Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. ‘They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash’ – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating … Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, 1961

‘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.’

Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.

Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine.

‘Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neither intellect nor consideration, neither sorrow nor conscience. This is what can be done to kind and honest peasant farmers. When sometimes I dream of that horror, I still cry through the dream.’

As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel – perhaps could not feel – pity. Instead, they turned their anger on the sufferer.

In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of the house. In its first stage, he is tormented and driven as though by fire and torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape from this home. People dig up worms, collect grass, and even make the effort to break through and get to the city. Away from home, away from home! And then a day comes when the starving person crawls back into his house. And the meaning of this is that famine, starvation, has won. The human being cannot be saved. He lies down on his bed and stays there. Not just because he has no strength, but because he has no interest in life and no longer cares about living. He lies there quietly and does not want to be touched. And he does not even want to eat … all he wants is to be left alone and for things to be quiet …

‘Nobody buried them, our own grief was enough.’

History, culture, family and identity were destroyed by the famine too, sacrificed in the name of survival.

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 cent of the deaths took place in 1933, and most of those in the first half of the year, with the highest numbers of casualties in May, June and July.5 But within those numbers, there are other

In other words, the regions ‘normally’ most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not ‘normal’. It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity. And in this, it succeeded.

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.

This was the argument that Stalin would advocate for the rest of his life. He never denied, to Sholokhov or to anyone else, that peasants had died from a famine caused by state policy in 1933, and he certainly never apologized.

Of course they knew it was happening, but in order to survive they had to observe the Kremlin’s taboos.

Censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition’.

‘I must not die, and when I grow up I must tell people how we and our Ukraine died in torment.’3 Elida Zolotoverkha, the daughter of the diarist Oleksandra Radchenko, also told her children, her grandchildren and then her great-grandchildren to read it and to remember ‘the horror that Ukraine had passed through’.4 Those words, repeated by so many people in private, left their mark. The official silence gave them almost a secret power. From 1933 onwards such stories became an alternative narrative, an emotionally powerful ‘true history’ of the famine, an oral tradition that grew and developed alongside the official denials. Although they lived in a propaganda state where the party controlled public discussion, millions of Ukrainians inside Ukraine knew this alternative narrative. The sense of disjunction, the gap between private and public memory, the gaping hole where the national mourning should have been – these things distressed Ukrainians for decades.

Oleksandra Radchenko, was literally persecuted for her private writing. During a search of her apartment the secret police confiscated her diary. Following a six-month interrogation, she was charged with having written a ‘diary with counter-revolutionary contents’. During her trial she told the judges that ‘the main aim of my writings was to devote them to my children. I wrote because after 20 years the children won’t believe what violent methods were used to build socialism. The Ukrainian people suffered horrors during 1930–33 …’ Her appeal fell on deaf ears, and she was sent for a decade to the Gulag, returning to Ukraine only in 1955.32

Although it had little impact at the time, The Ninth Circle now makes fascinating reading. It reflects the views of people who had been adults during the famine, who still remembered it vividly, and who had had time to reflect on the causes and consequences.

‘The first lesson which is becoming an integral part of Ukrainian consciousness is that Russia has never had and never will have any other interest in Ukraine beyond the total destruction of the Ukrainian nation.’75

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’, 1953

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress,

the famine of 1932–33 and the general economic crisis in Ukraine gave the Stalinist regime an excuse to adopt preventive measures against the Ukrainian national movement and also, in the distant perspective, its possible social base (the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the peasants).19

Because it was so devastating, because it was so thoroughly silenced, and because it had such a profound impact on the demography, psychology and politics of Ukraine, the Ukrainian famine continues to shape the thinking of Ukrainians and Russians, both about themselves and about one another, in ways both obvious and subtle. The generation that experienced and survived the famine carried the memories with them for ever. But even the children and grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators continue to be shaped by the tragedy. Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s – the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers – continues to matter. Even three generations later,

If the study of the famine helps explain contemporary Ukraine, it also offers a guide to some of the attitudes of contemporary Russia, many of which form part of older patterns. From the time of the revolution, the Bolsheviks knew that they were a minority in Ukraine. To subjugate the majority, they used not only extreme violence, but also virulent and angry forms of propaganda. The Holodomor was preceded by a decade of what we would now call polarizing ‘hate speech’, language designating some people as ‘loyal’ Soviet citizens and others as ‘enemy’ kulaks, a privileged class that would have to be destroyed to make way for the people’s revolution. That ideological language justified the behaviour of the men and women who facilitated the famine, the people who confiscated food from starving families, the policemen who arrested and killed their fellow citizens. It also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification. Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were ‘enemies of the people’, dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.

The nature and form of hate speech in Ukraine has changed, but the intentions of those who employ it have not. As in the past, the Kremlin uses language to set people against one another, to create first- and second-class citizens, to divide and distract. In 1932–3, Soviet state media described the OGPU troops working with local collaborators as ‘Soviet patriots’ fighting ‘Petliurists’, ‘kulaks’, ‘traitors’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In 2014, Russian state media described Russian special forces carrying out the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine as ‘separatist patriots’ fighting ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ from Kyiv.

Russia’s current leadership is all too familiar with this history. As in 1932, when Stalin told Kaganovich that ‘losing’ Ukraine was his greatest worry, the current Russian government also believes that a sovereign, democratic, stable Ukraine, tied to the rest of Europe by links of culture and trade, is a threat to the interests of Russia’s leaders. After all, if Ukraine becomes too European – if it achieves anything resembling successful integration into the West – then Russians might ask, why not us? The Ukrainian street revolution of 2014 represented the Russian leadership’s worst nightmare: young people calling for the rule of law, denouncing corruption and waving European flags. Such a movement could have been contagious – and so it had to be stopped by whatever means possible. Today’s Russian government uses disinformation, corruption and military force to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty just as Soviet governments did in the past. As in 1932, the constant talk of ‘war’ and ‘enemies’ also remains useful to Russian leaders who cannot explain stagnant living standards or justify their own privileges, wealth and power.

History offers hope as well as tragedy. In the end, Ukraine was not destroyed. The Ukrainian language did not disappear. The desire for independence did not disappear either – and neither did the desire for democracy, or for a more just society, or for a Ukrainian state that truly represented Ukrainians. When it became possible, Ukrainians expressed these desires. When they were allowed to do so, in 1991, they voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine, as the national anthem proclaims, did not die. In the end, Stalin failed too. A generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians was murdered in the 1930s, but their legacy lived on. The national aspiration, linked, as in the past, to the aspiration for freedom, was revived in the 1960s; it continued underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it became open again in the 1990s. A new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists reappeared in the 2000s. The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending. But the history of Ukraine is not a tragedy. Millions of people were murdered, but the nation remains on the map. Memory was suppressed, but Ukrainians today discuss and debate their past. Census records were destroyed, but today the archives are accessible. The famine and its aftermath left a terrible mark. But although the wounds are still there, millions of Ukrainians are, for the first time since 1933, finally trying to heal them. As a nation, Ukrainians know what happened in the twentieth century, and t...