Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Other published stories included the case of a peasant shot for possessing a small quantity of wheat gleaned by his ten-year-old daughter.102 This extraordinary law took an extraordinary toll. By the end of 1932, within less than six months of the law’s passage, 4,500 people had been executed for breaking it. Far more—over 100,000 people—had received ten-year sentences in labour camps. This preference for long camp sentences over capital punishment, dictated from above, was clearly pragmatic: forced labourers could get to work on the Gulag system’s vast new industrial projects—mines, factories, logging operations—that were just getting underway.103 In subsequent weeks and months, thousands of peasants flooded into the camp system, victims of the 7 August law. According to official figures (which do not reflect all arrests), the number of Gulag inmates nearly doubled between 1932 and 1934, from 260,000 to 510,000. The camp system had neither the resources nor the organizational capacity to cope with this huge influx of people, many of whom arrived already emaciated by hunger. As a result, deaths in the Gulag also climbed from 4.81 per cent in 1932 to 15.3 per cent in 1933.