Borderland

by Anna Reid

  The nightmarishness of the scene was not in the corpse on the bed, but in the condition of the living witnesses. The old woman’s legs were blown up to incredible size, the man and the children were clearly in the last stages of starvation.23

  By spring, people were eating anything they could find – grass, leaves, acorns, snails, ants and earthworms. They boiled up bones and leather, stripped the bark from the trees and fought over horse dung for undigested seeds. Suicide, murder and cannibalism were all common: ‘People cut up and cooked corpses,’ wrote Grossman; ‘they killed thfeir own children and ate them.’24 Many poisoned themselves by digging up and eating diseased horse carcasses: one account has the perpetrators being shot by OGPU soldiers as they lay dying in bed.25

  Peasants tried to escape the famine by fleeing to the cities. Though checkpoints were set up at railway stations and on the main roads, thousands managed to evade them, only to die ignored on the city streets. ‘People hurried about on their affairs,’ wrote Grossman of Kiev, ‘some going to work, some to the movies, and the streetcars were running – and there were the starving children, old men, girls, crawling among them on all fours.’26 Early each morning, carts collected the dead:

  I saw one such flat-top cart with children lying on it. They were just as I have described them, thin elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks . . . Some of them were still muttering, their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: ‘By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too.’27

  Similar carts went the rounds in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa and Poltava.

  Grain collections were officially halted in March 1933, by which time about a fifth of the entire rural population – 5 million people – lay dead. The size of the death-roll varied widely village by village. In some only one in ten families died; elsewhere whole communities perished. The euphemism used on death certificates – when they were issued at all – was ‘exhaustion’. Where the bodies were too numerous for burial, squads of Komsomol members put up black flags and ‘no entry’ signs. William Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, was one of the first foreign journalists to be allowed into the famine areas, in September 1933:

  Quite by chance the last village we visited was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian town south-west of Kiev. Here the ‘normal’ mortality rate of 10 per cent had been far exceeded. On the road to the village, former ikons with the face of Christ had been removed; but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found one deserted house after another, with window-panes fallen in, crops growing mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harvest them. A boy in the dusty village street called the death-roll among families he knew . . .

  ‘There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister; three children were left. With Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died; five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro; a wife and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children; only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two daughters; one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three children; one girl is still alive . . .’28

  Chamberlin was appalled, conviced both that collectivisation failed to justify ‘organised famine’, and that the famine was intentional, ‘quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy’.29 Nor did he hesitate to say so, in a book published soon after he left the Soviet Union. But Chamberlin was an exception. Killing more people than the First World War on all sides put together, the famine of 1932–3 was, and still is, one of the most under-reported atrocities of human history, a fact that contributes powerfully to Ukraine’s persistent sense of victimisation.

  The Soviet press, of course, denied that the famine existed at all. Arthur Koestler, living in Kharkiv in the ghastly winter of 1932–3, found not the slightest allusion to the disaster in the local papers:

  Each morning when I read the Kharkov Kommunist I learned about plan-figures reached and over-reached, about competitions between factory shock brigades, awards of the Red Banner, new giant combines in the Urals, and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands, or of some picturesque elder in Usbekistan, always smiling and always learning the alphabet. Not one word about the local famine, epidemics, dying out of whole villages . . . 30

  The Western press did little better. Despite a ban on foreigners leaving Moscow, the famine’s existence – though not its extent – was well known in the capital. Tew of us,’ wrote the United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons,

  were so completely isolated that we did not meet Russians whose work took them to the devastated areas, or Muscovites with relations in those areas. Around every railroad station in the capital hundreds of bedraggled refugees were encamped, had we needed further corroboration . . .

  There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression . . . The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversations at the hotels and in our homes.31

  None the less, it went almost unmentioned in despatches, treated at best as a sideshow, a temporary hitch in collectivisation. Though occasional full and honest reports did appear, they were far outnumbered by the dishonest, penned by reporters who feared losing their contacts and their visas, or who simply, found it more convenient to swallow the official propaganda. ‘Even conscientious newspapermen,’ wrote Koestler, ‘evolved a routine of compromise; they cabled no lies, but nolens volens confined themselves to official dope and expressed such comment or criticism as they dared “between the lines”, by some subtle qualifying adjective or nuance – which naturally passed unobserved by anybody but the initiated reader.’32 The result was a picture fatally distorted by half-truth, contradiction and doubt.

  Lyons gives a graphic example of the reigning atmosphere of pusillanimity. The British journalist Gareth Jones, ‘an earnest and meticulous little man’, of the sort ‘who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’, had succeeded in making a secret tour of the Kharkiv area. On his return to London, he sent a detailed account of the horrors he encountered to the Manchester Guardian. The rest of the Moscow press corps duly received urgent requests from their editors for follow-ups. These coincided, however, with the opening of a sensational show trial of a group of British engineers, on charges of sabotage. ‘The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors,’ wrote Lyons, ‘was for all of us a compelling professional necessity. Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.’ At a meeting with the chief censor, Konstantin Umansky, the journalists jointly worked out a ‘formula of denial’. ‘We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. That filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and “zakuski”, Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.’33

  The evasions and omissions of the professional journalists were backed up by the naive fellow-travellers who came to the Soviet Union to admire the results of the first Five-Year Plan. For the marvellously acerbic Malcolm Muggeridge (another journalist who managed to travel through Ukraine during the famine, and reported what he saw), they were ‘one of the wonders of our age’:

  There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of OGPU with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the n
ecessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through the anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square . . .34

  The government tourist agency Voks laid on full-scale Potemkin tours of factories, schools, prisons and collectives, complete with singsongs, folk-dancing, politically correct film-shows and enormous banquets. Sometimes these were permanent establishments, kept especially for propaganda purposes; sometimes ordinary villages were dressed up for the occasion. An extraordinary account of the preparations made for the visit of the French Radical leader Edouard Herriot to the ‘October Revolution’ collective near Kiev in September 1933 is worth quoting at length:

  It was thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned, all Communists, Komsomols and activists having been mobilized for the job. Furniture from the regional theatre in Brovary was brought, and the clubrooms beautifully appointed with it. Curtains and drapes were brought from Kiev, also tablecloths. One wing was turned into a dining-hall, the tables of which were covered with new cloths and decorated with flowers. The regional telephone exchange, and the switchboard operator, were transferred from Brovary to the farm. Some steers and hogs were slaughtered to provide plenty of meat. A supply of beer was also brought in. All the corpses and starving peasants were removed from the highways in the surrounding countryside and the peasants were forbidden to leave their houses. A mass meeting of collective farm workers was called, and they were told that a motion picture would be made of collective farm life, and for this purpose this particular farm had been chosen by a film-unit from Odessa. Only those who were chosen to play in the picture would turn out for work, the rest of the members must stay at home and not interfere. Those who were picked by a special committee were given new outfits brought from Kiev: shoes, socks, suits, hats, handkerchiefs . . . The next day, when Herriot was due to arrive, now well-dressed workers were seated in the dining-hall, and served a hearty meal. They were eating huge chunks of meat, washing it down with beer or lemonade, and were making short work of it. The director, who was nervous, called upon the people to eat slowly, so that the honoured guest, Herriot, would see them at their tables. Just then a telephone message came from Kiev: ‘Visit cancelled, wind everything up.’ Now another meeting was called. Shaparov thanked the workers for a good performance, and then Denisenko asked them to take off and return all the clothes that had been issued to them, with the exception of socks and handkerchiefs. The people begged to be allowed to keep the clothes and shoes, promising to work and pay for them, but to no avail. Everything had to be given back and returned to Kiev, to the stores from which it had been borrowed.35

  When Herriot returned home, Pravda was able to report that he ‘categorically denied the lies of the bourgeois press about a famine in the Soviet Union’.

  Speaking no Russian, closely chaperoned, and travelling on special trains, visitors came into almost no contact with ordinary homes, workplaces or people. Even those not already determined to turn a blind eye to any shortcomings they might stumble upon were easily misled. The travel-writer Robert Byron, no friend of the Soviet Union (his favourite amusement was to mutter the dread initials ‘GPU’ in public places, and observe the horrified reactions of passers-by), failed to notice anything amiss on a train journey through Ukraine in the horrible winter of 1932 save ‘a mob of maddened peasants’ at a wayside station.36

  But for most visitors, the Potemkin tours were an unnecessary precaution. They had made up their minds before they arrived. George Bernard Shaw, capering around Moscow with Nancy Astor in the summer of 1931, told a banquet in his honour that he had thrown tins of food out of the train window on crossing the border from Poland, so sure was he that rumours of shortages were nonsense. At lunch at the Metropole next day, he was upbraided by Chamberlin’s wife. Waving a hand around the restaurant, Shaw asked, ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’37 Back in London he told a press conference he had not seen ‘a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old’. ‘Were they padded?’ he wanted to know; ‘Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of rubber inside?’38

  Flattery was an important part of the package. Shaw was delighted to discover that the waitresses in his restaurant-car knew his work intimately and were longing to be introduced. The German socialist Lion Feuchtwanger, visiting Moscow in 1937, met ‘a young girl from the land, glowing with happiness’, who told him, ‘Four years ago I could neither read nor write, and today I can discuss Feuchtwanger’s books with him.’39 The tract Feuchtwanger wrote on his return exhorted his readers to ‘free themselves from their own conceptions of democracy’ and not to indulge in ‘carping, whining, and alarming’ at the Soviet Union’s expense, ending on a note of religious exaltation: ‘It does one good after all the compromise of the West to see an achievement such as this, to which a man can say “Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes,” with all his heart.’40 André Gide found the front pages plastered with his picture, and was told that sales of his latest book ran into the hundreds of thousands. He was given so much spending money that he did not know what to do with it: ‘Every time I got out my wallet to settle a restaurant or hotel bill, to pay a cheque, buy some stamps or a newspaper, I was brought up short by an exquisite smile and authoritative gesture from our guide: “You are joking! You are our guest, and your five companions with you.”’41

  But the palm among apologists for the horrors of the 1930s goes to a journalist – Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Of all the correspondents who denied or played down the famine, he was by far the most cynical and influential. In November 1932, as the famine took grip, he reported that ‘there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be’.42 By March he had subtly changed his tune: ‘There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’43 In August, in reply to a Herald Tribune piece estimating deaths at no less than 1 million, he wrote that ‘Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda’. ‘Food shortage’ had, however, ‘caused heavy loss of life’.44

  In September 1933 foreign journalists were allowed into the famine areas for the first time. Duranty was given a fortnight’s start over the rest of the corps. When he came back, Lyons ran into him with a group of friends in a restaurant:

  He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone.

  ‘But Walter, you don’t mean that literally?’ Mrs McCormick exclaimed.

  ‘Hell I don’t. . . I’m being conservative/ he replied, and as if by way of consolation he added his famous truism: ‘But they’re only Russians . . .’

  Lyons was not surprised to find that Duranty’s articles on the trip failed even to acknowledge the famine’s existence. When Kravchenko defected to America and published the memoirs I have quoted here, the Western press accused him of being a CIA plant. Duranty’s payback was a Pulitzer Prize, awarded for the ‘scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity’ of his reporting.45

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Vanished Nation: Ivano-Frankivsk

  You were my death:

  you I could hold

  when all fell away from me.

  – Paul Celan, 1968

  THREE BABUSHKI, STOUT and sturdy as ponies, wiggle their spades under a rectangular flagstone and heave it over. The underside is inscribed in Hebrew: ‘Here lies buried a righteous woman, Sarah, daughter of Shmeor. She died on nth October 1929.’ The next stone in the search also bears traces of lettering, but is too worn to read.

  I am in Ivano-Frankivsk, a nondescript town in south-western Ukraine. The tombstones have been here – in a yard round the back of the railway station – ever since the war, when German troops demolished the town’s Jewish cemetery and used the remains to pave what
was then an army repair-shop. Locals had always known that the stones came from Jewish graves, since some lay face-up, with the inscriptions showing. ‘It wasn’t normal, having people walking all over them,’ says one of the women, wiping her hands on her fluorescent orange apron. ‘They should have been back in the cemetery where they belong.’

  ‘So why didn’t you do anything about it earlier?’

  ‘Because nobody told us to.’

  The man who chivvied the city authorities into action is Viktor – or, in the Hebrew version he prefers, Moishe-Leib – Kolesnyk, the town rabbi. Unlike most of the rabbis in Ukraine, he is not an American, but was actually born here, to a conventional Party family – father a local soviet deputy – that much disapproved of his unexpected interest in religion. Sacked from his teaching job in a village school, he earned a living touring the mountains taking photographs of peasant weddings, before being ordained by New York Lubavitchers in Moscow and sent back to Ivano-Frankivsk to reopen the town synagogue, then used as a dance-hall by the local medical institute. The familiar bureaucratic battle ensued. ‘First we were given a small house in the yard – a shed really. Then, while building works were going on next door, the shed collapsed. We took all the holy books and came in here – we just said no, we wouldn’t go. A year later, we got it officially.’ But despite black mackintosh and patriarchal beard, rabbinical dignity is something Moishe-Leib is happy to put on and off with his homburg. Ensconced among old calendars and piles of books in a makeshift office at the back of the synagogue, he cracks open a packet of Dollar Gold cigarettes and reverts to his other incarnation, as local fix-it man and historian.