Chapter 21 Stalin’s Fortress

On December 21, 1929, Joseph Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The event was marked as a state occasion, leaving no doubt within the Soviet Union or abroad that a new supreme leader had emerged from almost a decade of struggle among the heirs of Vladimir Lenin.

Never before in peacetime had so much depended on the thoughts, actions, and whims of one individual. Stalin’s power and influence surpassed that of Lenin and every one of his imperial predecessors, including Peter I. While it would be a mistake to explain all that happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930s by pointing to Stalin alone — he often reacted to events instead of shaping them — there is little doubt that Stalin and a narrow circle of aides made all crucial decisions of the period. Most of those aides were under the spell of Stalin’s authority and intellect; as time went on, they often became fearful of raising their voices in opposition to their leader, whose cult of personality grew steadily throughout the 1930s. In their eyes, Stalin was the best hope for the survival of the revolutionary regime, which they believed to be under siege from abroad by the capitalist West and from within by the peasant majority of the population, whose mentality they regarded as petty bourgeois.

In a special edition of the newspaper Pravda issued on the occasion of Stalin’s jubilee, numerous articles written by his loyal lieutenants lauded him not only as the continuator of the cause initiated by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin but also as the “organizer and leader of socialist industrialization and collectivization.” The first term, “socialist industrialization,” referred to a Soviet-type industrial revolution, a government-funded and state-run program intended to bring about a revolutionary increase in industrial production, with priority given to the development of heavy industry, production of energy, and building of machinery.

The Soviet leadership deemed the industrialization and collectivization programs, coupled with the Cultural Revolution — a set of policies designed to train a new generation of cadres to replace the old managerial and bureaucratic class — the best means of ensuring the survival of the communist regime in a hostile capitalist environment. The three programs were key elements of the Bolshevik plan for transforming a traditional agricultural society into a modern industrial power, with the proletariat replacing the peasantry as the dominant class. Throughout the 1920s, Soviet leaders argued about the pace at which to implement their vision. It became clear early on that they could fund industrialization only from within — the West was not eager to finance a country bent on world revolution — and the only internal source for the so-called socialist accumulation of capital was agriculture, in other words, the peasantry. Stalin had initially advocated “natural,” evolutionary industrialization but then shifted position to insist on faster economic and social transformation.

The Kremlin regarded Ukraine, the second most populous Soviet republic, with slightly more than 2 percent of the Soviet Union’s territory and close to 20 percent of its population, both as a source of funds for industrialization, given its agricultural output and potential, and as an area for investment, given the preexisting industrial potential in the east and south of the republic. But with the center fully in control of resources, the Ukrainian leadership had to lobby Moscow to invest capital, originally extracted from Ukrainian villages, in the Ukrainian cities.

By far the largest construction project launched in Ukraine during the first five-year plan was Dniprohes, the Dnieper dam and electric power station built immediately beyond the Dnieper rapids. The site was chosen near the city of Oleksandrivsk, renamed Zaporizhia (Site Beyond the Rapids) in 1921 — a reminder of the region’s Cossack past and an acknowledgment of the importance of the Cossack myth during the revolutionary years. Once a small, sleepy town, Zaporizhia became a major industrial center, with metallurgical complexes growing around the power plant, which was the main supplier of energy for the industrialized Donbas and Kryvyi Rih regions. Apart from helping to produce electricity, the dam resolved a major problem that had hampered economic development by increasing the depth of the Dnieper sufficiently to drown the rapids and open the river fully to shipping. Dniprohes became the showpiece of the first Soviet five-year plan, while the population of Zaporizhia more than quadrupled in the course of a decade, growing from 55,000 in 1926 to 243,000 in 1937.

Like most Marxists of his time, Lenin believed in the transforming power of technology and once went on record as saying that communism meant Soviet rule plus the electrification of the whole country. Soviet propaganda claimed that Dniprohes was the first major step toward communism, but people at the top knew that they needed not only Soviet rule but also the efficiency of capitalism to get there.

The “Russian revolutionary sweep” that Stalin wanted to combine with American efficiency came to Dniprohes with tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants unqualified to do the job but eager to make a living. The number of workers employed in the construction of the dam and the electric power station grew from 13,000 in 1927 to 36,000 in 1931. The turnover was extremely high, even though the Soviets abandoned the earlier policy of equal pay for all categories of workers, and the top managers received up to ten times as much as unqualified workers; qualified workers made three times as much as the latter. Peasants had to turn into workers not only by learning trades but also by getting accustomed to coming in on time, not taking breaks at will, and following the orders of their superiors. It was a tall order for many new arrivals at the construction site of communism. In 1932, the Dniprohes administration hired 90,000 workers and released 60,000.

On May 1, 1932, after five years of construction, engineers ran the first tests on the turbines and generators produced by American companies, including the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and General Electric.

The construction of Dniprohes made history in more than one way. For the first time since the beginning of industrial development in Ukraine, the main workforce consisted not of ethnic Russians but of Ukrainians. The latter constituted approximately 60 percent of employees, while the former amounted only to 30 percent. The reasons for this shift would have been obvious to anyone who had left the Dniprohes construction site in October 1932 and explored the countryside, which was bracing itself for the coming man-made famine.

In the late 1920s, the Ukrainian village became as inhospitable to its inhabitants as the Russian village had been before the revolution, if not more so. It was not poor soil or bad weather but the dramatically changed political climate that made the Ukrainian village a living hell for the peasants, driving them out of their homes to construction sites such as Dniprohes. That was the result of Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization, which expelled the peasants from their natural habitat in the process of squeezing all possible resources out of the village.

In the fall of 1929, with the support of Lazar Kaganovich, the former general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine recalled to Moscow the previous year and placed in charge of the agricultural sector, Stalin stepped up the collectivization of land and households, demanding an all-out drive to enforce the policy. Waged throughout the USSR, this campaign hit hardest in the grain-producing areas, of which Ukraine was among the most productive.

With peasants in strategically important borderlands in revolt and the wave of peasant unrest spreading to other parts of the Soviet Union, the government used the army and the secret police to go after the rebels. They mainly targeted the well-to-do peasantry, which had no incentive to join the collective farms and often led protests against the forced collectivization of peasant property. The authorities not only arrested and imprisoned leaders of the revolts but also expelled from Ukraine and forcibly resettled anyone branded a kurkul’ (Russian: kulak) — a term applied originally to well-off peasants but then extended to include anyone who did not belong to the poorest stratum of the village population. In 1930, the Soviets deported up to 75,000 alleged kurkul’ families from Ukraine to remote parts of Kazakhstan and Siberia. Many were taken to remote forests by train and left to die of disease and malnutrition.

But opposition in the village was too great to counter with repression alone, and the authorities decided to make a tactical retreat. In March 1930, Stalin published an article with the telling title “Dizziness with Success,” in which he blamed forced collectivization on overzealous local officials. The party activists interpreted the article as a party order to stop forced collectivization, and over the next few months half the previously collectivized land reverted to peasants leaving collective farms. But the retreat was temporary. By the fall of 1930, the forced collectivization campaign had resumed. This time the peasants opted largely for passive forms of resistance, including refusal to grow more grain and agricultural produce than necessary for survival, the slaughter of domestic animals to preclude their confiscation by the state, and flight from the village, often to industrial centers such as Zaporizhia, where they joined the new socialist proletariat.

Faced with this new form of peasant resistance, Stalin and his aides refused to admit defeat and accused the peasants of sabotage and attempting to starve the cities and undermine industrialization. The authorities declared that the peasants were hiding grain and demanded greater quotas both from the collectivized peasantry and from those who refused to join the collective farms. The regime singled Ukraine out for especially harsh treatment, as it was crucial to the fulfillment of Moscow’s economic plans. By mid-1932, 70 percent of Ukraine’s households were collectivized, as opposed to an average of 60 percent across the Soviet Union. The republic that produced 27 percent of Soviet grain became responsible for 38 percent of all grain deliveries to the state. The new policy brought famine and mass starvation to Ukraine in the winter and spring of 1932, hitting the most populous agricultural areas of the forest-steppe zone.

Hundreds of thousands starved, and more than 80,000 died of hunger in 1932 in the Kyiv region alone. Especially hard hit were the sugar-beet production areas southwest of Kyiv, around the cities of Bila Tserkva and Uman. Vlas Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, admitted in June 1932 that excessive requisitions, which left the peasants nothing to eat, had caused the famine. He wrote to Stalin, “Given the overall impossibility of fulfilling the grain-requisition plan, the basic reason for which was the lesser harvest in Ukraine as a whole and the colossal losses incurred during the harvest (a result of the weak economic organization of the collective farms and their utterly inadequate management from the districts and from the center), a system was put in place of confiscating all grain produced by individual farmers, including seed stocks, and almost complete confiscation of all produce from the collective farms.”

According to Chubar, the famine most severely affected individual noncollectivized peasants whose property the state had requisitioned for their failure to meet procurement quotas. Next on the list were members of collective farms with large families. By March and April 1932, thousands of people were either starving or dying of hunger in hundreds of villages. In May 1932, a representative of the Kyiv Central Committee of the Communist Party picked seven villages in the Uman district at random. There were 216 registered deaths from hunger that month, and 686 individuals were expected to die in the next few days. In one of those villages, Horodnytsia, wrote the party official to his bosses in Kharkiv, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, “up to 100 have died; the daily death toll is 8–12; people are swollen with hunger on 100 of 600 homesteads.” Chubar asked Stalin to provide Ukraine with famine relief, but the general secretary would not hear of it. He denied the reality of the famine and banned the word itself from official correspondence.

Stalin attributed the failure of his policies not only to peasant resistance to collectivization and procurement quotas but also to covert resistance on the part of the Ukrainian party cadres. “Most important now is Ukraine,” wrote Stalin to Kaganovich in August 1932.

They say that in two oblasts of Ukraine (Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, I think), about 50 district committees have come out against the grain-procurement plan, calling it unrealistic.... If we do not start fixing the situation in Ukraine right away, we may lose Ukraine. Bear in mind that Piłsudski is not dawdling.... Also bear in mind that in the Communist Party of Ukraine (500,000 members, ha-ha), there is no lack (yes, no lack!) of corrupt elements, committed and latent Petliurites, and, finally, outright agents of Piłsudski. As soon as things get worse, those elements will not hesitate to open a front within (and outside) the party, against the party.

The master of the Kremlin was clearly concerned about the regime’s prospects of survival. He had never gotten over the surprise attack of Polish and Ukrainian troops on Kyiv in the spring of 1920. At that time, former Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries had joined the advancing forces of Jozef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura. Stalin feared a recurrence of 1920 on a larger scale. In the early 1930s, party membership in Ukraine was approaching half a million, with 60 percent consisting of ethnic Ukrainians — the result of the Ukrainization policy. Would those cadres remain loyal to Stalin if Piłsudski invaded again? He had serious doubts. In July 1932, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with the selfsame Piłsudski, ensuring that there would be no attack from the West for the next three years. In Stalin’s mind, the time had come to “secure Ukraine” by requisitioning grain, teaching the peasants who had resisted collectivization a lesson, and purging the Ukrainian party apparatus of those who refused to follow his orders.

Stalin’s August 1932 letter to Kaganovich included a detailed plan for avoiding the “loss” of Ukraine. He suggested replacing the current leaders of the Ukrainian party and government, as well as the leadership of the secret police, with new cadres. “We should set ourselves the goal of turning Ukraine into a real fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” he wrote. In November, Stalin sent a plenipotentiary to Ukraine to take over the secret police apparatus. In December, he turned a Politburo meeting on grain procurement into a platform to attack the Ukrainian party leadership for not only failing to fulfill quotas but also distorting the party line on Ukrainization. “The Central Committee and the Soviet of People’s Commissars note,” stated the resolution prepared on Stalin’s orders, “that instead of correct Bolshevik conduct of nationality policy in a number of districts of Ukraine, Ukrainization was conducted mechanically, without taking account of the concrete particulars of each district, without careful selection of Ukrainian Bolshevik cadres, which made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, Petliurites, and others to create their legal covers, their counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

The Politburo resolution spelled the end of Ukrainization in regions of the North Caucasus and the Far East settled by Ukrainians. It also served as the basis for an attack on the Ukrainization policy and its cadres in Ukraine itself, leading to the dismissal or arrest of thousands of party functionaries and the suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk, the people’s commissar of education and main promoter of Ukrainization at the state level. Stalin blamed Ukrainian nationalists at home and abroad for causing the Ukrainian peasantry to sabotage party policy and hide grain from the state, thereby undermining the industrialization campaign. The attack on the Ukrainian peasantry went hand in hand with the attack on Ukrainian culture. The famine that was beginning in Ukraine when the Politburo issued its resolution on procurements and Ukrainization resulted not only from Stalin’s policy toward the peasantry and the party apparatus but also from his shift of nationality policy that equated resistance to the grain requisitions with nationalism.

In December 1932, Stalin sent Kaganovich and the head of the Soviet government, Viacheslav Molotov, to Ukraine to ensure that the unrealistic grain-procurement quotas would be met. Led by Moscow plenipotentiaries and terrorized by the GPU, Ukrainian party cadres took all they could from the starving and, in many cases, dying peasantry. The authorities punished those villages that failed to fulfill their quotas by cutting off supplies of basic goods, including matches and kerosene, and confiscating not only grain but also livestock and anything else that could be used as food. The first deaths caused by the new famine were reported in December 1932; by March 1933, death from starvation was a mass phenomenon. The party bosses, now alarmed, bombarded Kharkiv and Moscow with requests for assistance. It came in insufficient quantities, too late to save millions of starving peasants. Most of the victims died in late spring and early summer, when food supplies ran out completely. Many died because they ate grass or early vegetables — their stomachs could not digest raw foodstuffs after months of starvation.

Hardest hit were the Ukrainian parklands in the Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts that had suffered from famine earlier in the spring — too weak to do proper sowing, the peasants there had little in the way of supplies and were the first to die. By the end of 1933, the Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts had each lost up to a million inhabitants. The major grain-producing oblasts in the Ukrainian steppes, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, both lost in excess of 300,000 people. Less affected was the industrial Donbas, where 175,000 people died of hunger in 1933. The steppe areas suffered less from the famine than did the parklands because they had not experienced famine the previous year; also, if things got really bad, the peasants could find refuge at the construction sites of Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and the Donbas. Besides, in the spring of 1933 the Moscow government was much more willing to supply relief grain to the south than to central Ukraine: Moscow needed more grain, and keeping people alive in the major grain-producing areas to harvest crops was the only way to get it. Others could be left to die, and they did. Altogether, close to 4 million people perished in Ukraine as a result of the famine, more than decimating the country — every eighth person succumbed to hunger between 1932 and 1934.

The famine produced a different Soviet Ukraine. Stalin managed to keep it in his embrace by purging the party and government apparatus of those who would not go against their own people and take the last food supplies from the starving: of more than five hundred secretaries of district party committees, more than half lost their positions in the first half of 1933, many of them arrested and exiled. The rest would toe the party line no matter what. Those were the cadres Stalin wanted to keep, at least for the time being. He also got a new “socialist” peasantry. Those who survived the famine had learned their lesson: they could survive only by joining the party-controlled collective farms, which were taxed at a lower rate and, in the spring of 1933, were the only farms to receive government relief. The collectivization of the absolute majority of households and land, now an accomplished fact, dramatically changed the economy, social structure, and politics of the Ukrainian village.

Was the Great Ukrainian Famine (in Ukrainian, the Holodomor) a premeditated act of genocide against Ukraine and its people? In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as such. A number of parliaments and governments around the world passed similar resolutions, while the Russian government launched an international campaign to undermine the Ukrainian claim. Political controversy and scholarly debate on the nature of the Ukrainian famine continue to this day, turning largely on the definition of the term “genocide.” But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932–1933 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also affected the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin’s decision to terminate the Ukrainization policy and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.

Stalin used the Great Famine to turn Ukraine into an “exemplary Soviet republic,” as he called it in his letter to Kaganovich. The transfer of the capital in 1934 from Kharkiv to Kyiv, whose intelligentsia, decimated by purges, no longer presented a challenge to the Soviet regime in Ukraine, completed the transformation of the autonomous and often independently minded republic into a mere province of the Soviet Union.

As the master of the Kremlin had wanted, Ukraine became a model of Soviet industrialization and collectivization. By the end of the 1930s, the industrial output of Ukraine exceeded that of 1913 eightfold, an achievement only slightly less impressive than that of the union’s largest republic — Russia. The agricultural sector was fully collectivized, with 98 percent of all households and 99.9 percent of all arable land listed as collective property. The problem was that impeccable collectivization statistics belied agriculture’s dismal performance. In 1940, Ukraine produced 26.4 million tons of grain, only 3.3 million more than in 1913, posting an increase in agricultural production that amounted to less than 13 percent. The village, devastated by the Great Famine and collectivization, could not keep pace with the rapidly growing industrial city. Although Ukraine underwent rapid industrialization and modernization, it paid a tremendous price for that “leap forward.” Between 1926 and 1937, the population of Soviet Ukraine fell from 29 to 26.5 million, rising to slightly more than 28 million in 1939.

Many Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds perished in the Great Purge — the multiple waves of arrest, execution, and exile that engulfed the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1940, taking their greatest toll in 1937. As many as 270,000 people were arrested in Ukraine in 1937 and 1938, and close to half of them were executed. The Great Purge had the same objective as many of Stalin’s other policies of the 1930s — to ensure the survival of the regime and Stalin’s position as its supreme leader. Those of his former allies and enemies who still survived, including Lev Kamenev, Georgii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, he had shot. In Ukraine, the same fate befell the leaders of the party, state, and secret police apparatus who had shown their loyalty to Stalin during the Great Famine. The regime wanted docile new cadres unaware of the crimes of the past who would serve the leader faithfully. Aside from party cadres, the terror hit former members of non-Bolshevik parties and national minorities hardest. Ukraine, as a border republic with numerous minorities whose loyalty the regime questioned, again came under severe scrutiny. Ethnic Poles and Germans topped the hierarchy of enemies. Poles accounted for close to 20 percent of those arrested, and Germans for about 10 percent. The USSR targeted both groups, whose portion of the overall population did not exceed 1.5 percent, as potential spies and “fifth columnists” of its main adversaries at the time, Poland and Germany.

In 1938, Stalin sent his new lieutenant, Nikita Khrushchev, to Ukraine to carry out the last repressive measures and prepare the republic for what he believed to be a coming war. Khrushchev’s task was the same as that of his predecessors: to turn Ukraine into a socialist fortress. “Comrades,” declared Khrushchev to delegates at the Ukrainian party congress in June 1938, “we shall bend every effort to ensure that the task and directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and Comrade Stalin — to make Ukraine a fortress impregnable to enemies — is fulfilled with honor.” The next few years would test the strength of the Ukrainian redoubt.

In October 1938, the government of the rump Czechoslovakia (then being dismembered by Adolf Hitler) appointed a Ukrainian activist, the Reverend Avhustyn Voloshyn, to lead the government of autonomous Transcarpathia, renamed from Subcarpathian Rus’ to Carpatho-Ukraine. The decision followed the transfer of the Hungarian-populated regions of Transcarpathia, along with its two main urban centers, Uzhhorod and Mukacheve, to Hungary. The new government replaced a short-lived administration of Russophile orientation and adopted Ukrainian as the official language. It also created its own paramilitary units to resist Hungarian and Polish militias. Called the Carpathian Sich — a reference to the Sich Riflemen of Galicia and Sich Cossacks of Dnieper Ukraine — those units largely consisted of young members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who came from Poland to fight for the cause of Ukrainian statehood.

The year 1939 began with rumors in European foreign ministries that Hitler planned to use Carpatho-Ukraine as a springboard to attack Soviet Ukraine and “reunite” all ethnic Ukrainian territories. In January, Hitler offered the visiting Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, an exchange of Danzig and the Polish corridor to the Baltic Sea for new territories in Ukraine to be acquired as a result of the German invasion of the USSR. Beck declined the offer. Irrespective of Beck’s position, Hitler decided not to play the Ukrainian card against Stalin, at least not immediately. When his troops moved into Prague in March 1939 to end the existence of Czechoslovakia, Hitler decided against the creation of an independent Ukrainian state and gave Transcarpathia to his ally, Hungary. The government of autonomous Transcarpathia met this decision with surprise and disappointment.

On March 15, the day Hitler’s forces moved into Prague, the parliament of Carpatho-Ukraine proclaimed the independence of its land. The new country chose blue and yellow as the colors of its national flag and adopted the Ukrainian national anthem, “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.” The declaration of independence did not stop the Hungarian army, which moved into the region without encountering resistance from Czechoslovak forces. The only troops fighting the advancing Hungarians were members of the Carpathian Sich units. “At a time when eight million Czechs submitted to the rule of the German state without offering the least resistance, thousands of Ukrainians came out against a Hungarian army of several thousand,” wrote a Ukrainian reporter at the time. Altogether the Carpathian Sich had about 2,000 fighters. As the forces were unequal, Ukrainian resistance was soon crushed. The government of the Reverend Voloshyn left the country, and Hungarian soldiers or Polish border guards captured many surviving members of the OUN on their way back to Galicia. This was the first baptism of fire for the nationalist fighters: more would come.

Stalin was sufficiently worried by the developments in Transcarpathia to ridicule the idea of German support for Ukrainian independence in a speech to a party congress in Moscow in March 1939. The existence of significant Ukrainian territories outside the Soviet Union that could be used by Hitler to challenge Stalin’s control over Soviet Ukraine became a major concern of his “fortress builders” on the eve of World War II. The defensive bulwark seemed to have developed a large crack — the threat of Ukrainian irredentism.