Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  With the advance of our troops to the west and into Ukraine, regional provisional Soviet governments are created whose task it is to strengthen the local Soviets. This circumstance has the advantage of taking away from the chauvinists of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia the possibility of regarding the advance of our detachments as occupation and creates a favourable atmosphere for a further advance of our troops.52

  Military commanders, in other words, were responsible for helping to create the pro-Soviet ‘national’ governments that would welcome them. The idea, as Lenin explained, was to ensure that the population of Ukraine would treat them as ‘liberators’, and not as foreign occupiers.

  At no point in 1918, or later, did Lenin, Stalin, or anyone else in the Bolshevik leadership ever believe that any Soviet-Ukrainian state would enjoy true sovereignty. The Ukrainian revolutionary council formed on 17 November included Piatakov and Volodymyr Zatonskyi, both pro-Moscow ‘Ukrainian’ officials – as well as Volodymyr Antonov-Ovsienko, the Red Army’s military commander in Ukraine, and Stalin himself. The ‘Provisional Revolutionary government of Ukraine’, formed on 28 November, was led by Christian Rakovsky, who was Bulgarian by origin. Among other things, Rakovsky declared that all demands to make Ukrainian the official language of the country were ‘injurious to the Ukrainian revolution’.53

  The general disorder made it easy to carry out this hybrid war. The Red Army began its assault on the republic at exactly the same time as the Bolsheviks began to negotiate an agreement with Petliura. The officials of the Directory furiously denounced this two-faced policy: Georgii Chicherin, the Bolshevik People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, blandly replied that Moscow had nothing to do with the troops moving onto Ukrainian soil. He blamed the military action on that territory on ‘the army of the Ukrainian Soviet government which is completely independent’.54

  The Directory protested that this was a flat-out lie. They could see perfectly well that the ‘army of the Ukrainian Soviet government’ was in actual fact the Red Army. But the Directory went on protesting, right up until January 1919 when the Red Army forced the Ukrainian government to withdraw from Kyiv altogether.55

  The second Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine began in January and would last for six months. During that period Moscow never controlled the whole territory of what later became the Ukrainian Republic. Even in districts where the Bolsheviks exercised authority in the towns and cities, the villages often remained under the sway of local partisan leaders or ‘otamans’, some loyal to Petliura and some not. In many places Bolshevik authority hardly extended beyond the train stations. Nevertheless, even that short period of partial rule gave the Bolshevik leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic the opportunity to show their true colours. Whatever theoretical independence the Ukrainian communist leaders had on paper, they had none in practice.

  Moreover, whatever ideas they had about Ukraine’s economic development were also quickly overwhelmed by another priority. No considerations of Marxist theory, no arguments about nationalism or sovereignty, mattered as much to the Bolsheviks in that year as the need to feed the workers of Moscow and Petrograd. By 1919, Lenin’s telegram – ‘For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!!!’ – had become the single most important description of Bolshevik attitudes and practice in Ukraine.

  The Bolshevik obsession with food was no accident: The Russian empire had been struggling with food supplies ever since the outbreak of the First World War. At the beginning of the conflict with Germany, imperial Russia centralized and nationalized its food distribution system, creating administrative chaos and shortages. A Special Council for Discussing and Coordinating Measures for Food Supply, a state food distribution organization and a clear precedent for the Soviet organizations that followed, was put in control. Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to ‘eliminate middlemen’ and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.56

  The resulting food shortages sparked the February revolution in 1917 and propelled the Bolsheviks to power a few months later. Morgan Philips Price, a British journalist, described the atmosphere of that year:

  Involuntarily the conversation seemed to be drifting on to one main topic, which was evidently engaging the attention of all: bread and peace … Everyone knew that the railways were no longer equal to the transport burden, that the cereals formerly exported to Western Europe were now more than absorbed by the army, that the cultivated area had fallen 10 per cent last year, and was certain to fall more this spring, that the workmen of several big towns had been several days without bread, while Grand Dukes and profiteers had large stores in their houses.57

  Price saw women queuing for rations: ‘Their pale faces and anxious eyes betrayed the fear that some calamity was approaching.’58 He visited the barracks of one of the Moscow regiments, where he found that ‘food rations were the subject of debate, and someone with a louder voice and more initiative than the rest proposed a delegation of three to the commanding officer to demand the immediate increase of these rations’. From food rations, the group moved on to the war, and then to the ownership of land: ‘This embryo Soldiers’ Soviet had, at any rate, become a centre for exchange of views on subjects which till yesterday were forbidden to all outside the charmed circle of the ruling caste. The next stage of the Revolution had been reached.’

  Later, Price observed that hunger, at least in its early stages, made people ‘more rapacious’. The lack of food led people to question the system, to demand change, even to call for violence.59

  The link between food and power was something that the Bolsheviks also understood very well. Both before, during and after the revolution, all sides also realized that constant shortages made food supplies a hugely significant political tool. Whoever had bread had followers, soldiers, loyal friends. Whoever could not feed his people lost support rapidly. In 1921, when an American relief mission was negotiating to enter the Soviet Union, one of its representatives told the Soviet negotiator (and later Foreign Minister), Maksim Litvinov, that ‘we do not come to fight Russia, we come to feed’. According to an American journalist, Litvinov responded very succinctly, in English: ‘Yes, but food is a veppon …’60

  Lenin thought so too. But the revolutionary leader did not therefore conclude that the Special Council’s nationalized food distribution system was wrong. Instead, he decided that its methods were insufficiently harsh, especially in Ukraine. In 1919, Rakovsky, the Bolshevik leader in charge of Ukraine, echoed this sentiment in a frank comment to a party congress. ‘We went into the Ukraine at a time when Soviet Russia went through a very serious production crisis,’ he explained: ‘our aim was to exploit it to the utmost to relieve the crisis’.61 From the very beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks assumed that the exploitation of Ukraine was the price that had to be paid in order to maintain control of Russia. As one of them wrote years later, ‘the fate of the revolution depended on our ability to reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread’.62

  The urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, known then and later as ‘War Communism’. Launched in Russia in 1918 and brought to Ukraine after the second Bolshevik invasion in early 1919, War Communism meant the militarization of all economic relationships. In the countryside, the system was very simple: take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed ‘essential’ by the state.

  In 1918 many would have found this system familiar. The Russian imperial government, tormented by wartime food shortages, had begun to confiscate grain at gunpoint – a policy known as prodrazvyorstka – as early as 1916. In March 1917 the Provisional Government had also decreed that peasants should sell all grain to the state at prices dictated by the state, with the exception of what they needed for their own sowing and consumption.63 The Bolsheviks followed suit. In May 1
918 the Council of People’s Commissars followed up on tsarist policy and established a ‘food-supply dictatorship’. The Commissariat of Food Supply created a ‘food-supply army’, which was to be deployed on the ‘food-supply front’.64

  But despite the militarized language, in practice War Communism meant that most people went hungry. To obtain any food at all, in the years between 1916 and 1918 the majority of Russians and Ukrainians used the black market, not the non-existent state companies.65 In Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the doctor’s wife seeks food and fuel in post-revolutionary Moscow by ‘wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks [peasants] sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.’ Eventually she found a man selling green birch logs, and exchanged them for a ‘small mirrored wardrobe’. The peasant took it as a present for his wife. The two made ‘future arrangements about potatoes’.66 Such was the interaction between city and countryside in the years of War Communism.

  City-country barter remained an enduring part of the economic system for many years after that. Even in 1921, when the civil war was technically over, an American charitable delegation visiting Moscow discovered a very similar set of arrangements. On Kuznetskii Most, once an important commercial street, old women and children were selling fruit from baskets outside the empty, shuttered shops. Vegetables and meat were unavailable except in the open-air markets. In the evening the Americans discovered the source of these goods. Returning to the railway car where they were due to spend the night, they watched a ‘perfect mob’ of men, women and children push and shove one another in order to get onto a train heading out of the city. What they deemed a ‘very fantastic sight in the half twilight’ was in fact the Russian food distribution network, thousands of individual traders going back and forth from the cities to the countryside.67

  During those years these illegal markets gave many people access to food, especially individuals not on special government lists. But the Bolsheviks not only refused to accept these street bazaars, they blamed them for the continuing crisis. Year after year the Soviet leadership was surprised by the hunger and shortages that their ‘confiscate and redistribute’ system had created. But because state intervention was supposed to make people richer, not poorer, and because the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers – ‘speculators’ – who made their living by physically carrying food from farms into towns. In January 1919, Lenin himself would denounce them as ideological enemies:

  All talk on this theme [private trade], all attempts to encourage it are a great danger, a retreat, a step back from the socialist construction that the Commissariat of Food is carrying out amid unbelievable difficulties in a struggle with millions of speculators left to us by capitalism.

  From there, he needed to make only a short logical leap to the denunciation of the peasants who sold grain to these ‘speculators’. Lenin, already suspicious of the peasantry as an insufficiently revolutionary class, was perfectly clear about the danger of urban-rural trade:

  The peasant must choose: free trade in grain – which means speculation in grain; freedom for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and starve; the return of the absolute landowners and the capitalists; and the severing of the union of the peasants and workers – or delivery of his grain surpluses to the state at fixed prices.68

  But words were not enough. Faced with widespread hunger, the Bolsheviks took more extreme measures. Usually, historians ascribe Lenin’s turn towards political violence in 1918 – a set of policies known as the Red Terror – to his struggle against his political opponents.69 But even before the Red Terror was formally declared in September, and even before he ordered mass arrests and executions, Lenin was already discarding law and precedent in response to economic disaster: the workers of Moscow and Petrograd were down to one ounce of bread per day. Morgan Philips Price observed that Soviet authorities were barely able to feed the delegates during the Congress of Soviets in the winter of 1918: ‘Only a very few wagons of flour had arrived during the week at the Petrograd railway stations.’70 Worse, ‘complaints in the working-class quarters of Moscow began to be loud. The Bolshevik regime must get food or go, one used to hear.’71

  In the spring of 1918 these conditions inspired Lenin’s first chrezvychaishchina – a phrase translated by one scholar as ‘a special condition in public life when any feeling of legality is lost and arbitrariness in power prevails’.72 Extraordinary measures, or chrezvychainye mery, were needed to fight the peasantry whom Lenin accused of holding back surplus grain for their own purposes. To force the peasants to give up their grain and to fight the counter-revolution, Lenin also eventually created the chrezvychainaia komissiia – the ‘extraordinary commission’, also known as the Che-Ka, or Cheka. This was the first name given to the Soviet secret police, later known as the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD and finally the KGB.

  The emergency subsumed everything else. Lenin ordered anyone not directly involved in the military conflict in the spring and summer of 1918 to bring food back to the capital. Stalin was put in charge of ‘provisions matters in southern Russia’, a task that suddenly mattered a lot more than his tasks as Nationalities Commissar. He set out for Tsaritsyn, a city on the Volga, accompanied by two armoured trains and 450 Red Army soldiers. His assignment: to collect grain for Moscow. His first telegram to Lenin, sent on 7 July, reported that he had discovered a ‘bacchanalia of profiteering’. He set out his strategy: ‘we won’t show mercy to anyone, not to ourselves, not to others – but we will bring you bread.’73

  In subsequent years Stalin’s Tsaritsyn escapade was mostly remembered for the fact that it inspired his first public quarrel with the man who would become his great rival, Leon Trotsky. But in the context of Stalin’s later policy in Ukraine, it had another kind of significance: the brutal tactics he used to procure grain in Tsaritsyn presaged those he would employ to procure grain in Ukraine more than a decade later. Within days of arriving in the city Stalin created a revolutionary military council, established a Cheka division, and began to ‘cleanse’ Tsaritsyn of counter-revolutionaries. Denouncing the local generals as ‘bourgeois specialists’ and ‘lifeless pen-pushers, completely ill-suited to civil war’, he took them and others into custody and placed them on a barge in the centre of the Volga.74 In conjunction with several units of Bolshevik troops from Donetsk, and with the help of Klement Voroshilov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, two men who would remain close associates, Stalin authorized arrests and beatings on a broad scale, followed by mass executions. Red Army thugs robbed local merchants and peasants of their grain; the Cheka then fabricated criminal cases against them – another harbinger of what was to come – and caught up random people in the sweep as well.75

  But the grain was put on trains for the north – which meant that, from Stalin’s point of view, this particularly brutal form of War Communism was successful. The populace of Tsaritsyn paid a huge price and, at least in Trotsky’s view, so did the army.76 After Trotsky protested against Stalin’s behaviour in Tsaritsyn, Lenin eventually removed Stalin from the city. But his time there remained important to Stalin, so much so that in 1925 he renamed Tsaritsyn ‘Stalingrad’.

  During their second occupation of Ukraine in 1919, the Bolsheviks never had the same degree of control as Stalin had over Tsaritsyn. But over the six months when they were at least nominally in charge of the republic, they went as far as they could. All of their obsessions – their hatred of trade, private property, nationalism, the peasantry – were on full display in Ukraine. But their particular obsession with food, and with food collection in Ukraine, overshadowed almost every other decision they made.

  When they arrived in Kyiv for the second time, the Bolsheviks moved very quickly. They immediately dropped the pretence that they were a force for ‘Ukrainian liberation’. Instead, they once again followed the preced
ent set by the tsars: they banned Ukrainian newspapers, stopped the use of Ukrainian in schools, and shut down Ukrainian theatres. The Cheka carried out rapid arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, who were accused of ‘separatism’. Rakovsky, the Ukrainian party boss, refused to use or even to recognize the Ukrainian language. Pavlo Khrystiuk, a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary, later remembered that ‘Russian troops’, many drawn from the ranks of the old imperial police, once again ‘shot anyone in Kyiv who spoke Ukrainian and considered himself a Ukrainian’. Hateful, anti-Ukrainian rhetoric became a standard part of Bolshevik language in Kyiv: ‘The unemployed, hungry, toiling masses simply joined the army, they were paid well for their service and provided with “rations” for their families. It wasn’t difficult to raise the “morale” of this army. All one had to say was that our “brothers” are starving because of the Ukrainian-Khokhly [a derogatory term for Ukrainians]. This is how our “comrades” lit the fires of hatred for Ukrainians.’77

  As in Russia, they also confiscated large estates and used some of the land to create collective farms and other state-owned agricultural enterprises, yet another harbinger of future policy. But although the Moscow Bolsheviks were keen to try these experiments, the Ukrainian communists were not. More to the point, neither were the Ukrainian peasants. Russia did have a tradition of communal agriculture, and the majority of Russian peasants held land jointly in rural communes (known as the obschina, or mir). But only a quarter of Ukrainian peasants followed the same custom. Most were individual farmers, either landholders or their employees, who owned their land, houses and livestock.78

  When spontaneously offered the chance to join collective farms in 1919, very few Ukrainian peasants accepted. And although the new Soviet regime organized some 550 collective and state farms in Ukraine in 1919, they were mostly unpopular and unsuccessful: almost all of them were dissolved soon afterwards. The vast majority of the confiscated land was instead redistributed. Peasants received smaller parcels in the western and central part of Ukraine, larger parcels in the steppe regions of the south and east. Small landowners who controlled between 120 and 250 acres kept their property. Although no one said so, this was a tacit admission that Ukraine’s private landowners produced more grain with greater efficiency.79