De-kulakization, Collectivization, and the Famine, 1929-1932

At the end of December 1929, shortly after Stalin removed Nikolai Bukharin, his heretofore closest ally and the head of the moderate pro­peasant faction in the Politburo, he announced a change in policy.

By manipulating the social tensions between the better-off and the poor­est peasants in the villages, the Soviet state isolated the kulaks, branded them as implacable “class enemies,” and encouraged their neighbours to divide their lands and take their personal property. Many criminal elements joined the redistribution brigades and the young activists the regime sent to the countryside. Together, these two groups engaged in lawless behaviour, punishing kulaks, not building a new order in the countryside. In some areas, they “drove the dekulakized naked into the streets, beat them, orga­nized drinking bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money etc.,” effectively terrorizing not just the kulaks, but the entire rural community.⁶⁶ Peasants who may have sympathized with the kulaks did not dare to reveal themselves to their neighbours.

The first wave of de-kulakization in Ukraine started in the first half of 1930.⁶⁸ In 1930-1, the Soviet government deported 63,720 kulak house­holds - over 300,000 men, women, and children - from that republic to the Arctic North, the Urals, Siberia, Yakutia, and the Far East.⁶⁹ According to one eyewitness, members of these families were

packed off into the terrible cold - infants, pregnant women piled in cattle cars on top of one another, and right there women gave birth (would there be a worse indignity?), then they were thrown out of the cars like dogs and put in churches and dirty, cold sheds, lice-ridden, freezing, and hungry, and here they are, thousands of them, left to the mercy of fate, like dogs no one wants to notice.⁷⁰

Even if at this point Soviet decision makers did not know their actions would lead to famine and mass starvation, they were assuredly aware of the inhumane suffering they were inflicting on these people. They would soon extend this barbarity against “class enemies” to all peasants. In prep­aration for this all-out assault, party leaders taught their agents that “peas­ants who opposed collectivization were agents of the class enemy and that the wrath of the proletariat should be meted out to them.”⁷¹ By 1930, if not before, most peasants in the USSR’s grain-producing regions recognized the party’s hostility towards them.

According to the 1926 Soviet census, the overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s twenty-nine million men and women (81 per cent) lived in the countryside and engaged in agricultural pursuits.⁷² Nearly 90 per cent of the rural population and rural households identified themselves as Ukrainians, although they were not evenly distributed in all of Ukraine’s regions (see map 6 and table 6.1).⁷³ The highest percentage (over 90 per cent) of Ukrainians lived in the Right Bank, Left Bank, and the Dnieper Industrial Region.⁷⁴ The Right and Left Banks also represented the two most densely populated areas of Ukraine, itself the most densely popu­lated republic of the USSR.⁷⁵

In the spring of 1929, the Ukrainian SSR possessed 5.2 million peasant households and 25.4 million peasants, well over 19 per cent of the total Soviet peasant population.⁷⁶ Farming the steppe’s rich black soil, those peasants who identified themselves as Ukrainians (approximately 22.2 mil­lion men, women, and children) represented the largest group of non­Russian peasants, second only to the Russian peasants, within the USSR.

After the party’s agents removed the “kulaks” from the countryside, they “encouraged” the other peasants to join collective farms. But the overwhelming majority of peasants in Ukraine did not welcome the pros­pect of collectivization. They possessed a tradition of individual farming, however difficult to maintain in the Soviet Union’s most overpopulated agricultural region, and few of them wanted to abandon their small, indi­vidual plots and voluntarily enter larger government-sponsored collective farms or state farms. Only the poorest, approximately 3 per cent of the

Table 6.1 Ukrainians and the Rural Population of the Ukrainian SSR, 1926

Source: Statystyka Ukrainy, no.

Note: Regions and okrugs:

rural households, joined the new agricultural units in the early 1920s, when peasants could freely choose to accept or reject this new system. As the government pressed this “voluntary” collectivization campaign in 1927 and 1928, less than 6 per cent of the five million peasant households in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic belonged to these collective farms.⁷⁹ Officials introduced a set of unrealistic goals, ignoring peasant aspirations to work for themselves on their own private plots.

The countryside became the epicentre of a great struggle to create a new social order under Soviet auspices. According to Lev Kopelev, one of hun­dreds of thousands of young men and women the party activated to col­lectivize the Ukrainian rural areas, this epic confrontation encompassed more than an effort to extract grain. It also represented a merciless fight “for the souls of (the) peasants who were mired in political backwardness, in ignorance, who succumbed to enemy agitation, who did not understand the great truth of communism.”⁸⁰ Peasant economic and political “back­wardness,” in other words, hampered the emergence of “socialism in one country” and the worldwide revolution.

In the Communist Party’s view of the world, peasants were too simple to see the radiant future that collectivization and industrialization would bring. The party, not the peasants, had to determine the goals and schedule the pace. The All-Union Communist Party’s Central Committee ap­proved the start of mass collectivization on 17 November 1929. On 4 February 1930, Stanislav Kosior, the head of the CP(b)U, declared that the entire Ukrainian countryside should be collectivized by the fall of 1930. By 1 March 1930, 62.8 per cent of all peasant households in Soviet Ukraine allegedly joined some sort of rudimentary collective farm.⁸¹

But these statistics represented a fantasy world, not reality. The party increased its demands on the peasants, but could not persuade them to deliver. The state’s repeated requisitions and claims for the tax arrears mo­bilized the peasants who overcame their internal divisions and united against the regime’s agents.⁸² The peasants resisted the authorities passive­ly as well as actively, non-violently as well as violently.

In 1930, approximately 13,754 peasant disturbances (ten times the num­ber recorded the previous year) with 2.5 million participants broke out across the USSR. They flared up in Ukraine, and the Central Black Earth region (which included Tambov province), the North Caucasus, the Middle Volga, the Moscow Region, Western Siberia, and the Tatar Republic within the USSR. Of these regions, the Ukrainian SSR emerged as the one with the most active resistance, with 4,098 demonstrations (29.7 per cent of the total throughout the USSR) and well over one million peasant participants (38.7 per cent of the total).⁸³ The peasants, according to OGPU reports, demanded an end to involuntary requisitions; the return of collectivized and requisitioned goods and deported families; the disbanding of the Communist Youth League (the Komsomol), which most peasants consid­ered an organization of informants and provocateurs; respect for religious feelings and practices; free elections to the village soviets; and the reintro­duction of trade in the countryside.⁸⁴ The peasants wanted to maintain their economic and civic autonomy; the Soviet political leaders aspired to crush peasant liberties and completely subordinate them to their urban mission.

In Ukraine, as well as in other non-Russian regions, the OGPU recorded nationalist slogans and rumours concerning the return of Petliura, who had been assassinated in Paris by a Soviet agent on 25 May 1926, “ostensibly in retaliation for pogroms perpetrated by some of his troops, but more likely because of the potential for a renewed alliance between the Polish state and an anti-Soviet and pro-independence Ukrainian national movement.”⁸⁵ Stalin and his allies recognized that the countryside and its peasants re­mained the primary social base for the supporters of Ukrainian national­ism.

Acknowledging the peasant opposition to collectivization, Stalin changed his approach, if only temporarily. On 2 March 1930, he published an article criticizing the fanaticism of party workers in the countryside, ordering them to slow the pace of collectivization and allow some peas­ants to leave the collectives.⁸⁶ Because the article only carried Stalin’s sig­nature, he “presented himself to the villagers as the reincarnation of the ‘good tsars’ of bygone days.”⁸⁷ This article - dubbed the “Dizzy from Success” pronouncement - overturned what the party had already accom­plished in the countryside. Despite expectations that most peasants would remain, approximately 65 per cent of all households in Ukraine left the collective farms within six months after Stalin’s article appeared.⁸⁸ But they enjoyed only a temporary respite from collectivization.

Despite Stalin’s illusive change of direction, the Soviet state made a num­ber of significant gains in the countryside, especially in denuding it of the peasant elite (the kulaks) and in creating a beachhead for collectivization. After all, 35 per cent of those collectivized remained in the collective farms, a far higher percentage than in 1928. If 300,000 peasant households be­longed to collective farms in 1928, approximately 1.1 million remained by the late summer of 1930, long after Stalin’s conciliatory article.⁸⁹

As the countryside calmed down, in July 1930 Moscow’s Politburo is­sued a secret decree restarting the collectivization drive that fall. In December 1930 the Central Committee approved a plan expanding the collective farm network, allowing the authorities to confiscate seed grain from those who did not join these new units.⁹⁰ The government employed fines, threats, physical abuse, confiscation, exile, and even executions to persuade peasants to join the new farms. Those who did not experienced “the constant threat of being classified as kulaks and therefore subjected to crippling taxation, which undoubtedly led many middle peasants to con­clude that it would be unwise to remain outside the collective farms.”⁹¹ Fear, not persuasion, convinced most.

Perceiving the end of their traditional way of life, some peasants crossed the border into Poland. Others set fire to their property and crops, killed their animals, destroyed machinery, assaulted party activists, and partici­pated in sporadic revolts and uprisings. In 1930, the OGPU recorded almost one million acts of individual resistance in Ukraine.⁹² That same year the Ukrainian GPU noted that the villages most engaged in opposing collectivization “were often the same ones that had distinguished them­selves in the rural disturbances of 1905 or produced an abnormally high proportion of socialist cadres before 1917.”⁹³ Engaging in uncoordinated acts of utter desperation, peasants slaughtered their animals en masse rath­er than surrender them to the collective farms. Between 1928 and 1932 the number of cattle in Soviet Ukraine fell from 8.6 million to 4.8 million and the number of pigs declined from 7 million to 2 million.⁹⁴ The Ukrainian countryside clearly possessed a deep-rooted culture of defying the central authorities, whether tsarist or Soviet.

In response to the widespread opposition to collectivization, the Soviet authorities applied enough coercion and violence to win control of the countryside. By October 1931, 68 per cent of the households in Ukraine - and 87 per cent in the fertile steppe region - joined these new farms.⁹⁵ In face of a massive invasion from the cities, most peasants signed up.

If on 1 January 1930 the Ukrainian SSR possessed approximately twenty-five million rural inhabitants engaged in agricultural pursuits, only 20,904 belonged to the Communist Party of Ukraine, which embraced a total of 250,681 members and candidate-members.⁹⁶ Many in the rural party leadership had served in the Red Army during the Civil War.⁹⁷ Between 1929 and 1932, the rural party grew to 42,000 members. To bol­ster these small numbers, the party leadership sent another 70,000 heavily armed party members, upping the total to 112,000 in 1932. The party lead­ers could also press into service nearly 500,000 Komsomol members, thousands of industrial workers and urban party officials who arrived in the villages for shorter or longer periods, and uncounted numbers from OGPU military units.⁹⁸ Most of the Komsomol activists remained “luke­warm” supporters of Ukrainization, distrusted the peasantry, and enthusi­astically toed the party line, especially in regard to collectivization.⁹⁹ (The authorities rarely employed the Red Army, which drew its rank and file from the peasantry; these recruits sympathized with the plight of their rural compatriots.)¹⁰⁰ It is unclear how many “outsiders” the party sent to subdue the countryside, but hundreds of thousands had to have been in­volved. The polarization of the countryside and the constant search for scapegoats for collectivization’s failures led to unprecedented violence, which easily surpassed that of the 1918-21 period.¹⁰¹

As the agricultural sector failed to acquire more exportable grain, party leaders introduced even more brutal measures to induce the outcome they desired. In light of Ukraine’s successful fulfilment of the agricultural quota in 1930 after a bountiful harvest, central planners increased the allotment in 1931. If the authorities set a goal of 265 million poods of grain for 1927­8, they imposed an impossible target of 510 million poods for 1931-2.¹⁰² Due to unfavourable weather conditions and extensive crop failure, the harvests of 1931 and 1932 produced less than the above-average results of 1930.¹⁰³ The party’s decision to raise these quotas at this point did not rep­resent a rational economic judgment, but a political one. In 1931-2, in the grain-producing areas, such as Ukraine and the North Caucasus, the state confiscated about half of the harvest.¹⁰⁴ By 1931 the Soviet state’s collec­tions of cereals in the largest wheat-growing regions of Ukraine and the northern Caucasus constituted 45-6 per cent of the entire Soviet harvest, stripping the peasants of their food supplies.¹⁰⁵ Many collective farmers met their assigned goals by being forced to surrender their seed grain.¹⁰⁶ Without seed grain, the peasants had nothing left to plant for the next season or to feed themselves. In Ukraine, the Soviet political leadership expanded the brutal grain collections campaign (implemented throughout the USSR) into a total war against the peasants.

Even after the Soviet government employed violent measures against them, the peasants still resisted, but now in a passive manner. They worked “as little and as poorly as possible,” stealing, hiding, or destroying the crops they grew.¹⁰⁷ In many respects, they acted as civilian versions of the good soldier Svejk. Thousands of local officials purged in 1932-3 “often concealed or at least tolerated” these peasant slowdowns.¹⁰⁸ These respons­es to collectivization only enraged the central authorities, who failed to secure the quantity of grain they imagined the countryside should deliver.

Despite appeals by Skrypnyk and others in the Soviet Ukrainian politi­cal leadership, Stalin refused to lower the assigned allotments for grain collections.¹⁰⁹ To do so, his lieutenants claimed, threatened the entire in­dustrialization program. By the end of 1931, another famine broke out in the Ukrainian countryside and in the first half of 1932 spread across the republic, subsiding only with the spring harvest.¹¹⁰ But due to abnormal weather patterns, the rapid commandeering of livestock, and the subse­quent peasant slaughter of millions of horses, the fall 1932 harvest pro­duced even less than the poor harvest of 1931, which was lower than the 1930 harvest.¹¹¹ Although the authorities lowered Ukraine’s grain levy three times, they did little to reduce the highly unrealistic allocations to the point where they would prevent mass starvation.¹¹²

In her diary entry of 5 April 1932, Oleksandra Radchenko, a rural schoolteacher from central Ukraine, wrote:

Famine, artificially created famine is taking on a nightmarish character. No one can understand why they are pumping out grain to the last kernel, and now having seen the results of such pumping out, they nevertheless continue to demand grain for sowing and sowing material in general. And when the indignant peasant exclaims that all his grain was taken for the grain procure­ment, he receives a question in reply: “Why did you give everything; you should have realized that you would have to sow with something?” and end­less negotiations begin. And the children go hungry, worn out, emaciated, tormented by tapeworms, so they eat only sugar beets - and those will run out soon - and the harvest is still four months away. What will become of us?¹¹³

Millions starved and many passed away. In 1932, Ukraine experienced 250,000 excess deaths and 67,100 indirect losses, primarily in the country­side.¹¹⁴ More men, women, and children died during the famine of 1932 than in 1928.