Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  But in 1919 grain was still a far bigger priority for Lenin than the conversion of Ukrainians to the benefits of collective farming. Whenever the republic was discussed, that was his primary concern: ‘at every mention of Ukraine Lenin asked how many [kilos of grain] there were, how many could be taken from there or how many had already been taken’.80 He was encouraged in his obsession by Alexander Shlikhter, a Bolshevik with revolutionary credentials who was named People’s Commissar of Food Collection in Ukraine in late 1918. By early 1919, Shlikhter had already placed every person, institute and agency associated with food production in Ukraine under his personal control.81 A native of Poltava, in east-central Ukraine, Shlikhter thought that the food-producing potential of his birthplace was huge, though he did not imagine that the beneficiaries would be Ukrainians: ‘We have a target, to procure 100 million poods [1.6 million kilos] through grain requisition … 100 million for starving Russia, for Russia which is now under threat of international intervention from the East. This is a colossal number, but rich Ukraine, bread-producing Ukraine will help …’82

  These numbers were plucked from the sky; later, Shlikhter would be asked for 50 million poods, but the reduction didn’t matter since he couldn’t collect anything close to that number.83 Certainly he found it impossible to purchase grain. As one observer remembered, the peasants refused to give up their produce to lazy city-dwellers in exchange for ‘Kerensky money’ [the currency created in February 1917] or Ukrainian karbovantsi: ‘There was scarcely a home which did not own bales of worthless paper money.’84 Although the peasants would have happily bartered their grain for clothing or tools, Russia was barely producing any manufactured goods and Shlikhter had nothing to give them.

  Force was again the only solution. But instead of deploying the crude violence that Stalin had used in Tsaritsyn, Shlikhter chose a more sophisticated form of violence. He created a new class system in the villages, first naming and identifying new categories of peasants, and then encouraging antagonism between them. Previously, class distinctions in Ukrainian villages had not been well defined or meaningful; Trotsky himself once said the peasantry ‘constitutes that protoplasm out of which new classes have been differentiated in the past’.85 As noted, only a minority of Ukrainian villages followed the practice, more common in Russia, of holding land communally. In most, there was a rough division between people who owned land and were considered hard workers, and those who did not own land or who for whatever reason – bad luck, drink – were considered to be poor workers. But the distinction was blurry. Members of the same family could belong to different groups, and peasants could move up or down this short ladder very quickly.86

  The Bolsheviks, with their rigid Marxist training and hierarchical way of seeing the world, insisted on more formal markers. Eventually they would define three categories of peasant: kulaks, or wealthy peasants; seredniaks, or middle peasants; and bedniaks, or poor peasants. But at this stage they sought mainly to define who would be the victims of their revolution and who would be the beneficiaries.

  In part, Shlikhter created a class division through the launch of an ideological struggle against the ‘kulaks’, or ‘kurkuls’ (literally ‘fists’ in Ukrainian). The term had been rare in Ukrainian villages before the revolution; if used at all, it simply implied someone who was doing well, or someone who could afford to hire others to work, but not necessarily someone wealthy.87 Although the Bolsheviks always argued about how to identify kulaks – eventually the term would simply become political – they had no trouble vilifying them as the main obstacle to grain collection, or attacking them as exploiters of the poorer peasants and obstacles to Soviet power. Very quickly, the kulaks became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution.

  While attacking the kulaks, Shlikhter simultaneously created a new class of allies through the institution of ‘poor peasants’ committees’ – komitety nezamozhnykh selian, otherwise known as komnezamy (kombedy in Russian). The komnezamy would later play a role in the Ukrainian famine, but their origins lay in this immediate, post-revolutionary moment, in Shlikhter’s first grain collection campaign. Under his direction, Red Army soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village, recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbours. In exchange, these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the ‘grain surpluses’ of their neighbours. These mandatory grain collections – or prodrazvyorstka – created overwhelming anger and resentment, neither of which ever really went away.88

  These two newly created village groups defined one another as mortal enemies. The kulaks understood perfectly well that the komnezamy had been set up to destroy them; the komnezamy equally understood perfectly well that their future status depended upon their ability to destroy the kulaks. They were willing to exact harsh punishments on their neighbours in order to do so. Iosyp Nyzhnyk, a loyal member of the poor peasants’ committee in Velyke Ustia, Chernihiv province, joined a komnezam in January 1918, after returning home from the front. As he recalled later, there were fifty members of the local committee. Tasked with confiscating land from their wealthier neighbours, they unsurprisingly met with fierce resistance. In response, a handful of komnezam members formed an armed ‘revolutionary committee’, which, Nyzhnyk recalled, imposed immediate, drastic measures: ‘kulaks and religious groups were banned from holding meetings without the permission of the revolutionary committee, weapons were confiscated from kulaks, guards were placed around the village and secret surveillance of the kulaks was set up as well’.89

  Not all of these measures were ordered or sanctioned from above. But by telling the poor peasants’ committees that their welfare depended on robbing the kulaks, Shlikhter knew that he was instigating a vicious class war. The komnezamy, he wrote later, were meant to ‘bring the socialist revolution into the countryside’ by ensuring the ‘destruction of the political and economic rule of the kulak’.90 Another Bolshevik stated it clearly at a party meeting in 1918: ‘You, peasant comrades, must know that here now in the Ukraine, there are many rich kulaks, very many, and they are well organized, and when we start founding our communes in the countryside … these kulaks will put up a great opposition.’91

  At one of the low moments of the civil war, in March 1918, Trotsky told a meeting of the Soviet and Trade Unions that food had to be ‘requisitioned for the Red Army at all costs’. Moreover, he seemed positively enthusiastic about the consequences: ‘If the requisition meant civil war between the kulaks and the poorer elements of the villages, then long live this civil war!’92 A decade later Stalin would use the same rhetoric. But even in 1919 the Bolsheviks were actively seeking to deepen divisions inside the villages, to use anger and resentment to further their policy.

  Shlikhter did not invent this form of grassroots revolution: Lenin had earlier tried it in Russia, in 1918, but it had failed. The poor peasants’ committees in Russia had not only been unpopular – Russian peasants were even less inclined than Ukrainians to think of themselves using strict class divisions, preferring to regard their neighbours as ‘fellow villagers’ – but also corrupt. The committees were quick to use what grain they confiscated for their own benefit, and in many Russian districts they deteriorated into ‘networks of corruption and distortion’.93 Shlikhter knew the political risks of repeating this policy in Ukraine, where the peasantry were less sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, under the slogan ‘Bread for the Fighters, for the Salvation of the Revolution!’, Shlikhter put huge pressure on the komnezamy to collect grain using whatever means they could.

  They were not his only tactic: Shlikhter also offered commissions to private groups or warlords. According to official records, eighty-seven separate grain collection teams arrived in Ukraine from Russia in the first half of 1919, deploying 2,500 people. The total number, if soldiers and
other unofficial participants were counted, may have been higher.94 Others came from within Ukraine, from cities as well as from local criminal networks. Just like the collectivization brigades that would be sent into the countryside from the cities in 1929, many members of these teams were urban followers of the Bolsheviks, if not Russian then Russian-speaking. Whatever their ethnic origin, peasants regarded these militarized collection teams as ‘foreigners’, outsiders who deserved no more consideration than the German and Austrian soldiers who had tried the same tactics a year earlier. Unsurprisingly, the peasants fought back, as Shlikhter also admitted: ‘Figuratively speaking, one could say that every pood of requisitioned grain was tinged with drops of workers’ blood.’95

  Peasants were not the only instigators of class violence, or the only victims. The Cheka also pursued a harsh and rigid campaign in Ukraine against political enemies. The secret police arrested not only Ukrainian nationalists but merchants, bankers, capitalists and the bourgeoisie, both haute and petite; former imperial officers, former imperial civil servants, former political leaders; aristocrats and their families; anarchists, socialists and members of any other left-wing parties who failed to toe the Bolshevik line. In Ukraine the latter were particularly important. The Borotbysty, the radical left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, had a strong following in the Ukrainian countryside. But although the Borotbysty were very close to the Bolsheviks ideologically – they also favoured radical land reform, for example – they were excluded from the government and treated with suspicion because they had cooperated with the Central Rada.

  The list of Bolshevik enemies also included the neighbouring Don and Kuban Cossacks, whose territory straddled Russia and Ukraine and who, like the Zaporozhian Cossacks in southern Ukraine, had always enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. Many Cossack stanitsas – the name given to their self-governing communities – sided with the White Russian imperial armies during the revolution, and some reacted even more radically. The Kuban Rada, the ruling organization of the most Ukrainian-speaking Kuban Cossacks, declared itself the sovereign ruling body in Kuban in April 1917, then fought against the Bolsheviks from October, and even proclaimed an independent Kuban People’s Republic in January 1918. At the height of the civil war in 1918, the Russian-speaking Don Cossacks also declared independence and founded the Don Republic, a romantic gesture that won them no friends in Moscow. The Bolsheviks repeatedly described them as ‘instinctive counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘lackeys of the imperial regime’.

  In January 1919, after the Red Army entered the Don province, the Bolshevik leadership issued an order designed to dispose of the Cossack problem altogether. Soldiers received orders ‘to conduct mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror against all those Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power … To confiscate grain and compel storage of all surpluses at designated points’.96

  Josef Reingold, the Chekist in charge, euphemistically referred to this program as ‘de-cossackization’. In fact, it was a massacre: some 12,000 people were murdered after being ‘sentenced’ by revolutionary tribunals consisting of a troika of officials – a Red Army commissar and two party members – who issued rapid-fire death sentences. A form of ethnic cleansing followed the slaughter: ‘reliable’ workers and peasants were imported in order to ‘dilute’ the Don Cossack identity further.97 This was one of the first Soviet uses of mass violence and mass movement of people for the purposes of social engineering. It was an important precedent for later Soviet policy, especially in Ukraine. The term ‘de-cossackization’ itself may have been the inspiration for ‘de-kulakization’, which would be so central to Soviet policy a decade later.

  But the policy backfired. By mid-March, Cossacks in the Veshenskaia stanitsa, many of whom had originally cooperated with the Red Army, were in full revolt.98 Across Ukraine, Red Army commanders were intensely worried. Antonov-Ovsienko, the Red Army leader in the region, twice wrote letters to Lenin and the Central Committee asking for a relaxation of Soviet policy, and particularly for more cooperation with local groups and Ukrainian national leaders. He suggested that the Ukrainian Soviet government be expanded to include social democrats and Borotbysty, who had more support among the peasantry than the Bolsheviks. He called for an end to the grain requisitions, and for concessions to the Ukrainian peasants who were deserting the Red Army in droves.

  Nobody in Moscow was listening. The harsh rhetoric continued. The grain collection policy remained in place. It was unsuccessful: Shlikhter only managed to dispatch some 8.5 million poods of grain – 139,000 metric tonnes – to Russia, a tiny fraction of what Lenin had demanded.99

  The Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.

  2

  Rebellion, 1919

  Ukrainian people, take the power in your hands! Let there be no dictators, neither of person nor party! Long live the dictatorship of the working people! Long live the calloused hands of the peasants and workers! Down with political speculators! Down with the violence of the Right! Down with the violence of the Left!

  Otaman Matvii Hryhoriev, 19191

  Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919.

  Mikhail Bulgakov, 19262

  When Nestor Makhno was christened, the priest’s clothing was said to have caught fire. This, the peasants said, was a sign: he was destined to become a great bandit. When Makhno’s first son was born, he had a mouth full of teeth. This, the peasants said, was also a sign: it meant that he was the Antichrist.3 Makhno’s son died, and the story of Makhno’s own christening faded. But the wildly contradictory rumours that swirled around Makhno, the most powerful and probably the most charismatic of the Ukrainian peasant leaders who arose out of the chaos of 1919, continued well after his death. Trotsky memorably described Makhno’s followers as ‘kulak plunderers’ who ‘throw dust in the eyes of the most benighted and backward peasants’.4 Piotr Arshinov, a Russian anarchist and admirer of Makhno, described him as the man who brought unity to the ‘revolutionary insurrectionary movement of the Ukrainian peasants and workers’. When ‘throughout the immense stretches of the Ukraine, the masses seethed, rushing into revolt and struggle’, Makhno ‘drew up the plan for the struggle, and coined the slogans of the day’.5

  Parting the mists and myths that surround the Ukrainian peasant revolt of 1918–20 is not easy, if only because a large number of the leading protagonists, Makhno among them, played so many roles and changed sides so many times. Originally, Makhno was a revolutionary activist from Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine. Arrested several times by the tsarist police, he spent the years 1908–17 in a Moscow prison. There he befriended Arshinov, among others, and became indoctrinated in the ideology of anarchism. This philosophy, although radical and opposed to the status quo in equal measures, never aligned precisely either with the Bolsheviks or the Ukrainian nationalists: Makhno wanted to destroy the state, not empower it. Released in 1917 after the February revolution, he returned to Zaporizhia and began organizing a Peasants’ Union. This grew rapidly into a rowdy peasant army which controlled what Trotsky described in disgust as the ‘little known state’ of Huliaipole, the territory around Makhno’s home village that refused to recognize the authority of Kyiv.

  Sometimes called the Black Army – they fought under the black anarchist flag – and at other times referred to as Makhnovists (Makhnovshchyna), Makhno’s men originally took up arms against both Pavlo Skoropadsky and his German and Austrian allies, as well as Symon Petliura and his Ukrainian nationalist forces. Some of their anger was purely local: among other things, they identified the Mennonite landowners of eastern Ukraine as ‘German’ exploiters who deserved to be stripped of their property. But they did have broader goals. Sympathizing neither with the ‘Whites’ nor with t
he Ukrainian Central Rada, Makhno’s anarchists allied themselves initially with the Bolsheviks. His forces helped the Bolsheviks establish the first, brief Bolshevik Ukrainian government in early 1918.

  Unsurprisingly, relations broke down. Makhno’s anarchism hardly sat well with the controlling instincts of the Bolsheviks. Their authoritarian methods didn’t appeal to him either. By 1920, Makhno was calling on Red Army soldiers to desert:

  We drove out the Austro-German tyrants, smashed the Denikinist [Imperial Russian] hangmen, fought against Petliura; now we are fighting the domination of the commissar authority, the dictatorship of the Bolshevik-Communist Party: it has laid its iron hand on the entire life of the working people; the peasants and workers of the Ukraine are groaning under its yoke … But we consider you, comrades in the Red Army, our blood brothers, together with whom we would like to carry on the struggle for genuine liberation, for the true Soviet system without the pressure of parties or authorities.6

  Despite Trotsky’s scorn, those sentiments proved popular well beyond Huliaipole. The idea that Ukrainians stood for the ‘true Soviet system without the pressure of parties or authorities’ – socialism without Bolshevism – was widespread and deeply appealing, affecting many people who knew nothing about Makhno. Like the Kronstadt sailors and Tambov peasants who also staged rebellions in 1920 and 1921, tens of thousands of rural Ukrainians wanted a socialist revolution but not the centralized power and repression emanating from Moscow. A leaflet passed around in central Ukraine, addressed to ‘Comrade Red Army Men’, put it succinctly: