“Extraordinary Measures” and the Famine of 1928-1929

Party leaders fervently believed that rapid industrialization necessitated the political and economic integration of the countryside and the acquisi­tion of even larger amounts of exportable grain.

By introducing large, centrally managed farms and by standardizing agri­cultural production, Stalinist modernizers hoped to bring order to the hin­terland and ensure a steady collection of grain for the cities and for industrialization by controlling the peasants.²³ But to take complete charge of the rural areas in the Ukrainian SSR and in such regions as the Ukrainian­speaking Kuban in southern Russia would not be easy. In these areas, most peasants possessed small plots and a substantial number engaged in individ­ual, subsistence farming.²⁴ Collective memories of Cossack self-rule, the national-liberation movements against the Poles, the violent struggles against the Bolshevik regime in 1917-21, and the overall predominance of heredi­tary (not communal) household land tenure reinforced their individualism and their differences with their Russian neighbours.²⁵ The overwhelming majority of peasants in these areas, as in most of the USSR, considered col­lectivization as a form of socio-economic bondage, a “second serfdom.”²⁶ But unlike Russian peasants, these Ukrainian-speaking men and women - largely due to the war, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary periods - could mobilize along national as well as social lines to oppose the new order.

With these limitations, how would the Soviet state acquire more grain? Financial manipulations and heavy taxes had failed to secure surplus cere­als from the countryside in the 1920s. The Soviet state raised the price of industrial goods it sold to the peasants while lowering the amount it paid for agricultural goods. The disparities between the high prices for wheat and rye the peasants received in the open market and the low prices they collected from the state only increased in this decade.²⁷ In response, the peasants reduced their sales to the state and planted less. From their eco­nomic perspective, they had no incentive to grow crops beyond their own immediate needs and acted accordingly. Behaving as they did during the Great War and in the immediate post-revolutionary period, the peasants threatened the government’s efforts to acquire enough grain to feed its growing urban population and to bankroll its industrialization. Just as the Soviet party-state launched its daring economic drive and as Soviet peas­ants decreased their production of exportable crops, the world agricultural market recovered from the First World War.

This international conflict delivered a severe blow to European farming production as peasants in both military alliances “put down their plough and took up the sword,” losing their horses to military requisitioning and their fields to artillery fire.²⁸ As the Great War pushed up wheat prices, the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia increased their acreage and made their yields more efficient, surpassing Europe’s pre-war output.

When the war ended, these overseas producers hoped to retain their new lucrative markets, even though European agricultural cultivation re­turned to pre-war levels by 1925.²⁹ This combined European and non­European production flooded the international market and led to a precipitous drop in worldwide wheat prices.³⁰ In the 1920s and 1930s good harvests outnumbered bad harvests and wheat prices continued to plunge.

If tsarist Russia supplied 25 per cent of the world wheat market in 1913, the USSR furnished only 12 per cent in 1926.³¹ Inasmuch as the new revo­lutionary government did not expect to receive any large international loans, Soviet planners chose to stay the course and increase exports to ac­quire hard currency. From their perspective, this remained the only option to finance their bold industrialization project.

In order to amass more grain to sell abroad, the party leadership launched a campaign to squeeze, then expropriate, the landholdings of the kulaks, those peasants they considered better off, those who produced the bulk of the exportable grain. In order to do so, the party leaders popularized the notion of class divisions in the countryside. According to this artificial construction of rural reality, the peasantry contained three groups: the poor peasants (the supporters of the working class), the middle peasants (their allies), and the kulaks (their class enemy).³² The authorities claimed that the kulaks (kurkuls in Ukrainian), those who possessed more than nine desiatins (twenty-four acres) of land and who employed at least one worker, constituted 2 to 5 per cent of the population in the grain-producing and grain-consuming regions of the USSR. These kulaks allegedly pro­duced enormous amounts of surplus grain.³³ Most importantly, the party claimed that kulaks exploited the poor and middle peasants and organized peasant resistance to Soviet power.

This cartoonish Marxist interpretation of the countryside exaggerated class divisions and neglected the prevalence of peasant solidarity against outsiders. In reality, many of those hiring labour included disabled war veterans, widows, and families with a number of small children. (The aver­age urban worker, moreover, earned twice as much as those peasants whom Soviet statisticians classified as “wealthy.”)³⁴

Inasmuch as the authorities needed to create a convenient group of “enemies” to subdue the entire peasant mass, the party launched an of­fensive against the alleged kulaks, seeking to limit them politically and economically.³⁵

The Soviet state in 1926 already levied a heavy tax burden on them.

As the state procurements of grain and other dietary essentials declined, the subsequent food shortages in the cities - the main bastion of Bolshevik support - shocked the Soviet leadership, especially Stalin. Ignoring pro­posals to raise the price of grain the Soviet state paid the peasants, he sent his trusted lieutenants throughout the USSR to find more grain and to oversee the timely delivery of grain shipments. As the leader of a successful urban-oriented Marxist political party, Stalin did not feel any love for the peasants, “the dark masses,” who - in his opinion and that of his colleagues - possessed a counter-revolutionary and nationalist view of the world and acted as the “natural saboteurs of Soviet power.”³⁸ The exclusion of peas­ants from the rationing system and the introduction of mass grain requisi­tions vividly expressed the Soviet government’s declaration of war on the peasants.³⁹ This internal war would not only revolutionize the relationship between all peasants and the Soviet regime, but also redesign the very foundations of Ukrainian society and identity.

Molotov, Stalin’s plenipotentiary, arrived in Ukraine on 28 December 1927 and stayed to 6 January 1928. He issued orders to local party and Soviet bodies to increase the amount of grain delivered to state coffers.⁴⁰ By employing brutal repressions (arrests, fines, and severe court sentenc­es) against the kulaks and other peasants, Molotov claimed to have raised the amount of grain procured in Ukraine.⁴¹

He convened a meeting of party activists in Kharkiv and told them that “Ukraine must hand over its grain immediately, without delay.”⁴² In discussing his actions in Melitopil, where the overwhelming majority of peasants worked their own individual farmsteads, Molotov remembered decades later:

We took away the grain. We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices. They gained nothing. I told them that for the present peasants had to give us grain on loan. Then I went to the countryside, to the Greek and Ukrainian settlements. I applied utmost pressure to extort the grain. All kinds of rather harsh methods of persuasion had to be applied. We started with the kulak.⁴³

After Molotov returned to Moscow, he described his activities to Stalin, who responded with delight, asserting that “I could cover you with kisses in gratitude for your action down there.”⁴⁴ Inspired by his deputy’s ruthless­ness, Stalin refined his methods. Between 18 January and 4 February 1928, he visited the agricultural regions in Siberia and the Urals and introduced “extraordinary measures” reminiscent of the crop confiscations under war communism in 1918-20. During his inspection tour, he demanded that par­ty officials seize kulak grain without payment, justifying their actions under Article 107 of the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibited “speculation.” Under Stalin’s guidance in Siberia, the arbitrary seizure of grain from kulaks as well as from middle peasants and even poor peasants became the standard operating procedure. The authorities now “could choose to regard the mere possession of grain stocks as illegal hoarding with a speculative purpose and therefore, a fit subject for confiscation without payment.”⁴⁵

The Soviet state, in short, claimed possession of all grain stocks, including grain reserves and seed grain the peasants kept for the next sowing period.

These arbitrary measures which Stalin mastered became known as the “Urals-Siberian” method. Although his colleagues on the Politburo forced him to cut short these wide-scale intercessions after April 1928, he reintro­duced them several months later. With the defeat of the pro-NEP faction within the Politburo in the spring of 1929, this institution endorsed this method throughout the USSR. In 1929, the grain requisitioning of kulak surpluses almost seamlessly evolved into the mass collectivization of the majority of all peasants.⁴⁶

Despite the poor harvests and the irregular weather patterns the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR experienced in the summer and fall of 1927, the USSR’s primary economic office - the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) - raised Ukraine’s grain consignment plan for the following year.⁴⁷ In cre­ating the agricultural goals for Ukraine in 1928-9 and beyond, Gosplan exaggerated Ukraine’s agricultural potential and underestimated its actual problems. With Stalin’s prodding, economic planners constructed radical­ly optimistic plans for agricultural production for the USSR and for the Ukrainian SSR, in particular.⁴⁸ In preparing this course of action, they re­jected the Soviet Ukrainian government’s proposals for a greater diversifi­cation of agriculture and did not include any leeway for poor weather patterns, which occurred frequently.⁴⁹

The harvests of 1928-9 did not meet expectations. Despite the crop fail­ure of 1928-9, Soviet authorities demanded that Gosplan’s grain consign­ments be fulfilled. In 1928, the Ukrainian SSR provided the USSR with 40 per cent of its total grain procurements.⁵⁰ The Stalinist faction within the party’s leadership reintroduced “extraordinary measures” to Ukraine and continued to extract the maximum amount of grain from the peasantry by coercive means, claiming that Ukraine should not only feed itself, but help sustain the rest of the USSR.⁵¹

Although the Soviet authorities cut back on the export of wheat and rye to Europe and provided Ukraine with some grain, which may have saved tens of thousands of lives, it was not enough to stave off starvation. The Soviet Ukrainian government established the State Commission for Aid to Victims of Crop Failure in the summer of 1928 to provide relief, but it reached “fewer than twenty percent” of the population in the crop-failure regions.⁵² Inasmuch as the Soviet authorities in Moscow “never intended to feed all of those who needed food,” relief agencies tried to limit aid “to the poorest peasants and nursing mothers and babies.”⁵³ This relief prior­ity would exclude the overwhelming majority of those opposed to the government’s policies in the countryside and include those who poten­tially would join the collective farms.

Despite the massive grain shortfall throughout the USSR, Soviet author­ities still believed that they had to continue to ship agricultural products abroad to acquire hard currency to fund the industrialization drive. In light of the scarcity of exportable grain, they sold more non-grain agricul­tural products abroad, such as meat, fowl, butter, eggs, and sugar, which they extracted from the countryside.⁵⁴ The expropriation of grain and common non-grain products the peasants consumed on a regular basis cre­ated a rural environment conducive to famine.

This catastrophe hit Ukraine in late 1928 and early 1929 for the first time since 1921-3 and 1924-5 as heavy frosts and erratic temperatures de­stroyed a third of the entire winter grain crop.⁵⁵ The Soviet government did not intend to create a famine in 1928-9, but in conformity with its rosy grain projections and its minimalization of the true extent of the crop fail­ures, it provided very limited aid to help the starving. The USSR’s com­mitment to “industrialization above all” and its extractive policies in the countryside ignited the 1928-9 famine and prepared the way for even deadlier famines in the near future. This grain crisis affected millions of peasants in Ukraine, especially the poorer ones and those in the southern steppe okrugs. This famine led to a reduction in seeded areas and to a seri­ous drop in the overall number of horses, cattle, and domestic animals.

During this famine, the Ukrainian SSR experienced a direct loss of ap­proximately twenty-three thousand men, women, and children and an in­direct loss of approximately eighty thousand.⁵⁶ Although much smaller in scope and number of victims than the famine of 1932 or the Holodomor of 1933, the famine of 1928-9 prepared the way for the next two by reactivating opposition to the forced grain requisitions and by politicizing the peasants. These consequences - not surprisingly - generated brutal Soviet countermeasures.

In Ukraine, the OGPU registered 150 mass protests against the rural authorities from 1 April to 1 October 1928, and 538 alleged “terrorist acts” in 1927-8 and 1,266 in 1928-9.⁵⁷ These crimes included the killing, attempt­ed killing, or wounding of representatives of the Soviet order and arson of socialist property or agricultural institutions. Although special OGPU and police units suppressed many of these protests, the growing resistance con­vinced Soviet leaders of the need to adopt extreme measures as quickly as possible.⁵⁸

Although most peasants did not directly challenge the authorities, the state’s grain requisitions radicalized the peasants, as OGPU agents noted in their internal reports. The peasants concluded that the Soviet govern­ment’s illegal and arbitrary confiscations, not the “evil” kulaks (as the Soviet media proclaimed), brought on the famine, which embittered them against the state. With the introduction of the Urals-Siberian method dur­ing the beginning of the grain procurement plan in Ukraine in early 1928, many in the intelligentsia and the peasantry assessed the crisis in the coun­tryside through a national, not class, prism.

Even Lazar Kaganovich, the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, recognized that the convulsions in the countryside strengthened anti­Soviet and national feelings, if not nationalism. Speaking at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U in March 1928, he noted that peas­ants asked provocative questions, such as “Where did they take the grain harvested in Ukraine?” “Why is our grain-growing republic starving now?” and “Who is guilty of the ongoing robbery of the Ukrainian village and the rapid impoverishment of the towns?” Some, according to Kaganovich, concluded that “it would be better if Ukraine separated from Russia. We would live better - but now (we) give bread to Russia and Russia sells it abroad. So it turns out that Ukraine is like a milch cow.”⁵⁹ Although it is difficult to ascertain how many Ukrainian peasants em­braced these views, these negative attitudes most likely grew as collectiv­ization and grain requisitioning absorbed more farms.

As the food situation deteriorated, national discontent surfaced not only in the villages, but also in the towns. “The government ships bread abroad, but we are starving” became a common refrain.⁶⁰ According to prominent party leaders in this Soviet Republic, Ukrainian separatism, stimulated by Petliura’s followers and by Poland, re-emerged as a very serious threat to the Soviet order, but to what extent still remains unclear.⁶¹

The agricultural crisis produced, at least in these comments, a fusion of national and social strands in opposition to the Soviet state. It also aggra­vated anti-Russian and anti-Semitic feelings among a number of Ukrainian peasants, perhaps because of the public prominence of Jews in the All­Union Communist Party and the CP(b)U, the OGPU/NKVD, and among leading party activists collectivizing the countryside.⁶² In the ab­sence of professional polling, it is difficult to quantify these attitudes. Nevertheless, collectivization must have inflamed national as well as social tensions in the countryside.

All in all, several factors contributed to the famine of 1928-9 and to the starvation of thousands. The droughts and abrupt climactic changes caused a genuine decline in the availability of grain, but the state-sponsored ac­quisitions continued, even if the total aggregate collected decreased. The Soviet government acquired the grain by coercive means and determined the amount exported and the amount sent to the cities and to grain-starved regions. This was a political decision, not an agricultural or climactic one. Once the agricultural pie shrank, the leaders of the Soviet party-state could have assessed their priorities and redistributed its grain resources in a more equitable manner to feed its population. But this choice did not appear on the political menu. Industrialization became the alpha and ome­ga of the Soviet system long before Stalin gained control of its command­ing heights.

The grain crisis, the Communist Party’s reaction, and the peasant re­sponse to the governmental intrusion into their economic sphere repre­sented a warning shot. With the introduction of extraordinary measures and compulsory grain requisitions in 1928 and 1929, the Soviet authorities discovered the strengths and weaknesses of the peasant’s opposition to the government’s intervention and to the future mass collectivization drive. The peasants, in turn, quickly realized that the moderate New Economic Policy had ended. Both sides calculated their risks and rewards and con­cluded that control of the countryside was essentially a zero-sum game. A greater and more brutal conflagration would soon engulf the farmlands.