Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Anne Applebaum

  * * *

  RED FAMINE

  Stalin’s War on Ukraine

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Maps

  A Note on Transliteration

  Preface

  Introduction: The Ukrainian Question

  1  The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917

  2  Rebellion, 1919

  3  Famine and Truce, the 1920s

  4  The Double Crisis, 1927–9

  5  Collectivization: Revolution in the Countryside, 1930

  6  Rebellion, 1930

  7  Collectivization Fails, 1931–2

  8  Famine Decisions, 1932: Requisitions, Blacklists and Borders

  9  Famine Decisions, 1932: The End of Ukrainization

  10 Famine Decisions, 1932: The Searches and the Searchers

  11 Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933

  12 Survival: Spring and Summer, 1933

  13 Aftermath

  14 The Cover-Up

  15 The Holodomor in History and Memory

  Epilogue: The Ukrainian Question Reconsidered

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Image Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ЖepTBaм

  To the victims

  List of Illustrations

  1. Ukrainian Declaration of Independence, 9 January 1918.

  2. Cover of Nashe Mynule, 1918, by Heorhiy Narbut.

  3. Independence rally in Kyiv, 1917.

  4. Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

  5. Cover of Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine (1917).

  6. Symon Petliura and Józef Piłsudski, Stanyslaviv, 1920.

  7. Nestor Makhno.

  8. Pavlo Skoropadsky.

  9. Oleksandr Shumskyi.

  10. Mykola Skrypnyk.

  11. Grigorii Petrovskii.

  12. Vsevelod Balytsky.

  13. Auction of kulak property.

  14. Kulak family on their way to exile.

  15. Confiscating icons, Kharkiv.

  16. Discarded churchbells, Zhytomyr.

  17. Peasants besides the ruins of a burned house.

  18. Women vote to join a collective farm.

  19. Peasants listening to the radio.

  20. Peasant family reading Pravda.

  21. Harvesting tomatoes.

  22. ‘Volunteers’ bringing in the harvest.

  23–24. Searchers find grain hidden from requisitions.

  25. Guarding fields.

  26. Guarding grain stores.

  27. Peasants leaving home in search of food.

  28. An abandoned peasant house.

  29. People starving by the side of the road.

  30. A starving family.

  31. Peasant girl.

  32–33. Breadlines in Kharkiv.

  34–37. Famine in Kharkiv, spring 1933.

  38–39. A starving man, alive and then dead.

  40–41. A family in Chernihiv, before and after the famine.

  42. ‘Famine Rules Russia’, Gareth Jones, Evening Standard, 31 March 1933.

  43. Walter Duranty dining in Moscow.

  44. ‘Russians Hungry but not Starving’, Walter Duranty, The New York Times, 31 March 1933.

  45. Lazar Kaganovich, Joseph Stalin, Pavlo Postyshev and Klement Voroshilov, 1934.

  46. Mass grave outside Kharkiv, 1933.

  List of Maps

  The Historical Evolution of the Territory of Ukraine

  Ukraine, 1922

  Physical Geography of Ukraine, 1932

  Famine, 1932–4

  A Note on Transliteration

  The transliteration of Ukrainian names and place names in this book follows the standard set out by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The Library of Congress transliteration rules for Ukrainian names and place names are followed strictly in the endnotes; in the text, names and place names are written without primes, since that seems more familiar to an English reader. Russian and Belarusian place names are transliterated according to the rules of those languages. A few well-known names and place names, including Moscow and Odessa, have been left in their better-known forms, also to make them recognizable to English-language readers.

  Preface

  The warning signs were ample. By the early spring of 1932, the peasants of Ukraine were beginning to starve. Secret police reports and letters from the grain-growing districts all across the Soviet Union – the North Caucasus, the Volga region, western Siberia – spoke of children swollen with hunger; of families eating grass and acorns; of peasants fleeing their homes in search of food. In March a medical commission found corpses lying on the street in a village near Odessa. No one was strong enough to bury them. In another village local authorities were trying to conceal the mortality from outsiders. They denied what was happening, even as it was unfolding before their visitors’ eyes.1

  Some wrote directly to the Kremlin, asking for an explanation:

  Honourable Comrade Stalin, is there a Soviet government law stating that villagers should go hungry? Because we, collective farm workers, have not had a slice of bread in our farm since January 1 … How can we build a socialist peoples’ economy when we are condemned to starving to death, as the harvest is still four months away? What did we die for on the battlefronts? To go hungry, to see our children die in pangs of hunger?2

  Others found it impossible to believe the Soviet state could be responsible:

  Every day, ten to twenty families die from famine in the villages, children run off and railway stations are overflowing with fleeing villagers. There are no horses or livestock left in the countryside … The bourgeoisie has created a genuine famine here, part of the capitalist plan to set the entire peasant class against the Soviet government.3

  But the bourgeoisie had not created the famine. The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms; the eviction of ‘kulaks’, the wealthier peasants, from their homes; the chaos that followed; these policies, all ultimately the responsibility of Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, had led the countryside to the brink of starvation. Throughout the spring and summer of 1932, many of Stalin’s colleagues sent him urgent messages from all around the USSR, describing the crisis. Communist Party leaders in Ukraine were especially desperate, and several wrote him long letters, begging him for help.

  Many of them believed, in the late summer of 1932, that a greater tragedy could still be avoided. The regime could have asked for international assistance, as it had during a previous famine in 1921. It could have halted grain exports, or stopped the punishing grain requisitions altogether. It could have offered aid to peasants in starving regions – and to a degree it did, but not nearly enough.

  Instead, in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and party activists, motivated by hunger, fear and a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets.

  The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described
in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger – holod – and extermination – mor.4

  But famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats. Anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had existed for a few months from June 1917, anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian history, anyone with an independent literary or artistic career, was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to a labour camp or executed. Unable to watch what was happening, Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, committed suicide in 1933. He was not alone.

  Taken together, these two policies – the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed – brought about the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word ‘genocide’, spoke of Ukraine in this era as the ‘classic example’ of his concept: ‘It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.’ Since Lemkin first coined the term, ‘genocide’ has come to be used in a narrower, more legalistic way. It has also become a controversial touchstone, a concept used by both Russians and Ukrainians, as well as by different groups within Ukraine, to make political arguments. For that reason, a separate discussion of the Holodomor as a ‘genocide’ – as well as Lemkin’s Ukrainian connections and influences – forms part of the epilogue to this book.

  The central subject is more concrete: what actually happened in Ukraine between the years 1917 and 1934? In particular, what happened in the autumn, winter and spring of 1932–3? What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible? How does this terrible episode fit into the broader history of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian national movement?

  Just as importantly: what happened afterwards? The Sovietization of Ukraine did not begin with the famine and did not end with it. Arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders continued through the 1930s. For more than half a century after that, successive Soviet leaders continued to push back harshly against Ukrainian nationalism in whatever form it took, whether as post-war insurgency or as dissent in the 1980s. During those years Sovietization often took the form of Russification: the Ukrainian language was demoted, Ukrainian history was not taught.

  Above all, the history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place. The Soviet state destroyed local archives, made sure that death records did not allude to starvation, even altered publicly available census data in order to conceal what had happened.5 As long as the USSR existed, it was not possible to write a fully documented history of the famine and the accompanying repression.

  But in 1991 Stalin’s worst fear came to pass. Ukraine did declare independence. The Soviet Union did come to an end, partly as the result of Ukraine’s decision to leave it. A sovereign Ukraine came into being for the first time in history, along with a new generation of Ukrainian historians, archivists, journalists and publishers. Thanks to their efforts, the complete story of the famine of 1932–3 can now be told.

  This book begins in 1917, with the Ukrainian revolution and the Ukrainian national movement that was destroyed in 1932–3. It ends in the present, with a discussion of the ongoing politics of memory in Ukraine. It focuses on the famine in Ukraine, which, although part of a wider Soviet famine, had unique causes and attributes. The historian Andrea Graziosi has noted that nobody confuses the general history of ‘Nazi atrocities’ with the very specific story of Hitler’s persecution of Jews or gypsies. By the same logic, this book discusses the Soviet-wide famines between 1930 and 1934 – which also led to high death rates, especially in Kazakhstan and particular provinces of Russia – but focuses more directly on the specific tragedy of Ukraine.6

  The book also reflects a quarter-century’s worth of scholarship on Ukraine. In the early 1980s, Robert Conquest compiled everything then publicly available about the famine, and the book he published in 1986, The Harvest of Sorrow, still stands as a landmark in writing about the Soviet Union. But in the three decades since the end of the USSR and the emergence of a sovereign Ukraine, several broad national campaigns to collect oral history and memoirs have yielded thousands of new testimonies from all over the country.7 During that same time period, archives in Kyiv – unlike those in Moscow – have become accessible and easy to use; the percentage of unclassified material in Ukraine is one of the highest in Europe. Ukrainian government funding has encouraged scholars to publish collections of documents, which have made research even more straightforward.8 Established scholars on the famine and on the Stalinist period in Ukraine – among them Olga Bertelsen, Hennadii Boriak, Vasyl Danylenko, Lyudmyla Hrynevych, Roman Krutsyk, Stanislav Kulchytsky, Yuri Mytsyk, Vasyl Marochko, Heorhii Papakin, Ruslan Pyrih, Yuri Shapoval, Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Valerii Vasylyev, Oleksandra Veselova and Hennadii Yefimenko – have produced multiple books and monographs, including collections of reprinted documents as well as oral history. Oleh Wolowyna and a team of demographers – Oleksander Hladun, Natalia Levchuk, Omelian Rudnytsky – have at last begun to do the difficult work of establishing the numbers of victims. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute has worked with many of these scholars to publish and publicize their work.

  The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in Toronto, led by Marta Baziuk, and its partner organization in Ukraine, led by Lyudmyla Hrynevych, continue to fund new scholarship. Younger scholars are opening new lines of inquiry too. Daria Mattingly’s research on the motives and background of the people who confiscated food from starving peasants and Tetiana Boriak’s work on oral history both stand out; they also contributed important research to this book. Western scholars have made new contributions too. Lynne Viola’s archival work on collectivization and the subsequent peasant rebellion have altered the perceptions of the 1930s. Terry Martin was the first to reveal the chronology of the decisions Stalin took in the autumn of 1932 – and Timothy Snyder and Andrea Graziosi were among the first to recognize their significance. Serhii Plokhii and his team at Harvard have launched an unusual effort to map the famine, the better to understand how it happened. I am grateful to all of these for the scholarship and in some cases the friendship that contributed so much to this project.

  Perhaps if this book had been written in a different era, this very brief introduction to a complex subject could end here. But because the famine destroyed the Ukrainian national movement, because that movement was revived in 1991, and because the leaders of modern Russia still challenge the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, I should note here that I first discussed the need for a new history of the famine with colleagues at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2010. Viktor Yanukovych had just been elected president of Ukraine, with Russian backing and support. Ukraine then attracted little political attention from the rest of Europe, and almost no press coverage at all. At that moment, there was no reason to think that a fresh examination of 1932–3 would be interpreted as a political statement of any kind.

  The Maidan revolution of 2014, Yanukovych’s decision to shoot at protesters and then flee the country, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and the accompanying Russian propaganda campaign – all unexpectedly put Ukraine at the centre of international politics while I was working on this book. My research on Ukraine was actually delayed by events in that country, both because I wrote about them and because my Ukrainian colleagues w
ere so transfixed by what was happening. But while the events of that year put Ukraine at the heart of world politics, this book was not written in reaction to them. Nor is it an argument for or against any Ukrainian politician or party, or a reaction to what is happening in Ukraine today. It is instead an attempt to tell the story of the famine using new archives, new testimony and new research, to draw together the work of the extraordinary scholars listed above.

  This is not to say that the Ukrainian revolution, the early years of Soviet Ukraine, the mass repression of the Ukrainian elite as well as the Holodomor do not have a relationship to current events. On the contrary: they are the crucial backstory that underlies and explains them. The famine and its legacy play an enormous role in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian arguments about their identity, their relationship and their shared Soviet experience. But before describing those arguments or weighing their merits, it is important to understand, first, what actually happened.

  Introduction

  The Ukrainian Question

  When I am dead, bury me Як умру, то поховайте

  In my beloved Ukraine, Мене на могилі

  My tomb upon a grave mound high Серед степу широкого

  Amid the spreading plain, На Вкраïні милій,

  So that the fields, the boundless steppes, Щоб лани широкополі,