Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place. 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.

Earlier still, Ukrainian lands lay at the heart of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval state in the ninth century formed by Slavic tribes and a Viking nobility, and, in the memories of the region, an almost mythical kingdom that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians all claim as their ancestor.

Ukraine was an idealized, alternative nation, more primitive and at the same time more authentic, more emotional, more poetic than Russia.

The Poles used the expression dzikie pola, “wild fields,” to describe the empty lands of eastern Ukraine, a region that functioned, in their national imagination, much as the Wild West did in America.

“L’Ukraine a toujours aspiré à être libre,” wrote Voltaire after news of Mazepa’s rebellion spread to France: “Ukraine has always aspired to be free.”12

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.”

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.

A Special Council for Discussing and Coordinating Measures for Food Supply, a state food distribution organization and a clear precedent for the Soviet organizations that followed, was put in control. Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to “eliminate middlemen” and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.56 The resulting food shortages sparked the February revolution in 1917 and propelled the Bolsheviks to power a few months later. Morgan Philips Price, a British journalist, described the atmosphere of that year:

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.

Year after year the Soviet leadership was surprised by the hunger and shortages that their “confiscate and redistribute” system had created. But because state intervention was supposed to make people richer, not poorer, and because the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers—“speculators”—who

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.

Force was again the only solution. But instead of deploying the crude violence that Stalin had used in Tsaritsyn, Shlikhter chose a more sophisticated form of violence. He created a new class system in the villages, first naming and identifying new categories of peasants, and then encouraging antagonism between them.

through the launch of an ideological struggle against the “kulaks,” or “kurkuls” (literally “fists” in Ukrainian).

The term had been rare in Ukrainian villages before the revolution; if used at all, it simply implied someone who was doing well, or someone who could afford to hire others to work, but not necessarily someone wealthy.87

In other words, some 95 per cent of the normal harvest had failed to materialize.20

More recently, some Ukrainian scholars have offered an even more pointed political explanation: perhaps the Soviet authorities actually used the famine instrumentally, as they would in 1932, to put an end to the Ukrainian peasant rebellion.

The letter, arguing that the famine offered a unique opportunity to seize Church property, was to be passed on to party members.

Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition.

Once again, there was an element of Russian chauvinism in all of their thinking: Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else.

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.”64

The idea was to make the peasantry both literate and Soviet. By absorbing Marxist thought in Ukrainian, they would come to feel like an integral part of the USSR.

Everywhere these ragged lines, chiefly of women, stretched from shop doors, under clouds of visible breath; patient, bovine, scarcely grumbling…Bread, which constitutes the larger half of the ordinary Russian’s diet, became a “deficit product.”

In the face of this threat it would be a terrible mistake to move softly or slowly. Instead, the kulaks and traders had to be separated from the other peasants, and hit hard with arrests:

about this time Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership also brought back the phrase chrezvychainye mery, “extraordinary measures,” as well as the chrezvychaishchina, a state of emergency, words still redolent of Tsaritsyn, the Red Terror and the civil war.

“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.”

The collectivization propaganda also contained more than a whiff of the Soviet cult of science and of the machine, the belief that modern technology, increased efficiency and rationalized management techniques could solve all problems.

“Comrade Stalin gave us our motto,” declared one local grain collector: “Press, beat, squeeze.”

The public campaigns were intended to affect their victims, and they did: public shaming played an important role in the campaign to “break” arrestees and get them to confess to crimes they had not committed—and, of course, to silence and terrify everyone who knew them.

The podkulachniki, the “under-kulaks”—or perhaps better translated as “kulak agents”—were poor peasants who were somehow under the influence of a kulak relative, employer, neighbour or friend.

The response to this tirade was silence—and then a “babel of shouts.” Finally, one of the women spat at the whole gathering: “Only pigs have come here; I might as well go home.” A local agitator shouted back: “What do we see? What do we hear? One of our citizens, a poor woman, but one with a decided kulak quirk in her mind, has just called us pigs!” In other words, it was not her wealth that defined the woman as “kulak”—or rather as a person with a “kulak quirk in her mind”—but her opposition to collectivization.41

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.

farmers who were not kulaks but not quite the poorest either—had been overheard saying that “after the kulaks, they will de-kulakize us too.”

“Dizzy with Success.” That was the title of an article written by Stalin and published in Pravda on 2 March 1930.

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 a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible.

Everyone tried to borrow or take from the collective as much as possible: after all, the state’s grain belonged to “no one.” Men and women who would never have considered stealing in the past now had no compunction about taking from state organizations that no one owned or respected.

As exports rose, the Soviet leadership perceived that they brought more than just hard currency. Foreshadowing the future Soviet (and Russian) use of gas as a weapon of influence, the Bolsheviks also began asking for political favours in response to large shipments of relatively low-priced grain.

Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages.

The missing feeling of “responsibility,” destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed.

Both threats and persuasion were failing. That left coercion—and in December 1931, Stalin and Molotov made coercion the policy:

No one in authority questioned the wisdom of this behaviour: the fact that the OGPU and Communist Party officials allowed journalists, even those loyal to the regime, to observe the confiscation of grain meant that, at the highest levels, they were convinced of the legitimacy of what they were doing.

To Ukrainians watching food leaving their hungry republic, the export policy seemed crazy, even suicidal.

collective farm workers (and factory workers too) often felt that state property belonged to no one and so there was no harm in taking

The state and its policies were not a danger to the starving peasants—but the starving peasants were a great danger to the state.

“Without these (and similar) draconian socialist measures it is impossible to establish new social discipline, and without such discipline it is impossible to strengthen and defend our new order.”

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.

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.

The insistence that the peasants deliver grain that Stalin believed should exist created, in turn, a humanitarian catastrophe.20

But the number never fell to zero. Nor did exports of other kinds of food stop either. 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.