Famine in Non-Ukrainian Villages
Writings and discourses that maintain there was no ethnic element to the Famine are found infrequently in Ukraine in the period since 1988. Nevertheless, they are worth recounting briefly because they offer a new dimension to the topic that may eventually be explored more fully.
It should be recalled that there were several large ethnic communities living in Ukraine during the Stalinist period, of which the German and Jewish communities were the most notable. Both of them suffered considerable losses during the years 1932-33. Very little has appeared on the Germans, but in a lengthy article on the causes and consequences of the Famine, Vasyl' Marochko asserts that the situation in the national districts essentially did not differ from the plight of Ukrainian villages. He observes that the only outside country that recognized the scale of the Famine was Nazi Germany, which organized broad assistance for ethnic Germans living in Ukraine. However, some Germans refused to accept this aid because they were fearful of Soviet reprisals.59 Clearly, Hitler's regime may have had more selfish motives than aiding kin in the Soviet Union, and some Volksdeutsche offered a warm welcome to the invading forces of the Wehrmacht in 1941. A more detailed picture has emerged of the Jewish settlements, principally from Jewish regional newspapers in contemporary Ukraine.Thus Yakov Konigsman contests the theory that the Famine in Ukraine was the deliberate policy of the Soviet government, which singled out Ukrainians for destruction—this theme represents the more extreme version of the genocide theory. He argues that the Famine affected different areas of the Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan and the Volga region, and encompassed members of different nationality groups. His main thesis is that the Famine resulted from the criminal policies of Stalin's regime which, despite a relatively poor harvest, tried to requisition as much grain as possible from the villages for export.
The Famine, in Konigsman's view, signaled the decline of Jewish settlements in Ukraine. The start of such habitation dated back to Imperial Russian times, and Russia's efforts to convert Jews to Orthodoxy by tying them to the land. By the late 19 th century, he points out, only 3% of almost 2 million Ukrainian Jews, were working in agriculture, whereas 97% resided in towns and cities. The revolution and Civil War had a devastating impact on Jewish settlements, reducing the Jewish population by about half compared to the numbers in 1914. However, the years 1921-22 saw a revitalization of colonization efforts by Zionist activists, who favored settlement in the Ukrainian south and the Crimean peninsula. Zionist cooperatives received support from Jewish organizations in the United States. A number of such cooperatives emerged in Crimea and employed over 1,600 Jewish peasants by 1923.60By August 1924, the Soviet authorities were overtly supporting the policy of settling Jewish working people, and as a result Jewish colonies began to develop in Crimea and South Ukraine, based on the administrative districts of Freifeld, Neufeld, Blumenfeld, Kalinindorf, and Stalindorf. Similar colonies appeared in other parts of the USSR, such as Belarus, the Smolensk region of Russia, and the Caucasus. Jewish settlers were hostile to collectivization and the upheaval it posed for their settlements. However, by 1930, 93 Jewish collective farms had been founded in Ukraine, with a population of 156,000 peasants, which was 10% of the entire Jewish community of the republic. Konigsman maintains that collectivization was a destructive process. People lacked motivation, and requisitions undermined the stability of the kolkhoz and brought famine to the Jewish regions. Some American Jewish organizations (Agrojoint, Komzet), upon learning of the outbreak of famine in the Kherson region, attempted to help the communities, but their support was not accepted by the Soviet authorities.
Konigsman reports that starving Jews attempted to escape to the cities and even to the Jewish region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East. By 1937, only 68 Jewish kolkhozes remained, and the number of peasants in them had fallen to 109,000, a decline of 30%.61One memoir relates the Jewish experience of the Famine in Kherson region. The author is a native of the village Sudnyakove in Khmel’nyts’kyi region, but moved with her parents to Kherson as part of a Jewish colonization venture organized by Agrojoint in 1928. They settled in the village Rodonsk and the company built them houses. When the Soviet authorities collectivized the region, the settlers were deprived of their horses and tools, but retained their cattle. In 1932-33 the father received 30 poods of grain for his labor on the kolkhoz, and 22 poods were exchanged for some sheep. When requisitions began, the family had to make bread from mustard flour, the grandfather died, and the author became swollen from hunger, although she survived. The malnourished children received one meal a day at school—some thin soup with beans.62 Another author takes issue with those who have maintained that the Famine in Ukraine was organized by Jews (see below) and argues that Jews suffered from the event as much as any other group. In Ukraine, she states, the death toll for Jews was second only to that for Ukrainians and Russians, because the Famine targeted people based not on national identity but on the region and class affiliation, i.e., peasantry. Mikhail Siganevich from Kalinin- dorf recalled that the harvest in 1932 was satisfactory. His family received 20 poods of grain, but this amount was requisitioned in the fall of that year. The village schoolteacher ordered all children to bring 5 kilograms of grain to donate to the state, and his mother was obliged to give up what grain remained. The family endured the winter eating rotten vegetables. Though the Si- ganevich family survived, many of the neighbors perished.63 There is little to distinguish such stories from those of Ukrainian villages.
Another article by Marochko is worth citing as a final example in the category of non-Ukrainian victims during the Famine. Though the Famine was not limited to Ukraine, he remarks, starvation tended to affect primarily those areas in which many Ukrainians lived, such as the Kuban region, along the Don River, and Kazakhstan. Though members of other nationalities suffered, it was primarily because they were unfortunate enough to reside in Ukraine (Russians, Jews, and Germans). In 1932, he points out, there were 2.6 million Russians in Ukraine, and most Russian peasants lived in nine national districts. Like their Ukrainian counterparts, they resisted collectivization and by 1932 those in all the Russian national districts were starving. The 1932 famine was also unique in that it affected cities as well as villages. Thus various cities were facing crises: Kyiv, Berdyakhiv, Zhytomyr, Uman, Zaporizhzhya, and others. He challenges the perspective that Jews occupied the prominent party and government posts and played some role in organizing the Famine by observing that they were also sufferers, but also somewhat absurdly participates in this discussion by suggesting that Russians and Ukrainians occupied more of such positions than Jews.64 This article overall seems to contradict his earlier contribution to the debate in that it suggests that the Famine may well have been directed primarily against Ukrainians, but affected other groups by the simple factor of geography; that these peoples happened to be in the locality and therefore suffered as well. On the other hand, a regime that intended to eradicate Ukrainians for their nationalist views, or for their potential alliance with the Poles, might have taken steps not to alienate other national groups living in the republic. In general, this question has received little attention from historians and requires a fuller treatment.