialization of the village, so that we were automatically recruited as activists to encourage people to join the collective farms.”

Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks. A household that had two cows, a cow and a calf or a pair of horses was considered kulak. Villages that refused to give up excess grain or expose kulaks were raided by punitive detachments. So peasants had special meetings to decide who was going to be a kulak. I was astonished by all this, but the peasants explained: “We were ordered to uncover kulaks, so what else can we do?”…To spare the children they usually chose childless bachelors.38

Of all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks: 15,000 of the most “diehard and active kulaks” were to be arrested, 30,000–35,000 kulak families were to be exiled, and all 50,000 were to be removed to the Northern Krai, the northern Russian region near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. By contrast, the comparable kulak numbers from Belarus were 4,000–5,000, 6,000–7,000 and 12,000. From the Central Black Earth province 3,000–5,000 were arrested, 10,000–25,000 were to be exiled, and a total of 20,000 were to be resettled.

In some instances expropriation took place through the means of heavy, retrospective taxation. One peasant donated his livestock to the collective farm. He worked there for a year, but then tried to take his cows back: his children were starving and he needed the milk. He was allowed to do so, but the following day he was asked to pay the heavy taxes required of the “individual” peasant. To do so, he had to sell a cow, two goats and some clothes. Taxes kept increasing anyway, until the family finally had to sell the house and move into a barn where they slept on hay. Eventually they escaped, blending into the urban landscape of Leningrad.

In one Russian village a brigade raped two kulak women and forced an elderly man to dance and sing before beating him up. In another Russian village an older man was forced to undress, remove his boots, and march around the room until he collapsed.

There were many casual cruelties. In one Ukrainian village, brigades burned down the home of two recently orphaned sisters. The elder girl went to work at the collective farm, and was forbidden to care for her younger sibling when she became very ill. No pity was shown to either girl. Instead, neighbours scavenged the charred remains of their house for firewood, and helped themselves to their remaining possessions.

Under the leadership of the OGPU, the Gulag launched a series of ambitious industrial projects: the White Sea canal, the coalmines of Vorkuta, the goldmines of Kolyma—all enterprises made possible by the sudden availability of plentiful forced labour.

Religious repression in the USSR began in 1917 and lasted until 1991, but in Ukraine it reached its brutal height during collectivization. It was not coincidental that the Politburo’s January 1930 decree on collectivization also ordered churches to be closed and priests arrested: the Soviet leaders knew that a revolution in the countryside’s class and economic structure also required a revolution in its habits, its customs and its morality. The assault on religion was part of collectivization from the beginning. All across Ukraine, the same brigades that organized collectivization also ordered peasants to take down church bells and destroy them, to melt down the bells into metal, to burn church property, to wreck icons.78 Priests were mocked and holy places were desecrated.

In rural and urban schools children were told not to believe in God. The state banned traditional holidays—Christmas, Easter, saints’ days—as well as Sunday services, replacing them with Bolshevik celebrations such as May Day and the anniversary of the revolution. It also organized atheist lectures and anti-religious meetings. The whole cycle of traditional peasant life—christenings, weddings, funerals—was disrupted. The authorities promoted “getting together” instead of marriage, a status marked by a visit to a registry office rather than a church, and with no traditional feast or celebration afterwards.

The Bolsheviks were committed atheists who believed that churches were an integral part of the old regime. They were also revolutionaries who wanted to destroy even the memory of another kind of society. Churches—where villagers had gathered over many decades or centuries—remained a potent symbol of the link between the present and the past. In most Russian and many Ukrainian cities, the Bolsheviks had immediately sacked churches—between 1918 and 1930 they shut down more than 10,000 churches across the USSR, turning them into warehouses, cinemas, museums or garages.88 By the early 1930s few urban churches were still functioning as places of worship.

Above all, the church was an institutional umbrella under which people could organize themselves for charitable and social endeavours.

Family relationships changed too. Fathers, deprived of property, could no longer bequeath land to their sons and lost authority. Before collectivization it was very unusual for parents to abandon children, but afterwards mothers and fathers often went to seek work in the city, returning sporadically or not at all.92 As elsewhere in the USSR, children were instructed to denounce their parents, and were questioned at school about what was going on at home.93 Traditions of village self-rule came to an abrupt end too. Before collectivization, local men chose their own leaders; after collectivization, farcical “elections” were still held, with candidates making speeches exhorting their neighbours to join the great Soviet project. But everyone knew that the outcome was determined in advance, guaranteed by the omnipresent police.94 Finally, and perhaps most ominously, 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. The farm bosses distributed food products and other goods according to the quality and quantity of work. Theoretically, the system was supposed to provide an incentive to work. In practice, it also meant that peasants had no cash, no way to purchase food, and no mobility. Anyone who left without permission or refused to work could be deprived of his or her ration. When their family cows and garden plots were taken away, as they would be during...

Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives. Like the serfs of old, they were forced to accept a special legal status, including controls on their movement: all collective farmers, kolkhozniks, would eventually need to seek permission to work outside the village.