7 Killing by Hunger

On 14 December 1932, Joseph Stalin and Viacheslav Molotov, the former as head of the Communist Party, the latter as premier of the Soviet government, signed a decree “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region.” The country was in the midst of a food crisis that had already caused widespread hunger, but the decree was not concerned with the fate of the peasantry and the impending famine.

The Soviet leaders demanded that their underlings in Ukraine and the North Caucasus—two of the three main grain-producing areas of the USSR—fulfill the grain-procurement plans for 1932 by January-February 1933. The decree of 14 December ordered the arrest and, if necessary, the execution of collective-farm heads and local officials who failed to fulfill the quotas. Some of the “saboteurs” were mentioned by name: fifteen regional officials were to be sentenced to hard labor for periods between five and ten years—the decree gave the Soviet judiciary a modicum of flexibility in that regard. In the Kuban region of the North Cau­casus, the inhabitants of the Poltavskaia settlement were accused of sabotaging the procurement campaign, and the secret police was ordered to deport its entire population to the Soviet North.

The village would be resettled by Red Army veterans from central Russia.

But Stalin was not after bread alone. The decree of 14 Decem­ber also dealt with the politics of culture. All “saboteurs” listed by name were Soviet cadres from Ukraine, and the population of the Poltavskaia village happened to be overwhelmingly Ukrainian as well.

The December 1932 decree turned Stalin’s all-Union “grain­extraction” campaign into a direct assault on the Ukrainian po­litical elite and the cultural foundations of Ukrainian nation­building, thereby distinguishing the famine in Ukraine from that in other parts of the USSR. Now known in Ukraine as the Great Famine or Holodomor (killing by hunger), the famine of 1932-33 claimed the lives of close to four million people, more than half of those who starved to death in the Soviet Union during that period. The famine dramatically changed Ukrainian society and culture, leaving deep scars in the national memory. It also pro­duced a vast literature on the subject and generated numerous debates in Ukraine and beyond. As the Soviet regime refused to admit the very existence of the famine, its recognition was hotly contested in the last decades of the Cold War. Subsequently it became a bone of contention between Ukraine and Russia, with the government of the former defining the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people and the latter stressing the all-Union character of the disaster.

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With Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017), Anne Apple­baum walks into the minefields of memory left by Stalin’s policies in Ukraine and multiple attempts to conceal, uncover, interpret and reinterpret the Holodomor with new determination to set the record straight and new evidence that has become accessible since the fall of the Soviet Union. Her book is the most important English-language study of the famine since Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, published in 1986.

Red Famine stands out from the existing English-language literature on the subject by its persistent focus on Ukraine as the place where the famine story not only takes on its salient characteristics and concludes but also where it begins. Apple­baum recognizes and states repeatedly that the famine was not limited to Ukraine and was caused by policies that grew out of considerations and circumstances broader than what she defines as Moscow’s “Ukrainian Question.” But she is no less persistent in pointing out the uniqueness of the Ukrainian situation and the political and cultural factors—the strength of Ukrainian nation­alism, the stubborn peasant resistance to the communist regime in Moscow and, last but not least, the fertility of the soil—that made the Ukrainian famine the deadliest of the Soviet famines of the time.

The time frame of the book is unusually broad for histories of the Great Famine. While the events of 1932-33 are central, Applebaum presents a brief survey of Ukraine’s history before the twentieth century that illuminates her approach to the “Ukrainian Question.” She also covers in detail the prehistory of the famine, starting with the Revolution of 1917, and her epilogue brings the interpretation of the Holodomor up to the present. This contex- tualization of the famine helps to explain its importance for the perennial historical debate on the Russian Revolution, under­stood in the book as comprising a number of national revolutions, the Ukrainian one in particular, and for the history of Russo- Ukrainian relations, so hostile today.

Ukraine’s rich black soil has produced grain for international markets since the days of Herodotus, and the country became known as the “breadbasket of Europe” long before Germany oc­cupied it in 1918 to feed its army and home front. In particular, the Bolsheviks were there before the Germans came.

The Bolshevik regime survived civil war and economic col­lapse not only by being ruthless but also by making concessions to forces that its leaders were initially unprepared to tolerate, in­cluding Ukrainian nationalism and the Ukrainian peasantry. The first was appeased by the policy of Ukrainization, which offered support for the Ukrainian language and culture in exchange for giving up aspirations to political sovereignty. The second was pac­ified by the New Economic Policy, which allowed the peasants to hold the land they had acquired in the revolution and put an end to requisitions, introducing elements of the market.

Ukraine, or rather eastern and central parts of today’s Ukraine that comprised the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic during the interwar period, benefited from both policies, but the Bolshe­viks considered them temporary. Their long-term objective was the elimination of both the peasantry and the nationalities. “The national question is purely a peasant question,” declared Mikhail Kalinin, the formal head of the Soviet state and one of the very few Bolshevik leaders with a peasant background. “[T]he best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers.” The connection established by the Bolshevik rulers between the peasant and nationality questions created a convic­tion that cost Ukraine millions of lives.

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The Soviet Union entered the 1930s with a new sense of insecurity that prompted a drive to accelerate the revolutionary transforma­tion of the economy and society. The Soviet leaders’ hopes of using the Russian Revolution as a spark to ignite world revolution, first in Europe and then in the colonial East, never materialized and were replaced by the ruling elite’s determination to build socialism in one country. The survival of the regime in a hostile capitalist environment necessitated a strong military-industrial complex to arm and mechanize the military, while mobilizing the population in defense of the “socialist motherland” required an ideology with deeper local roots than Marxist internationalism. The regime looked to the village to provide human and agricul­tural resources for industrialization and to Russian nationalism as a source of legitimization—policies that promised nothing good for Ukraine.

The first to feel pressure from the center was the village. Sta­lin’s policy of forced collectivization, implemented in the fall of 1929, singled out Ukraine for especially rapid conversion to the supposedly more efficient model of agriculture. The collectivized farms were to produce more grain and sell it to the state for rock-bottom prices, providing resources for building the military­industrial complex. Those who questioned the new policy were declared to be kulaks (in Russian) or kurkuls (in Ukrainian)—a term that delegitimized the most entrepreneurial peasants, who had everything to lose from collectivization, as agents of counter­revolution. In March 1930, Moscow ordered the arrest of 15,000 kurkuls and the deportation to the North of more than 35,000 kurkul families from Ukraine alone.

The Ukrainian village, with its record of armed resistance to the Bolsheviks, rebelled. Two thousand “mass protests” were reg­istered in Ukraine in March 1930 alone. Peasants in the Pavlohrad and Kryvyi Rih areas—the home base of the strongest warlord of the revolutionary era, Nestor Makhno—formed detachments but were soon outnumbered and outgunned by the regime’s security forces.

With the harvest in the silos, Stalin moved his shock troops of party and Young Communist League activists and secret-police officers back into the countryside to push once again for collec­tivization and collect the grain. With rebel leaders of the previous year imprisoned or exiled and villages cleansed of kurkuls, the peasants returned to the collective farms, but they did not change their attitude toward the government and its policies. They were not eager to grow more than was needed for themselves and their families. The record harvest of 1930 would never be equaled again. Stalin and his aides in the Kremlin decided that peasants were simply hiding the grain they had grown. In the fall of 1931, they ordered requisitions that brought new famine to Ukraine in the spring of 1932. Hardest hit were the sugar beet-producing areas south of Kyiv, where the authorities tried to collect grain that was not there in the first place. The famine, limited at that point to Ukraine alone, had begun.

As people began dying en masse in central Ukraine in the late spring and early summer of 1932, the government in Moscow sent the republic new quotas for grain procurement in the fall of that year. As there was no sowing in regions already affected by famine, and the rest of the collective farms were in disarray, Ukrainian party officials sounded the alarm, pleading with Stalin for the reduction of quotas. He refused. Keeping the 1932 quotas in place and maintaining pressure on the peasantry, Stalin opened a new front in his war on Ukraine. His enemies were the Ukrainian party and government officials who were trying to defend the peasantry instead of toeing the party line and extracting grain no matter what.

The attack on the Ukrainian political leadership, allegedly colluding with the kurkuls in the countryside, was first conceived in the summer of 1932. Doubting the loyalty of the cadres in Ukraine, Stalin accused them of sympathizing with Ukrainian nationalism, a trend that he associated with Symon Petliura, a Ukrainian leader of the revolutionary era. He also suspected them of leanings toward Petliura’s former ally, the leader of Po­land, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine,” wrote Stalin to his right-hand man, Lazar Kaganovich. “Keep in mind that Pilsudski is not daydreaming.... Keep in mind that the Communist Party of Ukraine includes more than a few rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites as well as direct agents of Pilsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will not be slow in opening a front within and outside the party against the party.”

Stalin wanted to purge the party leadership and top echelons of the Ukrainian secret police not only to facilitate increased grain requisitions but also to cleanse the party and government appa­ratus of cadres more loyal to their people than to their boss in Moscow. In November 1932 Stalin appointed a new chief of the Ukrainian secret police, Vsevolod Balytsky, who was experienced in combating Ukrainian nationalism. In the following month he opened one more front in his Ukrainian war, this time against the cultural elite. The decree signed on 14 December 1932 signaled the start of Stalin’s offensive on all three fronts: against the peasantry, the local party elite, and the Ukrainian intelligentsia. It linked the failure to fulfill grain-requisition plans with kulak resistance to the regime, the alleged nationalism of the elites, the subversive activities of foreign governments, and policies to promote the Ukrainian language and culture. The political stage on which the Great Famine of 1932-33 would occur was now fully in place.

On New Year’s Day 1933, Stalin sent a telegram to the Ukrainian party bosses ordering them to apply a recently adopted law on the theft of collective-farm property in order to prosecute those who did not fulfill grain quotas. From now on, every grain found in a peasant household could be considered stolen from the collective farm and thus from the state. As the procurement brigades, composed of party cadres from the cities, police officials, and local activists moved from one peasant household to another, confiscating grain and often taking all available food supplies as “fines” from the starving peasants, they left in their wake a dev­astated countryside bracing itself for the now inevitable famine.

The first cases of mass death from starvation were recorded that same January. Especially hard hit were regions of central Ukraine that had not recovered from the famine of 1932. Peas­ants there died at a higher rate than anywhere else, with Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts accounting for losses of over ι million each. Altogether close to 4 million people would die in Ukraine, most of them between March and June 1933, when food supplies were exhausted and early crops turned out to be too difficult for starv­ing stomachs to digest. Government assistance arrived too late and was insufficient to stop the death spiral. It was distributed exclusively to the collective farms and shipped predominantly to the main grain-producing areas in southern Ukraine. People in the most severely afflicted areas of central Ukraine were left to die. As in the Gulag, the subject of Applebaum’s earlier book, the regime was prepared to feed those still able to work.

As the peasants died of hunger, Stalin intensified his war on Ukraine on two other fronts: against the party elite and the cul­tural intelligentsia. The charge was led by Stalin’s plenipotentiary Pavel Postyshev, who arrived in Ukraine in January 1933. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian communists were purged from the party during Postyshev’s first year in Ukraine. In the commissariat of education close to 4,000 teachers were dismissed, and repres­sive measures were taken against most school administrators. Ukrainian writers were targeted for especially severe persecution. In May 1933, on hearing of the arrest of his friend, the writer Mykhailo Ialovy, Ukraine’s leading communist author, Mykola Khvyliovy, committed suicide. “The arrest of Ialovy—this is the murder of an entire generation.... For what? Because we were the most sincere communists?” wrote Khvyliovy in his death note.

In July 1933, Mykola Skrypnyk, an old Bolshevik and architect of cultural policies in Ukraine, committed suicide to avoid immi­nent arrest. By that time, teaching and publishing in Ukrainian not only in the Kuban but also in other regions of the Russian Federation settled by Ukrainians was already banned. The largest ethnic minority in Russia was wiped out in cultural terms. In Ukraine itself, the promotion of Ukrainian culture among non­Ukrainians was stopped in its tracks, ensuring the dominance of Russian culture in the Ukrainian cities. Stalin’s three-pronged assault on the Ukrainian peasantry and the country’s political and intellectual elite produced a new Ukraine—subdued and silent but refusing to forget.

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Anne Applebaum tells the story of the Great Famine not only with compassion but also with precision, using a wealth of offi­cial documents and oral testimony to reconstruct the events and reveal the thoughts, concerns, and feelings of those involved, both perpetrators and victims. Analyzing the famine in multiple polit­ical, economic, ethnic, and cultural contexts, she avoids reducing it to a chronicle of ethnic suffering or turning it into something that it was not.

“Stalin did not seek to kill all Ukrainians, nor did all Ukraini­ans resist,” writes Applebaum in her conclusions. The Holodomor, she suggests, does not conform to the definition of genocide set forth in the United Nations convention of 1948, but it readily fits the definition produced by no less a figure than the father of the concept, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who emphasizes the Soviet attack on the Ukrainian political and cultural elite in his article of 1952, “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.” The UN convention, explains Applebaum, was shaped in large part by the Soviet dele­gates to that organization, who were eager to limit the definition of genocide to acts committed by proponents of fascist and racist ideologies. Applebaum leaves it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on the issue.

Red Famine, a book about an enormous tragedy, ends on a positive note. Applebaum suggests that Stalin, who succeed­ed in forcing the Ukrainian peasantry into collective farms and crushed the Ukrainian national renaissance of the 1920s, lost in the long term. People were killed, but their legacy lived on, as did the Ukrainian language, culture, and idea of independence. So did the memory of the Holodomor. “As a nation Ukrainians know what happened in the twentieth century,” reads the last sentence of the book. Red Famine helps not only Ukrainians but the world at large to gain a better understanding of what the twentieth century brought to the world.