The 70th Anniversary of the Famine

The 70th anniversary of the Famine in Ukraine was commemorated widely in 2003. It included official recognition of the Famine as an act of genocide by the government and parliament of Ukraine, as well as various foreign gov­ernments, including the Senate of Canada and the government of the United States.

a) That of the academics, writers, and publicists of Ukrainian ancestry, who commemorated the Famine as an act of genocide (as indeed they had done for decades), using the term that Kul’chyts’kyi had applied in his article ten years earlier—Holodomor, or death by hunger. North Americans of Ukrain­ian ancestry had commemorated the Famine ten years earlier in significant fashion, including the commissioning by the Harvard Ukrainian Research In­stitute of the definitive work on the Famine to date by Robert Conquest, a historian based at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 1986.⁴⁶ In 2003, the campaign benefited from increased awareness and knowledge of the Famine and the scale of the catastrophe engendered by the Conquest book, and the work of James E. Mace and his colleagues on the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, which had published its findings in several volumes by 1990. It coincided also with a campaign discussed earlier, taken up by the Ukrainian Civil Liberties Association,⁴⁷ to persuade the New York Times to revoke the Pulitzer Prize it had awarded to its Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty in 1932 for his reporting from the USSR.

b) That of Western academics, not of Ukrainian ancestry, who still hesi­tated to delineate national motives to Stalin's collectivization and grain collec­tion campaigns.⁴⁹ Key among them has been Mark Tauger of the University of West Virginia, who has maintained that the 1932 harvest was much poorer than believed hitherto.⁵⁰ Notably, Western academics were paying much more attention to the topic. In contrast to earlier works that never even cited the Famine—Moshe Lewin's Russian Peasants and Soviet Power being the classic example—new studies discussed the issue carefully. Most notable in this re­gard was Terry Martin's much heralded book, The Affirmative Action Empire, which argues that:

The Politburo's development of a national interpretation of their grain requisitions crisis in late 1932 helps explain both the pattern of terror and the role of the national factor during the 1932-1933 famine. The 1932-33 terror campaign consisted of both a grain requisitions terror, whose pri­mary target was the peasantry, both Russian and non-Russian, and a na­tionalities terror, whose primary target was Ukraine and subsequently Bela­rus. The grain requisitions terror was the final and decisive culmination of a campaign begun in 1927-1928 to extract the maximum possible amount of grain from a hostile peasantry. As such, its primary targets were the grain­producing regions of Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Lower Volga, though no grain-producing regions escaped the 1932-1933 grain requisi­tions terror entirely. Nationality was of minimal importance in this cam­paign. The famine was not an intentional act of genocide specifically target­ing the Ukrainian nation.

In other words, the denationalization campaign came after the Famine rather than alongside it and when it did take place it affected Ukraine and Belarus more or less equally.⁵²

c) The work of academics in Ukraine, led by Kul’chyts’kyi, Shapoval, Ma- rochko, and Danilov, and also the writings of James E. Mace, resident in Ukraine for the last decade of his life. There remain subtle but very distinct differences in the interpretation of the Famine by historians in Ukraine. Kul’chyts’kyi, Mace, and Shapoval emphasize the importance of the 11 Au­gust 1932 letter from Stalin to Kaganovich, which complained about the weakness of the CPU and the presence within it of Petlyurites working in the interests of Polish leader Pilsudski. Though it seems reasonable to assume a fear of Ukrainian nationalism, oddly neither of them remark on Stalin's star­tling paranoia and fear of Poles, illustrated in this document most vividly. They also lay emphasis, correctly in my view, on the formation of an extraor­dinary commission under Molotov on 22 October 1932 (other leaders policed different areas: Kaganovich was sent to the North Caucasus and Pavel Posty­shev to the Volga region) and the Molotov decree of 18 November 1932 ex­tending requisitions for failure to meet the assigned grain quotas. Shapoval, as noted earlier, believes that the decision to abort the policy of Ukrainization of 14 December 1932 was tied directly to the grain requisitions policy. Mace notes that the problems were blamed on kulaks and wreckers in order to “unleash a reign of terror on party officials” (The Day, 25 November 2003).

According to Kul'chyts'kyi, in a March 2003 article in the journal Istoriya v shkolakh Ukrainy, the causes of the Famine are impossible to comprehend without a study of the nature of the Soviet social-economic transformation that occurred after 1929. After the abandonment of the New Economic Policy in 1928, the new political leadership under Stalin moved to the forced crea­tion of the Communist order under slogans of socialist construction. The key goal was to transform the peasantry into an engaged work force that could labor through a command system on the collective farms. This drive was more successful than Lenin's attempt of 1918-21 and relied on three factors. First, says Kul'chyts'kyi, in the 1920s and 1930s the authorities proved stronger than the peasantry. The state prepared for several years for a campaign of full collectivization, having eliminated the kulak sector from the villages. The GPU organs made a list, and neutralized the most mutinous element among the peasantry. Second, Stalin introduced a policy change in March 1930. He refused to force peasants into Communes as demanded by Communist doc­trine and switched to the “artel” form of collectivization, which was much looser. The logical result was the legalization of free commodity circulation in May 1932, which was prohibited by Communist doctrine. There thus arose a kolkhoz trade sector and the monetary form of wages was retained for workers and employees. The third factor was the use of terror, and the division of peasants into rich, middle, and poor, with the expropriation and deportation of kulaks. Such a fate befell all those who were hostile to collective farms.⁵³

Kul’chyts’kyi also focuses once again on the Grain Commissions that be­gan to operate from November 1932. He believes that these commissions functioned with unusual force and venom in Ukraine and the Kuban/North Caucasus, where two-thirds of the population was of Ukrainian ethnicity. Here, the commissions took not only grain.

Notable here is less a difference in interpretation than in emphasis. Kul’chyts’kyi chooses once again to highlight a “terror-famine” imposed by the Soviet authorities as a form of punishment, which together with excessive grain procurements ensured that Ukraine suffered large losses of its rural population. Stalin responded to the Famine as a phenomenon that never ex­isted. The word was never used in party documents, but is found only in spe­cial papers that were not for discussion. This ban on use of the word was for strategic reasons, i.e., to avoid the necessity of organizing aid to the hungry. Internal military police were installed to prevent starving peasants from cross­ing the republican border. According to Kul’chyts’kyi, Western governments were aware of the Famine but chose not to intervene directly because they put their national interests first—in the case of the United States, because such an intervention would compromise the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Un­ion by Washington, and as a potential ally given the coming to power of Hitler in Germany.

This theory is refined in an article Kul’chyts’kyi wrote in this same year in Ukrains'kyi Istorychnyi zhurnal, which explores conditions in collectivized ag­riculture in 1930-31 with the goal of establishing a “genetic link” between all- out collectivization and the Famine. According to this paper, although the state successfully managed to coerce peasants into collective farms, in the years following it failed completely to organize effective management of the kolkhoz economy. Peasants also felt alienated from the results of their labor. The authorities bungled by moving to a two-tier form of administrative control of center-district, eliminating the middle sector of regions, which made it dif­ficult to oversee operations. The result was administrative chaos. Two other factors are considered: first the 25,000ers, or urban volunteers who moved from towns to the villages to create the leadership cadres in the kolkhozes. Their results, says Kul’chyts’kyi, were mixed. The Machine-Tractor Stations, on the other hand, which were supposed to provide the collective farms with technical support during the sowing campaign, were a failure because they lacked skilled machine operators. Finally he describes the grain procurement campaign and highlights the discrepancy between the projected harvest and the actual yield.⁵⁶ Though detailed, one could advance an argument that there is little in Kul’chyts’kyi’s explanation in this article that could not be applied to other republics subjected to collectivization, including Russia and Belarus. What was distinctive about the campaign in Ukraine, and was collectivization really the main cause of the Famine?

In a research paper delivered in Canada during the 70th anniversary pe­riod, Yurii Shapoval addressed the issue of the Famine through various pri­mary documents, including exchanges between leaders and Stalin, letters, re­ports, and diary entries to emphasize the role of Stalinist leaders in the Fam­ine, particularly Molotov and Kaganovich. He points out that at the third con­ference of the Communist Party of Ukraine, held during the summer of 1932, and attended by the two leaders in question, CPU leaders and local officials tried to draw the attention of the Kremlin to the catastrophic situation in Ukraine, but to no avail. Conversely, in his letter to Kaganovich of 11 August 1932—a letter recognized by several historians as pivotal to the issue—Stalin outlined his suspicions about the Ukrainian peasants and questioned the loy­alty of the Ukrainian party leadership in Kharkiv. He believed that it was un­der the influence of the late Symon Petlyura as well as agents of the Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski. He was afraid that the Soviet Union might “lose” Ukraine and that it required prompt attention so that it could be drawn into the fortress of the USSR. Shapoval believes that the letter indicates Stalin's desire to squeeze the maximum grain out of Ukraine to feed the urban popula­tion, as well as his intention to conduct a purge at all levels of Ukrainian soci­ety to eliminate nationalists and other enemies.⁵⁷

Shapoval's second major point is that what made the situation in Ukraine quite distinct from that in Russia was a sudden shift in nationality policy on 14 December 1932 by Stalin and Molotov who issued a resolution on behalf of the Central Committee of the CPSU that called for a decisive struggle against recalcitrant elements in Ukraine. Shapoval perceives this event as the end of official Ukrainization (the implementation of a national culture with a socialist content begun in the 1920s) and the beginning of purges directed against Ukrainians. Thus in 1933 a purge was introduced and Pavel Postyshev was appointed Second Secretary of the CPU with plenipotentiary powers. Documents demonstrate that party officials from Moscow, including Posty­shev, took an active role in requisitioning grain from the Ukrainian villages. Later the purges became part of the Great Terror that encompassed the entire Soviet Union in 1936-38. Thus we have an added element to the outline pro­vided by Kul'chyts'kyi and others, namely a terror-punishment that was linked to Soviet nationality policy. Evident from this account, but never explicitly stated by Shapoval or any other Ukrainian historian in the discussion to this point, is Stalin's fear of Poland and its intentions toward Ukraine, a holdover from the war of 1920-21, and reflected in Stalin's subsequent purge of the Communist Party of Poland, the Katyn massacre of 1940, and other events. Were Ukrainians feared because of nationalism or because they had allied in the past with Poles against the Soviet leadership? If the Poles are taken into account as a factor in Stalin's thinking, then what impact does that have on the theory of the Famine as genocide?

The national issue is given further emphasis in another article on the 70th anniversary by two well-known Ukrainian historians, V. M. Danylenko and M. M. Kuz'menko. They concentrate on Stalinist repressions against two groups in the period of 1929-33: the upper scientific intelligentsia and village teach­ers. The political aspects of the “terror-famine,” they argue, are to be found not only in punitive operations of state organs against the peasants, but also in the attack by the party leadership on “national-cultural deviationism,” i.e., the campaign for Ukrainization and the “socio-spiritual self-organization of Ukraine,” particularly in the rural areas. In 1932-33, they point out, 1,649 Ukrainian scholars were purged. In reality, the accusations of nationalism lacked substance as Stalin was seeking scapegoats for his own errors—the Ukrainian intelligentsia had tried to sabotage collectivization and was thus responsible for the onset of famine. After the Famine was organized, the lead­ership, in the opinion of the two authors, began to be fearful of food riots and therefore embarked on further repressions and deportations. These repres­sions were soon extended to organizations with members who were prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, such as the Ukrainian Association of Cultural and Scientific Workers for assistance to Socialist Construction, as well as rank- and-file teaching cadres. By February 1933, the purge had extended to the People's Commissariat for Education and some 200 “nationalists,” “enemies,” and unreliable elements were removed. Teachers were linked to the events in the villages because by this time the economic support of teachers had be­come the responsibility of the collective farms.⁵⁸

Aside from the example of teachers, however, Danylenko and Kuz'menko fail to explain the links between the Famine in the villages and Stalin's clamp­down on intellectuals and the reversal of Ukrainization. That there was such a link seems plausible, but the authors fail to come up with any conclusions; and this article in Ukraine's most authoritative historical journal is unconvinc­ing because it fails to deal adequately with the social situation and the rela­tionship between the towns and the villages. Indeed, in general, despite the close attention to the subject of the Famine by 2003 and the plethora of pub­lished works, Ukrainian historiography is notable for its absence of clear con­clusions or convincingly argued theories about why events took the course they did. The most important figure—at least as determined by standing and productivity—Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi continued to seek economic explana­tions whereas others began to turn to the national question. Others still took a very narrow view that laid the blame on other ethnic groups, principally the Russians, thus perceiving the Famine purely in ethnic terms. As we have seen, some writers took this conception further, and sought explanations from hun­dreds of years of history, maintaining that Russian persecution of Ukrainians was a centuries-old tradition. That the Famine was a more complex issue was evident from the works of other writers who attempted to provide a portrait of how the Famine affected non-Ukrainian regions of the republic.