Conclusion

At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR experienced drought, fluctuations in temperatures, severe crop infestation, and fungal disease, which severely damaged the grain har- vests.²⁰⁰ But the subsequent famines of 1928-9 and 1931-4 did not primar­ily develop as a consequence of unpreventable natural disasters, deficient harvests, poor weather conditions, the chaos of collectivization, or the iso­lated overzealousness of those who collectivized the farms, as some schol­ars have argued.²⁰¹ These factors, of course, played a role in the starvation of millions.

Stalin’s radically optimistic plans for industrialization and collectiviza­tion did not recognize the complexity of agricultural production or the human factor. The economic plans the Communist Party embraced left very little room for natural disasters or unfavourable weather patterns. Party leaders irrationally assumed that with the new collective farm sys­tem each harvest would top the previous one in terms of quality and quantity.²⁰²

Assumptions based on ideological fervour did not produce the antici­pated results. The party did not seriously prepare the groundwork neces­sary for collectivization. The manufacture of tractors, the cornerstone of the mechanization of agriculture, did not keep pace with the demands of collectivized agriculture or the peasantry’s mass killing of horses, the pri­mary source of energy in the countryside. In the spring of 1933, the total number of work horses through the USSR numbered two million less than in 1932, but tractors and other machinery supplied only 30 per cent of the energy resources employed in collective farms.²⁰³

In addition to this serious problem, the Soviet government did not ex­tensively construct new storage facilities or add more rolling stock to transport grain to distant cities.

The Soviet authorities also did not emphasize mundane matters, such as weeding or crop rotation, which they believed would needlessly divert the agricultural labour force from activities which would increase crop yields over the short term.²⁰⁶ Hyper-industrialization’s demands trumped the need to balance short-term, medium-term, and long-term considerations in the agricultural sphere. To overtake the advanced capitalist countries in a decade, as Stalin demanded, necessitated economic short cuts.

Documents discovered and published in the twenty-first century, espe­cially those from the secret police archives, clearly demonstrate that the collectivization campaign represented something more than the party’s mismanagement.²⁰⁷ Most importantly, the Bolsheviks possessed an ideo­logical view of agriculture and a blind faith in collectivization, which pro­pelled their political decisions, overshadowed their incompetency as agricultural administrators, and allowed them to ignore the possibility of natural disasters or the unintended consequences of their policies. According to the Bolshevik view of the world, collective farms were more productive than individual farms and would provide the means to control the unruly countryside. These new farms would increase the size and the quality of the harvests, feed the expanding urban populations and the en­larged military forces, and provide the hard currency necessary to fund industrialization. No fact or disaster would ever overturn this a priori as­sumption or challenge this Bolshevik vision of reality.

If mass collectivization appeared as the only means to industrialize the USSR, the party did not need to tolerate dissenting views.

Most importantly, the authorities did not provide the peasants with incen­tives to produce. Before the start of collectivization in 1929, the Soviet gov­ernment paid low prices for their wheat and rye; after collectivization, most collective farmers received small returns for their “labour days,” the highly arbitrary measure of how peasants as members of the collective farms would be paid, in cash or kind.²¹⁰ Under the new order, the peasants could not find the motivation to cooperate with the countryside’s new commissars.

Following the pattern set by the First World War and refined by the second, the Communist Party introduced large, military-like operations in the countryside to attain ambitious political objectives. It raised the scale of mass violence to unprecedented levels in order to subdue the peas­ants. By blockading the countryside and extracting its natural resources, the party and its agents gave no quarter. They demolished the complex web of rural relationships and local traditions which had existed for gen­erations, and suppressed all armed and unarmed resistance to the new or­der. In response to any suspected or actual resistance to the state’s grain acquisitions, they annihilated entire communities, deliberately killing, ar­resting, or deporting hundreds of thousands of peasants.

A never-ending barrage of unremitting propaganda accompanied the par­ty’s advance into the countryside, constantly challenging the reality on the ground and in the field. Following the biases of the Bolshevik Civil War generation, each newspaper account, radio broadcast, and mass agitation and propaganda meeting vilified and dehumanized the opponents of collectiviza­tion and requisitioning, justifying their arrests, deportations, imprisonment, and executions. A stark black-and-white view of the world prevailed. “He who is not with us is against us” and “He who does not deliver the assigned grain quota (for any reason) shall not eat” became one of the prevailing slo­gans of the day.

Stalin and the Soviet political leadership set the famines of 1928-9 and the early 1930s into motion. Although they did not plan the famines, they purposefully facilitated them by imposing impossible requisition alloca­tions and taking grain, seed, and grain reserves from the peasants and by extracting everything edible from the villages in the Ukrainian SSR, forc­ing people to die from the subsequent malnutrition, diseases, hunger, and starvation.²¹¹ Stalin’s total war against the peasants in Ukraine triggered the last major European famines in peacetime.²¹² When the famines broke out, the authorities did little to stop them. Instead, they took advantage of the opportunity to punish “disobedient” Ukrainians, those who opposed their rule from late 1917 and who resisted collectivization. They recog­nized that these “disobedient” and “potentially disobedient” Ukrainians numbered in the millions, if not tens of millions.

Despite Stalin’s flexibility concerning the implementation of grain allo­cations in Georgia in 1931, he insisted that the assigned quotas in Ukraine remain in place and that the Soviet state not provide this grain-producing republic with any food supplies to relieve the mass starvation.

Stalin continued to press the issue of grain requisitions in late 1932, even after mass starvation broke out in Ukraine and after warnings from Ukrainian officials. The party leader sent his emissaries, Molotov and Kaganovich, to impel the Communist Party of Ukraine to extract more from the peasants.

The party’s development of the collective farm system, the party’s command-and-control centres in the alien countryside, made these mass grain removals possible. In April 1933, a party official in a Dniepropetrovsk Oblast, wrote to Stalin and Molotov that “our levers of pressure on the vil­lage are immeasurably stronger than last year.”²¹⁴ Mendel Khataevich, the first secretary of the Dniepropetrovsk oblast party committee, expressed this assessment in blunter terms. In a private conversation he allegedly claimed that a “ruthless struggle” between the Soviet regime and the peasantry over control of the 1933 harvest was “a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their [peasant] endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm sys­tem is here to stay. We’ve won the war.”²¹⁵ This total war to subdue the Soviet Union’s primary granary included a decimating attack on the Ukrainian in­telligentsia and on the republic’s Communist Party itself.

In short, the singled-minded implementation of de-kulakization and mass collectivization generated an enormous amount of violence - and a drastic drop in productivity. The Soviet state, moreover, persecuted, exiled, executed, and starved the peasants in Ukraine for political as well as eco­nomic reasons. In doing so, the Stalinist regime did not acquire more effec­tive farm workers or more grain after the collectivization drive ended. The famine, in short, represented the “absolute triumph of politics over eco­nomics” and the political “emasculation” of the countryside and Ukrainian culture and traditions.²¹⁷ The party remained obsessed with the goal of sub­jugating the countryside and its peasants, even after mass famine broke out.

From the perspective of Moscow’s commissars, the Ukrainian country­side possessed one of the most fertile areas and the highest rural population density in the USSR, as well as the most insubordinate peasants. Of all of the USSR’s grain producers, the Ukrainians engaged in the most relentless opposition to collectivization. The authorities would not mourn the disap­pearance of several million of these peasants. Already in the 1920s, long before the collectivization drive, the Soviet press identified significant numbers of the Ukrainian peasants as followers of Petliura and as ardent Ukrainian national-chauvinists, staunch enemies of the Soviet state.

Even with the famine, the authorities took firm actions to ensure that the collectivization plans remained on the proper express track.²¹⁸ They viewed any setbacks from the prism of their class-driven and “Russia/USSR first” ideology. The number of alleged counter-revolutionary, foreign-sponsored, and hostile groups in the countryside multiplied and conveniently justified Stalin’s claim that as the USSR moved closer towards socialism, the class struggle would only intensify.²¹⁹ In late November 1932, Stalin asserted that anti-Soviet individuals and groups had infiltrated the collective and state farms and that a large number of rural communists with non-Marxist atti­tudes actively disrupted the Kremlin’s grain collections goals.²²⁰ With their removal, the Stalinists completed the assigned mission.²²¹

By the end of December 1932, Stalin’s OGPU emissary to Ukraine, Vsevolod Balitsky, “substantiated” the party leader’s charges. Balitsky and his organization discovered a vast network of nearly one thousand groups of counter-revolutionaries, spies, and wreckers, who took advantage of Soviet policies, such as Ukrainization, in order to sabotage the grain col­lections and to overthrow the Soviet regime in Ukraine. Members of the national-chauvinist Ukrainian intelligentsia and “traitors with party cards” belonged to these organizations. These Ukrainian nationalists in alliance with Pilsudski, according to Balitsky, had purposely triggered the famines. In the first three weeks of the month, Balitsky’s men arrested over twelve thousand men and women.²²²

Although the security chief’s accusations had no truth in them, his fab­rications had consequences. They confirmed Stalin’s suspicions of the Ukrainian peasants, the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia, and Ukrainian communists, raising the issue of their loyalty to the Soviet state.

Stalin then accused the Ukrainian nationalist groups Balitsky uncovered of planning uprisings “to separate Ukraine from the USSR and re-establish capitalism.”²²³ Following Stalin’s logic, Kosior declared in mid-February 1933 that some local party officials employed “kulak arithmetic” in order “to deceive the Soviet state by presenting false data on yields, sown area, and gross production.”²²⁴ If senior party officials first blamed the rural communists, Stalin and his inner circle soon denounced the leadership of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which - according to Postyshev - had “facilitated the anti-Soviet activity of Petliura-ite and kulak elements.”²²⁵ As Kosior reported on 15 March 1933, “the unsatisfactory course of sow­ing in many areas” demonstrated “that the famine still [had not] taught reason to many collective farmers,” confirming that the Soviet state had employed hunger to teach the peasant a lesson.²²⁶ Even in his 17 March 1933 request for a grain loan and additional rations for starving children, V.I. Cherniavsky, the first party secretary in the Vinnytsia Oblast, con­ceded that some famine victims were “irresponsible slackers” and that “counter-revolutionary kulak agitation counts on creating a famine psy­chosis in the villages.”²²⁷ Ultimately, Stalin and his inner circle blamed the leaders of the CP(b)U and the victims of the state-sponsored famine for their own starvation. Despite the Kremlin’s best attempts, the Ukrainian SSR had become a “slacker republic” and had to be severely disciplined with extensive grain confiscations and expanded blacklists.

Between the end of 1932 and the summer of 1933, according to Andrea Graziosi, “famine in the USSR killed in half the time, approximately sev­en times as many people as the Great Terror of 1937-1938.”²²⁸ The brutal August 1932 injunction on socialist property and the subsequent decrees of 18 November 1932, 14-15 December 1932, and 22 January 1933 best expressed Stalin’s total war against the Ukrainian peasants and against Ukrainians and Ukrainian culture at its height. Like previous conflicts, this war bred mass arrests, mass deportations, and mass starvation. But Stalin raised the scale and intensity of violence in this war to unprecedented lev­els and spawned a ruthless environment conducive to genocide, however improvised.²²⁹

According to the Stalinist world view, Ukraine’s Communist Party had allowed the grain operations to fail and had tolerated the existence of a vast insurgent underground in contact with foreign powers (especially Poland) ready to spark an uprising, embrace foreign intervention, and re­store capitalism.²³⁰ Many of its party members had cast aside their class vigilance, misunderstood the efforts of the remnants of the old shattered classes to reinvigorate their lost cause, and underestimated the unbreak­able link between the national and peasant questions.²³¹ They had to pay.

Inasmuch as Stalinists sought to raise the USSR’s geopolitical status in the world, the suffering and starvation of millions remained irrelevant. The satisfaction of the needs of the proletarian state, as Molotov argued, came before all other priorities, including individual needs.²³² The intro­duction of coercive political and economic institutions convinced the Soviet leadership that the USSR would overcome its economic backward­ness and rejoin the ranks of the world’s leading industrial powers, securing its political future as the world’s first socialist state.

The Communist Party, a primarily urban political institution, had fi­nally gained control over the wayward countryside two decades after the revolution. Not only did collectivization transform twenty-five million individual peasant households into 250,000 collective farms, it integrated the isolated Russian and non-Russian countrysides into the overall Soviet economy and political system.²³³ Although some of the authorities may have believed that collectivization would increase crop yields and raise the living standards throughout the USSR, they were more interested in dom­inating the countryside and acquiring a slow, but steady supply of grain to the urban centres and for export. The Communist Party now emerged as the party of “victors.” In pressing the issue of rapid collectivization and mass grain requisitions in the face of enormous resistance inside and out­side the party, Stalin became the undisputed “victor of victors.”