From Famine to the Holodomor, 1932-1933

Many of the party secretaries responsible for implementing the grain col­lection plans in Ukraine cautiously warned Moscow of its impossible quo­tas. They understood that the mass protests and demonstrations they encountered represented only a small tip of the iceberg of mass discontent and anger in the countryside.¹¹⁵ Ukrainian party officials warned Stalin that the harvest of 1932 would produce less than in 1931 and that the fam­ine would intensify in the fall.

Although the 1932 harvest did produce less than the poor harvest of 1931, Stalin did not relent.¹¹⁷ By the early summer of 1932, he resolved that “only a policy of uncompromising harshness would enable the grain col­lections to succeed.”¹¹⁸ On 15 June, he asserted, “Ukraine has been given more than it should get. There is no reason to give it more grain - and there is nowhere to take it from.”¹¹⁹ Although he admitted the existence of “impoverishment and famine” in a number of fertile Ukrainian districts, he did not view it as an emergency.¹²⁰ Three days later, in a letter to Lazar Kaganovich and Molotov, he demanded that “we should add an extra 4-5 percent to the plan in order to cover inevitable errors in the records and fulfill the plan at any cost.”¹²¹

In late June 1932, Stalin and Molotov sent a telegram to the Communist Party of Ukraine and to the Soviet Ukrainian government, stressing the necessity to complete the assigned grain deliveries by all means neces- sary.¹²² At the Third All-Ukrainian Conference of the Communist Party of Ukraine (6—9 July 1932), Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin’s primary troubleshooters, forced members of the reluctant CP(b)U Politburo to agree to fulfil the centrally assigned agricultural plan without any compro­mises or delays.¹²³ As Stalin and his closest allies well understood at this point in time, the extreme grain requisitions would spark not just an acci­dental famine, but an intentional one, the Holodomor.¹²⁴

In response to peasant resistance, Stalin insisted on the promulgation of the “Decree on the Protection of State Property” in early August.

Despite the ruthless measures the authorities embraced in the late sum­mer, the grain collections did not meet expectations. In early August, Stalin complained about the state of grain accumulation in Ukraine. In September, the republic nearly met the monthly goal imposed by Moscow, but in October and November its peasants faltered. Of all of the major grain­growing areas of the Soviet Union (which included Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga Region, and the Central Volga Region), the Ukrainian SSR produced less than 40 per cent of its assigned quota, the lowest of the four.¹²⁷ In the eyes of Stalin and his closest comrades, Ukraine - the USSR’s breadbasket - had just become a “slacker republic.” In his eyes, not only did the republic not deliver, it refused to deliver. In an ad­dendum to a special OGPU report on the anti-collective farm movement in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, written in the late summer of 1932, the authors asserted that “Ukraine stands in first place when it comes to mass anti-Soviet incidents.”¹²⁸ Stalin, who followed the progress of collec­tivization closely, most likely read this dispatch. If not, he independently drew the same conclusions. Moscow’s central organs had to break Ukraine’s resistance and compel its communist party to complete its duties.

Constantly pressured by the All-Union Communist Party, the Central Committee of the CP(b)U and the Soviet Ukrainian government issued a decree on 18 November 1932 punishing independent households as well as collective farms that “maliciously wrecked the grain procurement plan,” which included most of the peasants.¹²⁹ These men and women now had to return the meagre grain the government had advanced them.

On 28 November 1932, Soviet authorities expanded the use of “black­lists.” They emerged as early as the fall 1929 grain campaign, but became widespread in Ukraine in August 1932, reaching a peak that October and November.¹³¹ By late 1932, the authorities placed well over half of all populated areas in Ukraine, including collective farms, rural soviets, and raions, on these lists.¹³² This vicious punishment, as well as the subsequent removal of all edible goods from the villages, represented a disproportion­ate response to the drop in grain deliveries to the Soviet state - a death sentence. These areas soon became “zones of death.”¹³³

On 14 December 1932, Stalin and Molotov signed a secret directive which demanded that party cadres “fully complete the grain and sunflow­er seed procurement plan by the end of January 1933.”¹³⁴ Both men then ordered all collective farms to deliver all grain, including reserves for seed­ing and nourishment, leaving nothing for the peasants. To meet this goal, the party intensified repressive measures and increased the number of ar­rests and deportations. In the final paragraph, the edict granted Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar, the primary party leaders in Soviet Ukraine, the right “to suspend the delivery of goods to especially backward districts until they fulfill the grain procurement plan.”¹³⁵ These “goods” included food, nails, tools, salt, and gas, the very materials needed to deliver grain into state hands.¹³⁶

Armed Soviet detachments then confiscated harvested grain, seed, and grain reserves, and suspended food deliveries to the recalcitrant villages.

Whatever misgivings some party activists may have experienced, they successfully stripped the rural areas of grain and all edible goods. These procurements triggered a famine, which spread across the Ukrainian countryside between November 1932 and June 1933, reaching a peak in March-April.¹³⁹ Deaths rose at a horrendous rate. To stop the migration of starving peasants to the cities, in December 1932 the Central Executive Committee of the USSR introduced the internal passport system in the cities and the mandatory registration of individuals in their places of resi­dence. In addition, it prohibited collective farmers from seeking employ­ment in factories and mines unless these industries drafted them in the proper bureaucratic manner. The peasants did not receive passports and experienced discrimination and brutal treatment whenever they entered the cities in search of food.¹⁴⁰

Residents of urban areas fared better. The authorities “passportized” Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, Minsk, all of the major urban centres situated within one hundred kilometres of the western border, and the most important industrial cities by the spring of 1933. In the process of doing so, they expelled thousands, if not tens of thousands, of vagrants, “unreliable elements,” and people with “a suspicious past” from these cit­ies.

The Soviet Union’s major metropolises, Moscow and Leningrad, re­ceived better and more provisions than other cities.¹⁴² Due to the rationing system in place, their residents may have experienced hunger, but not mass starvation or famine. But those who lived in Ukraine’s cities often wit­nessed large numbers of bodies of food-deprived peasants “who had some­how bypassed the roadblocks, only to then die in the streets of Kharkiv and Kiev.”¹⁴³

The onslaught of another famine in the fall of 1932 did not impede the party’s final offensive against the peasants. In the early morning of 20 December, Kaganovich forced the Ukrainian Politburo to raise the ap­portionment for grain requisitions. Nine days later, this political body de­clared that seed stock reserves also had to be seized in order to fulfil the new plan.¹⁴⁴ This left nothing for the peasants.

Despite these brutal measures, the December 1932 collections in Ukraine did not meet the party’s goals. Instead of 1,207,000 tons, the au­thorities collected only 650,000 tons.¹⁴⁵ Stalin felt betrayed. In his view, the party, which developed makeshift compromises with the grain-producing regions in lowering the plan’s designated targets before August 1932, re­ceived little in return. Ukraine could not even meet the reduced standards. Enough of compromises! The agricultural as well as the industrial plan had to be fulfilled. Requisition everything!

On 22-3 January 1933, the central Politburo, the Communist Party, and the Soviet government issued directives prohibiting the massive outflow of peasants from Ukraine into other regions or entry into Ukraine of peasants from the North Caucasus. They also ordered the arrest of all those who left Ukraine for the Moscow region, the Central Black Earth Region, Belarus, or the Lower and Middle Volga Regions, which possessed more food.

Driven by hunger, people ate everything and anything: even food that had already rotted - potatoes, beets, and other root vegetables that pigs normally refused to eat. They even ate weeds, the leaves and bark of trees, insects, frogs, and snails. Nor did they shy away from eating the meat of diseased horses and cattle. Often that meat was already decaying and those who ate it died of food poisoning.¹⁴⁹

As the famine intensified, food dominated people’s thoughts and ac­tions. The amount of time and energy “spent in food-seeking activities increase[d] while the time and energy devoted to activities unrelated to hunger decrease[d].”¹⁵⁰ As physiological starvation set in, people became depressed and apathetic.¹⁵¹ With physical enfeeblement, the survival in­stinct weakened.¹⁵² The writer Vasily Grossman, a native of Berdichev, graphically described the transition from life to death:

In the beginning, it (hunger) burns and torments you - it tears at your guts, at your soul. And so you try to escape your home. People dig for worms, they gather grass - and yes, they even try to fight their way through to Kiev. Whatever they do, they’ve got to get out, they’ve got to get away. And then the day comes when the starving man crawls back into his home. That means hunger has won. This one has given up the struggle; he lies down on his bed and stays there. And once hunger has won, you can’t get the man up again, try as you might. Not just because he doesn’t have the strength, but because it’s all the same to him; he no longer wants to go on living. He just lies there quietly. All he wants is to be left alone. He doesn’t want to eat, he can’t stop peeing, he has the runs. All he wants is to sleep, to be left in peace. If you just lie there quietly, it means you’re near the end.¹⁵³

Millions passed away, transforming the countryside into a silent waste­land. The children died first, followed by the old and then the middle- aged.¹⁵⁴ Far more men died than women, and far more individual peasants (edinolichniki), those who did not belong to collective farms, than members of such farms. According to one Western journalist,

If in many districts ten percent of the collective farmers died, the percentage of mortality among the individual peasants was sometimes as high as twenty- five. Of course, not all who died passed through the typical stages of death from outright hunger, abnormal swellings under the eyes and of the stomach, followed in the last stages by swollen legs and cracking bones. The majority died of slight colds which they could not withstand in their weakened condi­tion; of typhus, the familiar accompaniment of famine; of “exhaustion,” to use the familiar euphemistic word in death reports.¹⁵⁵

The inhabitants of thousands of villages perished in the stillness of their homes and fields, often alone. Only the empty, crumbling peasant struc­tures commemorated the once-bustling village life before mass starvation and death by hunger.

Despite these horrific losses, the Stalinist leadership continued to sell grain to Europe. If the USSR exported less than one million centners of grain in 1928, it traded 13 million in 1929, 48.3 million in 1930, 51.8 million in 1931, and 18.1 million in 1932. Even in the worst year of the famine, in 1933, Soviet authorities shipped almost ten million centners to Western Europe.¹⁵⁶

Under normal circumstances, Ukraine and the North Caucasus pro­vided half of the USSR’s total marketable grain.¹⁵⁷ In 1930 and 1931, the majority of grain (70 per cent) exported from the USSR came from the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus; the rest came from the Lower Volga and the Central Black Earth Region.¹⁵⁸

Even with the decline in harvests and the decline in grain exports, Stalin did not reallocate the grain the USSR gathered to alleviate the famine. According to Roy Medvedev, “only half of the grain that was exported in 1932-1933 would have been sufficient to save all the southern regions from famine.”¹⁵⁹ According to another scholar, the grain exports in 1932-3 were enough “to feed more than five million people for one year.”¹⁶⁰ According to a third scholar, “Had Moscow stopped all grain exports and released all strategic grain reserves, the available 2.6 million tons of grain, under optimal conditions of distribution, might have saved up to 7.8 mil­lion lives, which was the approximate number of actual deaths of the 1932-1933 famine.”¹⁶¹ But the Kremlin continued to export and did not accept any foreign aid. In 1933, mass death from starvation “could have been averted but was not because the Stalinist regime did not, as yet, wish to end the famine, because it served their geopolitical ends.”¹⁶²

Despite a poor harvest, the collapse of the food distribution network, a raging famine engulfing tens of millions of lives, and depressed wheat pric­es on world markets, grain exports remained the Soviet state’s first prior­ity. The ruthless logic of radical collectivization and industrialization induced Stalin and his inner circle to pursue a demographic catastrophe. For party leaders and economic planners, the quality of peasant life in the overpopulated grain-producing areas always remained far less important than the USSR’s overall national defence and urban food security. Outside of producing for the urban workers, the military, and industrialization, the peasants remained irrelevant to the scientifically grounded Marxist vision of history. In the Stalinist working-class-centred interpretation of the world, peasants were expendable; defiant Ukrainian peasants, especially those who opposed the Soviet order in 1917-20 (and now collectiviza­tion), even more so.

Urban residents also suffered, although certainly not to the degree that the peasants did.¹⁶³ In addition to less bread, those living in the cities ac­quired smaller amounts of meat, dairy products, and fish. Workers in Moscow and Leningrad, “comparatively well provisioned in comparison to other towns, went hungry. Stores did not even have enough food to honor ration cards... and prices in the free peasant markets skyrocket­ed.”¹⁶⁴ In the cities of Ukraine in the early 1930s, industrial workers re­ceived 800 grams of bread as their daily norm, manual workers 600 grams, and office employees 400.¹⁶⁵

By the summer of 1933, peasants in Ukraine learned their lesson, as Kosior put it, and surrendered. The only way to survive was “to work for the Soviet state.”¹⁶⁶ In the last months of 1933, the agricultural situation changed for the better. Collective farmers in the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus harvested more grain than in the previous two years.¹⁶⁷ The urban centres now received more bread, flour, and foodstuffs. Repression abated. But in this period, epidemic diseases, including typhus, spread throughout Ukraine.¹⁶⁸ The All-Union Central Council of Unions, moreover, continued to receive reports from local union and party offi­cials about malnourished workers in the cities.¹⁶⁹

This total war against the peasants in Ukraine ended in the second half of 1933. Food conditions improved by late 1933 and early 1934, but those who survived the famine in the countryside understood that their plight differed radically from that of those who lived in the towns and cities. By law, economic status, and political position, the peasants remained un­equal to their urban cousins until the 1970s and beyond.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet government and the Communist Party embraced a series of decisions to gain total control over the countryside and to ruthlessly exterminate anyone who opposed them. To obtain credits for imports of capital equipment leaders repeatedly pro­claimed the need to increase wheat exports. The bumper crop of 1930 helped expand exports from 100,000 metric tons in 1929 to 2.3 million. By 1931, these sales doubled to 5.2 million metric tons, but due to worldwide surpluses the Soviets received less than they anticipated for these crops.¹⁷⁰

By the fall of 1932 the Soviet regime experienced a major crisis. The decline in the export of grain from 1931 to 1932 (from 5.18 to 1.81 million metric tons) as the world price of grain fell created a crisis in the balance of Soviet payments,

forcing the state to suspend payments to foreign specialists and workers, many of whom then left. Their departure, in turn, compounded problems in the newly built factories, which still needed parts, machinery, and the advice of those very same foreign experts. Essential raw materials could also not be imported in the required quantities, and many industrial complexes produc­ing tractors, armaments, vehicles, and other machinery had to stop produc­tion for weeks at a time, imperiling the Soviet industrialization campaign... the German bills of exchange, used in 1931 to re-launch industrialization af­ter the 1930 crisis, were coming due, cities teemed with former peasants deep­ly inimical to the regime, and there was mounting discontent in the workers’ ranks. Moscow feared what would happen if another cut in food rations was announced... Documents began surreptitiously circulating in Party circles attacking Stalin and his policies. Then, on November 7th, following the cel­ebration of the October Revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezdha Alliluyeva, committed suicide.¹⁷¹

Driven to accumulate capital for industrial development through the sale of wheat, Soviet leaders desperately sought to acquire more grain and sell it on international markets, depressing prices. In doing so, they ig­nored the economic realities of supply and demand, undermining the Soviet state’s ability to earn more capital by withholding grain and waiting for world prices to rise. Although Stalin and his colleagues responded to the Soviet agricultural crisis by selling less wheat abroad, they did not lower the grain-requisitioning quotas to the point of preventing millions of their own peasants from starving to death.