The Famine of 1932–33

The famine that occurred in 1932–33 was to be for the Ukrainians what the Holocaust was to the Jews and the Massacres of 1915 for the Armenians. A tragedy of unfathomable proportions, it traumatized the nation, leaving it with deep social, psychological, political, and demographic scars that it carries to this day.

The central fact about the famine is that it did not have to happen. Stalin himself proclaimed that “nobody can deny that the total yield of grain in 1932 was larger than in 1931.”⁹ As Conquest and Krawchenko have pointed out, the harvest of 1932 was only 12% below the 1926–30 average.¹⁰ In other words, food was available. However, the state systematically confiscated most of it for its own use. Despite the pleas and warnings of Ukrainian Communists, Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas in 1932 by 44%. His decision, and the regime’s brutal fulfillment of his commands, condemned millions to death in what can only be called a man-made famine.

The regime’s disregard for the human costs of its policies was evident in a series of measures implemented in 1932. In August, party activists received the legal right to confiscate grain from peasant households; that same month the infamous law that carried a death penalty for the theft of “socialist property” was enacted. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a government silo or a collective farm field could be, and often was, executed. Under extenuating circumstances, such “crimes against the state” were punished by ten years of hard labor. To prevent peasants from abandoning collective farms in search of food, a system of internal passports was put into effect. In November, Moscow enacted a law stipulating that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the peasants until the government’s quota had been met.

In January 1933 Stalin ordered his plenipoteniary, Pavel Postyshev, to castigate the Ukrainian Communists for their “lack of Bolshevik vigilance” and to speed up the collection of grain. Under his leadership, gangs of party activists conducted brutal house-to-house searches, tearing up floors and delving into wells in search of any grain that remained. Even those already swollen from malnutrition were not allowed to keep their grain. In fact, if a person did not appear to be starving, he was suspected of hoarding food. In retrospect, a party activist has described his motivations at that time in the following manner: “We believed Stalin to be a wise leader… We were deceived because we wanted to be deceived. We believed so strongly in communism that we were ready to accept any crime if it was glossed over with the least little bit of communist phraseology.”¹¹

Famine, which had been spreading throughout 1932, hit full force in early 1933. It is estimated that at the outset of the year an average peasant family of five had about eighty kilograms of grain to last it until the next harvest. In other words, each member had to survive on about 1.7 kg a month. Lacking bread, peasants ate pets, rats, bark, leaves, and the garbage from the well-provisioned kitchens of party members. There were numerous cases of cannibalism. According to a Soviet author, “The first who died were the men. Later on the children. And last of all, the women. But before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.”¹² Even as whole villages died out, party activists continued confiscating grain. One of them, Victor Kravchenko, later wrote: “On the battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degree, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables.

Of course, Stalin and his associates saw things differently. In 1933, Mendel Khataevich, another of Stalin’s lieutenants in Ukraine and the leader of the grain-procurement program, proudly stated: “A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We have won the war!”¹⁴

Soviet statistics for the period are notoriously unreliable (displeased with the results of the census of 1937 that revealed shockingly high mortality rates, Stalin had the leading census takers shot). And Soviet archival materials dealing with the Stalin era are still generally inaccessible. It is, therefore, difficult to establish conclusively how many died in the famine. Based on demographic extrapolations, estimates usually place the death toll in Ukraine at between 3 and 6 million.¹⁵

While famine raged in Ukraine, especially its southeastern regions, and in the north Caucasus (where many Ukrainians lived), much of Russia proper barely experienced it. One of the factors that helps to explain this peculiarity is that, according to the first FYP, “Ukraine… was chosen to serve as a colossal laboratory for new forms of socioeconomic and productive-technical reconstruction of the rural economy for the entire Soviet Union.”¹⁶ Ukraine’s importance to Soviet economic planners was also proclaimed in a Pravda editorial (7 January 1933) entitled “Ukraine – The Deciding Factor in Grain Collection.” Consequently, the demands on the republic were inordinately great.

Given their tradition of private ownership of land, Ukrainians tended to resist collectivization more fiercely than did the Russians. Therefore, the regime made a point of pushing its policy – with its horrible consequences – faster and further in Ukraine than elsewhere. As Vasilii Grossman, a Soviet novelist and former party activist, put it: “It was clear that Moscow was basing its hopes on Ukraine. And the upshot of it was that most of the subsequent anger was directed against Ukraine… We were told that in Ukraine they had an instinct for private property that was stronger than in the Russian republic. And truly, truly, the whole business was much worse in Ukraine than it was with us.”¹⁹

Others argue that the famine was Stalin’s way of weakening Ukrainian nationalism. Certainly the relationship between the peasantry and nationalism was not lost on the Soviet leadership. Stalin stated that “after all, the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence of the national question… In essence, the national question is the peasant question.”²⁰ A leading Communist paper in Ukraine in 1930 carried the equation further when it declared that “collectivization in Ukraine has a special task… to destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism – individually-owned peasant agriculture.”²¹ One can conclude therefore that, at best, Stalin viewed the deaths of millions as a necessary cost of industrialization. At worst, he consciously allowed the famine to wipe out resistance in a particularly troublesome region of his empire.

A noteworthy aspect of the famine was the attempts to erase it from public consciousness. Until very recently, the Soviet position was to deny that it occurred at all.

Although some newspapers in the West informed the public about the famine, here, too, the realization of its horrendous scope was stifled. Soviet export of grain in the early 1930s and the regime’s refusal to accept any foreign aid made it difficult for many Westerners to believe that a famine could be raging in Ukraine. After completing carefully staged tours of the USSR, Western luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw and the former French premier Edouard Herriot returned with glowing accounts of Soviet achievement and of contented, well-fed peasants. To curry Stalin’s favor, Walter Duranty, the Moscow-based reporter of the New York Times, repeatedly denied the existence of a famine in his articles (while privately estimating that about 10 million people may have starved to death). For the “profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity” of his dispatches from the USSR, Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.

Although Western governments knew about the famine, their attitudes in this regard were similar to the one expressed in a British Foreign Office document: “The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia [sic], similar to that which has appeared in the press… We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.”²³ Moreover, during the Great Depression, many Western intellectuals evinced strong pro-Soviet sympathies and vigorously dismissed all criticism of the USSR, especially on the question of the famine. As Conquest notes, “the scandal is not that they justified Soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence.”²⁴