Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Convinced that collectivization was now on the path to success, the Kremlin made what would turn out to be a disastrous and callous decision: to increase the export of grain, as well as of other food products, out of the Soviet Union in exchange for hard currency. Grain export was of course not new. As we have seen, in 1920 the Bolsheviks had reckoned grain to be one of the safest goods to sell to the West, since doing so required no interaction with “capitalists.”10 Nor was it the only source of hard currency. Funds also came in from the sale of art, furniture, jewellery, icons and other objects confiscated from “the bourgeoisie” and the Church. In

In 1922 the Soviet government told the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that unless Britain signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, it would cut off the supply of grain to British markets. Some speculate that in the late 1920s the Soviet Union began dumping grain at low prices for geopolitical reasons: Stalin hoped to damage Western capitalism. By 1930 one German newspaper was arguing for trade barriers to stop the flood of “cheap Russian produce.” At

The result of this urgent policy directive would be a far higher rate of grain export in 1930—4.8 million tonnes, up from 170,000 tonnes in 1929—and an even higher rate in 1931, 5.2 million tonnes.18 These numbers were a relatively small fraction of the more than 83 million tonnes, with higher totals in future, that Stalin believed should be harvested. But when less than that came in, it represented food that would not be available to Soviet citizens—and certainly not to the peasants who produced it.

Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages. Stalin himself had received reports explaining exactly what was wrong with the collective farms, describing their inefficiency in great detail. One official from the Central Black Earth province even wrote him a daring defence of private property: “How to explain this enormous drop in collective farm production? It’s impossible to explain it, except to say that the material interest in and responsibility for the losses, and for the low quality of work, don’t affect each individual collective farmer directly…”28 The missing feeling of “responsibility,” destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed.

By the year’s end export levels did fall dramatically—from 5.2 million to 1.73 million tonnes.79 The value to the state dropped dramatically as well, from 203.5 million rubles in 1931 to 88.1 million in 1932.

In order to get people to stop stealing food, the law must be supported by a propaganda campaign fully grounded in Marxist theory. Capitalism had defeated feudalism because capitalism ensured that private property was protected by the state; socialism, in turn, could defeat capitalism only if it declared public property—cooperative, collective, state property—to be sacred and inviolable too.

The theft of tiny amounts of food, in other words, could be punished by ten years in a labour camp—or death. Such punishments had hitherto been reserved for acts of high treason. Now, a peasant woman who stole a few grains of wheat from a collective farm would be treated like a military officer who had betrayed the country during wartime.

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.

Like the Jews that Moses led out of Egyptian slavery, the half-savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages…will die out, and a new tribe will take their place—literate, sensible, hearty people. Maxim Gorky, On the Russian Peasant, 1922

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.

All across the USSR the total grain harvest for 1931–2 was 69.5 million tonnes (down from 83.5 million in 1930–1); for 1932–3 the total was 69.9 million tonnes. In 1933–4 the USSR harvested 68.4 million tonnes, and in 1934–5 the total was 67.6 million. But the state’s unrealistic demands on the peasants—the expectation that they meet unattainable goals—created the perception of total failure.

In practice, both individual and collective farmers were forbidden from holding back anything at all. Even those allowed to keep grain in the past had to give it back. Any collective farmer who produced grain for his family on a private plot now had to turn that over too.22 No excuses were accepted.

Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.

In an oddly worded statement, the Council of Ministers denounced the irregular methods of food collection that had been used all across the country—the plans, the plan failures, the supplementary plans—and called, instead, for peasants to pay a tax, in the form of a fixed percentage of their production. But there was one caveat: the tax was to take effect only in the summer of 1933. Until then the deadly requisitions would continue.29 In other words, Stalin knew that the methods being used were damaging, and he knew they would fail. But he allowed them to continue for several fatal months, during which time millions died.30

In 1932 the USSR exported more than 3,500 tonnes of butter and 586 tonnes of bacon from Ukraine alone. In 1933 the numbers rose to 5,433 tonnes of butter and 1,037 tonnes of bacon. In both years Soviet exporters continued to ship eggs, poultry, apples, nuts, honey, jam, canned fish, canned vegetables and canned meat, food that could have helped to feed Ukraine.33

A series of sanctions on blacklisted farms and villages followed. In a telegram sent to all the provinces the Ukrainian Central Committee banned blacklisted districts that had failed to meet grain targets from purchasing any manufactured or industrial goods. In the initial order an exception was made for kerosene, salt and matches. Two weeks later, in a telegram from Moscow, Molotov ordered Kosior to ban the delivery of those three items too. After the ban went into effect, any peasant who might possess food would soon have great difficulties cooking it.40 A complete ban on trade came next. Earlier in 1932 an edict had forbidden peasants from trading grain and meat products if their farms had not met requisition quotas. Now, districts which had failed to meet the grain procurement targets—and this included most of Ukraine—could no longer legally trade grain, seeds, flour or bread in any form at all.

In some places the blacklists were enforced by special brigades or teams of soldiers or secret policemen who blocked trade to the village, farm or district.45

Collectivization had “encountered active resistance” in the town as well, thanks to a “large kulak community.” The district leaders decided to tighten the rules just for Horodyshche. They demanded the early return of a 23,500-ruble loan that had been borrowed by the collective farm. They seized three tractors. They confiscated all of the village’s seed stock. They levied meat “fines”—which meant the confiscation of livestock—and confiscated the miners’ garden plots. They arranged for 150 people to be dismissed from their jobs in local factories, because their families had failed to hand over grain. Finally, they arrested and put on trial the collective farm leadership, and warned all of the village residents that if “sabotage” did not cease, they would be deported and replaced with “conscientious collective farmers.” Their houses would be confiscated and given to “industrial laborers in need of accommodations.”

As more peasants drifted into the centre of Kharkiv, things grew worse. They were easily identifiable by their ragged clothes and bare feet: thanks to the trudodni system of rationing, they had no money, and no way to buy either food or clothing.

As their numbers increased dramatically, the Soviet government finally declared there could no longer be any doubt: “the flight of villagers and the exodus from Ukraine last year and this year is [being] organized by the enemies of the Soviet government…and agents of Poland with the goal of spreading propaganda among the peasants.” A solution was found. 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.

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.

Only a few years earlier the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences had proposed creating a historical preservation zone, a “Kyiv Acropolis” in the most ancient part of the city. But in 1935 the city instead destroyed dozens of architectural monuments, including Orthodox and Jewish cemeteries as well as churches and ecclesiastical structures. The graves and monuments of literary and political personalities from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries disappeared from Kyiv too.

Once the people and the monuments were out of the way, the attack on their books followed. On 15 December 1934 the authorities published a list of banned authors, decreeing that all their books, for all years and in all languages, must be removed from libraries, shops, educational institutions and warehouses. Eventually, four such lists would be published, containing works by Ukrainian writers, poets, critics, historians, sociologists, art historians, and anyone else who had been arrested. In other words, the extermination of the intellectual class was accompanied by the extermination of their words and ideas.55

Informers were recruited to help out the activists. In some villages special boxes were set up where people could deposit anonymous confessions or information as to the whereabouts of their neighbours’ hidden grain.26 Hanna Sukhenko remembered that it was “popular” to inform, because when a person found someone else’s food, he or she was given up to a third of it as a reward.

Inhabitants of blacklisted villages were meant to hand over their savings too. Collecting these sums had long been a problem: in his diary for December 1932, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s close associate in Ukraine, noted that the individual farmers in Ukraine had been fined 7.8 million rubles, but that only 1.9 million had been collected. Vlas Chubar had weakly argued that this was because they had “nothing to sell.”31 But in the autumn of 1932 auctions of furniture and other goods were arranged so that peasants could pay these sums: “When a peasant paid the tax, then another, bigger tax was put on him. Father could not pay this additional tax, so an auction was called…a storehouse, a shed were sold.”

To ensure that starving peasants did not “rob” the fields of whatever grain was growing in them, the brigade leaders also sent guards on horseback—usually villagers bribed to assist, with promises of food—to watch the fields, or else set up watchtowers beside them, to ensure that nobody stole anything from them. Armed guards—again, many were villagers—were placed in front of barns and other places where grain was stored.

“We children would run to the collective farm stubble-field to gather up the stalks,” remembered Kostiantyn Mochulsky, then aged eight. “Mounted patrolmen would chase after the children, slashing at them with rawhide whips. But I collected some ten kilograms of grain.”46 Some failed to evade the overseers. A girl from Kharkiv province once succeeded in quietly gathering some wheat ears, but on the way home from the fields she met three young Komsomol members. They took her wheat and beat her “so severely that there were bruises on my shoulders and lower legs long afterwards.”47 Perhaps she was lucky: another survivor remembered a young girl who was shot on the spot for gleaning leftover potatoes.48

Years and decades later, survivors found different ways of describing the groups of men and a very few women who had come to their homes and removed their food, knowing that they would starve. In oral histories the groups have sometimes been described as “activists,” “Komsomol,” “confiscators” or “murderers”; as an “iron brigade,” a “red team,” “red caravan” or “red broom” that swept the village.

At the time Kravchenko did not protest. As he explained years later, he had, like the Twenty-Five Thousanders before him, deliberately allowed himself to succumb to a form of intellectual blindness. Kravchenko spoke for many when he described it: “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind. You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”

The French writer Georges Simenon, who visited Odessa in the spring of 1933, was told by one man that the malheureux, the “unfortunates” that he saw begging for food in the streets, were not to be pitied: “Those are kulaks, peasants who have not adapted to the regime…there is nothing for them but to die.” There was no need for pity: they would soon be replaced by tractors, which could do the work of ten men. The brave new world would not have space for so many useless people.

But the vast majority of members of the brigades that searched villages for food in 1932–3 were not outsiders. Nor were they motivated by hatred of Ukrainian peasants, because they were Ukrainian peasants themselves. More importantly, they were the neighbours of the people whose food they stole: local collective farm bosses, members of the village council, teachers and doctors, civil servants, Komsomol leaders, former members of the “poor peasants’ committees” from 1919, former participants in de-kulakization. As in other historic genocides, they were persuaded to kill people whom they knew extremely well.

Everyone knew that working with the party might bring with it access to food or to ration cards, or to other people who had them. Kateryna Iaroshenko, also from Dnipropetrovsk province, survived the famine because her father was a party leader who had access to a special Communist Party shop providing grain and sugar.85 The highest party officials also had ration cards, which enabled them to make purchases that were impossible for others. Privileges were also extended to their children, as those less fortunate remembered: “There was a special school for the children of the bosses. There was a canteen inside…breathtaking smells spread from that kitchen, I wept because of them, with such tears!”

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.

Another survivor remembered that his mother “looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen…was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.”

Her legs were shining, and the skin had burst.”11 Hlafyra Ivanova from Proskuriv province remembered that people turned yellow and black: “the skin of swollen people grew chapped, and liquid oozed out of their wounds.”12 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

Between February and June 1933, for example, the OGPU in Kharkiv recorded that it had surreptitiously buried 2,785 corpses.83 A few years later, during the Great Terror of 1937–8, this secrecy was enforced even further. Mass graves of famine victims were covered up and hidden, and it became dangerous even to know where they were located. In 1938 all the staff of the Lukianivske cemetery in Kyiv were arrested, tried and shot as counter-revolutionary insurgents, probably to prevent them from revealing what they knew.

Many felt that, once they had dug the mass graves, it didn’t matter how they were filled. “They didn’t even shoot, they economized on bullets and pulled living people into the hole.”96

Police also arrested a man in Mariia Davydenko’s village in Sumy province. After his wife died, he had gone mad from hunger and eaten first his daughter and then his son. A neighbour noticed that the father was less swollen from hunger than others, and asked him why. “I have eaten my children,” he replied, “and if you talk too much, I will eat you.” Backing away, shouting that he was a monster, the neighbour went to the police, who arrested and sentenced the father.

According to a 1931 law, all Soviet citizens who worked for the state sector received ration cards. That left out peasants; it also omitted others without formal jobs. In addition, the size of rations was based not only on the importance of the worker, but also of his workplace. Priority went to key industrial regions, and the only one in Ukraine was Donbas. In practice, some 40 per cent of the Ukrainian population therefore received about 80 per cent of the food supplies.

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.

Extra rewards were available to those who played the game particularly well, as the case of Walter Duranty famously illustrates. Duranty was the correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow between 1922 and 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. Duranty, British by birth, had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and sceptical “realist” trying to listen to both sides of a story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”62 This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that he lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting seems to have been the primary motivation for Duranty’s flattering coverage of the USSR. Whereas Clyman’s writing struck few chords, Duranty’s missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. Many of the men who would become part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” were looking for new economic ideas and had a deep interest in the Soviet experiment; several had visited Moscow in 1927, where they were...

Duranty’s reluctance to write about famine may have been particularly acute: the story cast doubt on his previous, positive (and prize-winning) reporting. But he was not alone. Eugene Lyons, Moscow correspondent for United Press and at one time an enthusiastic Marxist, wrote years later that all foreigners in the city were well aware of what was happening in Ukraine as well as in Kazakhstan and the Volga region: The truth is that we did not seek corroboration for the simple reason that we entertained no doubts on the subject. There are facts too large to require eyewitness confirmation…There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression. Inside Russia the matter was not disputed. The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversation at the hotels and in our homes. In the foreign colony estimates of famine deaths ranged from one million up; among Russians from three million up…

In Kharkiv he kept making notes. He observed thousands of people queuing in bread lines: “They begin queuing up 3–4 o’clock in the afternoon to get bread the next morning at 7.

On 31 March, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the headline of The New York Times. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones: There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.” Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was “on the verge of a terrific smash,” as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkiv and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.83 Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: “To put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He went on to explain that he had made “exhaustive inquiries” and concluded that “conditions are bad, but there is no famine.” Indignant, Jones wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, patiently listing his sources—a...

Later, Lyons, Chamberlin and others expressed regret that they had not fought harder against him. But at the time nobody came to Jones’s defence, not even Muggeridge, one of the few Moscow correspondents who had dared to express similar views. As for Jones himself, he was kidnapped and murdered by Chinese bandits while reporting in Manchukuo in 1935.84 “Russians Hungry But Not Starving” became the accepted wisdom.

By the end of 1933 the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president’s team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to contain the Japanese meant it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes—the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully—encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too.88 Eventually a deal was struck. Litvinov arrived in New York to sign it—accompanied by Duranty. During a lavish banquet for the Soviet Foreign Minister at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced to the 1,500 guests. He stood up and bowed. Loud applause followed. Duranty’s name, The New Yorker later reported, provoked “the only really prolonged pandemonium” of the evening. “Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.”89 With that, the cover-up seemed complete.