Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  You are led into Ukraine by Russian and Jewish commissar communists who tell you they are fighting for Soviet power in Ukraine but who in fact are conquering Ukraine. They tell you they lead you against rich Ukrainian peasants but in fact they are fighting against poor Ukrainian peasants and workers …

  Ukrainian peasants and workers cannot tolerate the conquest and pillage of Ukraine by Russian armies; they cannot tolerate the oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture as occurred under Tsarist rule …

  Brothers, don’t turn your weapons against the peasants and workers of Ukraine but against your commissar communists who torture your unfortunate people as well.7

  An observer who visited Ukraine on a Red Cross mission at the time paraphrased Ukrainian thinking like this:

  A special peasant phraseology was formed: ‘We are Bolsheviks,’ said the peasants in the Ukraine, ‘but not communists. The Bolsheviks gave us land, while the communists take away our grain without giving us anything for it. We will not allow the Red Army to hang the commune about our necks. Down with the commune! Long live the Bolsheviks!’8

  So confused was the terminology at the time that those sentences could easily have been written the other way around: ‘Down with the Bolsheviks! Long live the commune!’ But the point was clear: the Ukrainian peasants had wanted one form of revolution, but had got something else altogether.

  Similarly left-wing, equally revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik language also appealed to the followers of Matvii Hryhoriev, another charismatic leader who emerged from the chaos of 1919. On the surface, Hryhoriev could not have been more different from Makhno. A Cossack and a former member of the Russian imperial army, he had initially supported the Skoropadsky regime, which granted him the rank of colonel. Disillusion then set in, and his ambition grew. Hryhoriev gathered around him a band of loyal followers – 117 separate partisan bands, by one account, including between 6,000 and 8,000 soldiers – allied himself with a similarly idiosyncratic group of peasant commanders, and transferred his support from the German puppet regime to Petliura.9

  The Directory, the national force led by Petliura, granted Hryhoriev the title of ‘Otaman of Zaporizhia, Oleksandriia, Kherson and Tavryda’. A braggart and a blusterer, Hryhoriev, like Makhno, used the language of the radical left. He equated the German and Austrian occupiers with the hated ‘bourgeoisie’ who had connived to keep Ukraine poor. In one ultimatum, issued in the autumn of 1918, he declared:

  I, Otaman Hryhoriev, in the name of the partisans whom I command, rising against the yoke of bourgeoisie, in clear conscience declare to you that you have appeared here in Ukraine as blind instruments in the hands of your bourgeoisie, that you are not democrats, but traitors of all European democrats.10

  When it became clear that the Directory would fall to the Red Army, Hryhoriev quickly changed sides again and joined forces with the Bolsheviks. This alliance was even more unstable than the pact between Makhno and the Red Army. One Soviet war correspondent travelling with Hryhoriev’s men observed with trepidation the irregular organization of the troops, their fondness for looting, and the anti-semitism ‘embedded in the consciousness’ of the soldiers. He quoted some of the commanders joking about the day they would once again take up arms against the ‘communist-Jews’.11 This kind of talk didn’t, he feared, bode well for a long-term alliance with the Bolsheviks.

  It didn’t work in the short term either. Communications between Hryhoriev and the Red Army commanders frequently broke down, especially when he wanted them to do so. Cooperation eventually ceased altogether and in May 1919, Hryhoriev finally called upon his followers to revolt against the Soviet regime that was still then clinging to power in Kyiv. His grandiose statement was a complete mishmash of ideas – nationalist, anarchist, socialist, communist – that probably reflected quite accurately the feelings of Ukrainian peasants who had already watched several armies tramp across their soil:

  Let there be no dictators, neither of person or 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!12

  The Bolsheviks responded to this rhetoric with their own. They denounced the ‘kulak uprising’, the ‘kulak bandits’ and the ‘kulak traitors’. Evidently the word ‘kulak’ had already acquired a broader meaning, well beyond ‘rich peasant’. As early as 1919, anyone who had extra stores of grain – and anyone who opposed Soviet power – could be damned by it. A decade later, Stalin would not need to invent a new word for the same sort of enemy.13

  But flinging insults didn’t help the Soviet cause in 1919. By early summer, both Hryhoriev and Makhno had broken away from the Bolsheviks once and for all, as had a host of other partisans, atamans and local leaders, all of whom agreed upon only one thing: their revolutionary aspirations for land and self-government had been thwarted by Ukrainian nationalists, by Germans and above all by the Bolsheviks. Lured by the slogan, ‘For Soviet Power, without Communists!’, peasant soldiers deserted the Red Army in droves and joined other groups. Oleksandr Shlikhter counted ninety-three ‘counter-revolutionary attacks’ in the month of April alone.14 By another reckoning, there were 328 separate revolts in June, incidents of peasant attacks on Soviet officials or the Red Army. In the month of July, Christian Rakovsky counted more than 200 anti-Bolshevik rebellions within twenty days.15

  The word ‘chaos’ fails to explain or encompass what happened next. Makhno and Hryhoriev fought the Red Army, the White Army, the Directory – and eventually one another. A meeting of rebel forces turned into a shootout in July after Makhno’s deputy pulled a gun on Hryhoriev, murdering him along with several aides. Anton Denikin, the White general, began a new campaign, first taking Stalin’s beloved Tsaritsyn and then advancing into Ukraine, capturing Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) in June. A month later he took Poltava too. Meanwhile, Petliura’s forces advanced from the west and retook Kyiv, only to lose the city again soon afterwards.

  All told, Kyiv changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919 alone. Richard Pipes has memorably described that year in Ukraine as ‘a period of complete anarchy’:

  The entire territory fell apart into innumerable regions isolated from each other and the rest of the world, dominated by armed bands of peasants or freebooters who looted and murdered with utter impunity … None of the authorities which claimed Ukraine during the year following the deposition of Skoropadsky ever exercised actual sovereignty. The Communists, who all along anxiously watched the developments there and did everything in their power to seize control for themselves, fared no better than their Ukrainian nationalist and White Russian competitors.16

  For ordinary people, lawlessness meant that they were constantly preyed upon. Heinrich Epp, one of Ukraine’s Mennonite minority, remembered that his community was at the mercy of whoever passed through:

  Most of the time we were without any real government for all intents and purposes. There were no laws or police … During the day it was mainly the local Russian nationals from the region or young men who visited us repeatedly. Each time they took something which caught their fancy as their own property … But far more fearful were the nights, when the so-called bandits came, for such visits rarely passed without some life being given as sacrifice.17

  Each change of power was accompanied by a change in policy. Whenever Denikin’s White Army took over a region, it returned confiscated property to landowners. Following in the tsarist tradition, it also shut down Ukrainian libraries, cultural centres, newspapers and schools. Derisively, Denikin’s men spoke not of Ukraine but of ‘Little Russia’, and thus successfully alienated any Ukrainian forces who might have joined them.18

  Whenever the Red Army took over, Bolshevik commissars organized a slaughter of the ‘aristocracy’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’ – which could just mean anyone who opposed them – and once again empowered the poor peasants’ committees, helping them to rob their wealth
ier neighbours. In Odessa, Bolshevik leaders armed 2,400 criminals, put them under the control of the city’s most famous crime boss, Misha the Jap – a character in Isaac Babel’s stories – and let them plunder the city.19 In Kyiv stories were told of a torturer named Rosa:

  She would cause a captured soldier to be tied to nails driven into the wall, and would then sit a few feet away from him with a revolver in her hand. She would treat him to a little talk about the proletariat, punctuating her remarks every ten minutes by shooting at and smashing his main joints one after the other.20

  Meanwhile, Makhno’s 10,000-man cavalry and 40,000 foot soldiers, dragging their artillery around on wheeled carts, undermined whoever was in power. All told, his Black Army killed more than 18,000 of Denikin’s soldiers, severely weakened his forces, and possibly robbed him of what could have been a victory against the Bolsheviks.21 In the regions they occupied, including the Mennonite German settlements of southern Ukraine, some of Makhno’s men also attacked civilians with an abandon that seemed unhinged. In his memoir – evocatively entitled ‘The Day the World Ended: December 7, 1919, Steinbach, Russia’ – Epp remembered going from house to house in the village of Steinbach, and finding that all the inhabitants had been murdered. At each one, he opened the door and found corpses:

  The next place was Hildebrandts – my cousin Maria … Here I saw a scene of indescribable horror that I will never forget as long as I live. Mrs Hildebrandt lay in the small bedroom just inside the door to the corner room, completely unclothed. One of her arms had been chopped off and lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Her youngest baby lay dead in the cradle. Its neck had been hacked off. The woman was one of those who had been raped, before or after her murder.

  As Epp stood there, mourning his friends and family, peasants began to gather in the village:

  The robbery now commenced: all property, movable or unmovable, dead or alive, now went over into their hands. In one place, I witnessed a woman turn a dead body over onto its back and tear off his coat. She dealt with the corpse as if it were a head of livestock.22

  Atrocities committed by one side fuelled the anger of the others. When the White Army took over Kharkiv in August 1919, it exhumed the bodies of officers recently buried in shallow trenches in a public park. They found evidence that the men ‘while still alive, had actually had their shoulder badges nailed on to the flesh. In some cases live coals had been pressed into their stomachs, and a number appeared to have been scalped.’ Of course the revelations spurred on those who wanted revenge.23

  Conflicts not only broke out between armies and ethnic groups, but also within villages. In Velyke Ustia, Chernihiv province, violence between the ‘poor peasants’ committee’ and the ‘kulaks’ erupted during elections to the local village council:

  The komnezam members got ready, they were deciding who should nominate whom, who should nominate candidates for the presidium, how the vote should be counted and other details … but the kulaks also got ready, and started nominating kulak agents. Seeing that the poor and middle peasants were standing together and winning over kulak agents, the kulaks started a fistfight in the building, trying at least to disrupt the meeting; but the komnezam activists did not hold back, they began to put down the fighting and tossed the bullies out of the window. The meeting went on as it was supposed to, under full democracy.24

  Soon after, the same komnezam members were attacking kulaks and forcibly taking their bread, ‘in order to give it to the organs of Soviet power’. They also took part in the ‘fight against banditry’, battling what they called ‘kulak bands’ of various kinds and at one point calling in the militia to help. Together, one remembered, ‘the militia and the komnezam activists caught the bandits near the cemetery. During the shooting, the bandits hid themselves, after which they never again appeared in the village and soon were completely liquidated.’25

  Massacre followed massacre in repetitive cycles. The peasants’ resistance infuriated the Bolsheviks, not least because it confounded their historical determinism: the poor were supposed to support them, not fight against them. Conscious that they were a minority fighting against the majority, the Bolsheviks increased their brutality, sometimes demanding the murder of hundreds of peasants in exchange for one dead communist, or calling for the entire adult male population of a village to be wiped out.26

  The tragedies of those terrible years would remain in local memory for decades afterwards, feeding the desire for revenge on all sides. But some of the most brutal violence was inflicted on a group that sought to stay as far away from the conflict as possible.

  In the autumn of 1914 a young Russian soldier named Maksim wrote a cheerful letter home to his family from the Austrian front. He opened with reverent respect for his father and all his relatives, as well as a wish that ‘the Lord God gives you good health and all of the happiness in the world’. But he continued with concern. His unit had suffered a defeat, which he blamed on Jewish spies who had, he believed, set up an underground telephone line in order to feed information to the enemy. Since then, he and his comrades had been ‘plundering and beating the Jews as they deserve, for they just want to trick all of us’.27

  Of course, Maksim wasn’t the first to come up with the idea that Jews were traitors: anti-semitism was rife throughout the imperial army in 1914, as indeed it was rife throughout Russian society, even at the very highest levels. Tsar Nicholas II was a particularly enthusiastic anti-semite, for whom Jews symbolized everything hateful about the modern world. The emperor once defined a newspaper as a place were ‘some Jew or another sits … making it his business to stir up passions of people against each other’.28 During his reign the okhrana, the imperial secret police, had produced the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a notorious forgery that depicted a Jewish plot to govern the world. The state had also had a hand in inspiring a wave of pogroms across Russia in 1905. Given that general attitude, it is not surprising that the army leadership in 1914 suspected Jews of ‘consorting with the enemy through the use of underground telephones and airplanes’ and supplying German troops with gold smuggled across the front line in the stomachs of cattle and the eggs of geese.29 Swirling conspiracy theories about Jewish treachery supplied a plausible explanation for unpalatable facts: the defeat of a unit, the loss of a division, the poor performance of the entire army.

  This same belief in Jewish treachery, common enough before the February revolution, laid the groundwork for a series of appalling massacres in the years that followed. Between 1918 and 1920 combatants on all sides – White, Directory, Polish and Bolshevik – murdered at least 50,000 Jews in more than 1,300 pogroms across Ukraine, according to the most widely accepted studies, though some put the death toll as high as 200,000. Tens of thousands were injured and raped as well. Many shtetls were burnt to the ground. Many Jewish communities were blackmailed out of all their worldly goods by soldiers who threatened to kill them unless they paid up. In the town of Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi) a riot started by the Bolsheviks led to the deaths of 1,600 people over the course of two days. Thousands of Jews fled the violence only to die of hunger and disease in Kyiv. When Denikin’s troops left the city in December 1919, some 2,500 Jewish corpses were found in makeshift refugee shelters.30

  A complete explanation for this infamous wave of anti-semitic violence is beyond the scope of this book, especially since so much of the evidence was long ago cherry-picked by authors seeking to prove a case for or against the Bolsheviks, the White Army or the Directory. From a wide range of sources it is clear that there were perpetrators on all sides. Hryhoriev made little pretence about his virulent anti-semitism; Denikin and his generals enthusiastically carried out pogroms in retaliation against the ‘Jewish’ Cheka and the ‘Jewish’ Bolsheviks. A British journalist who travelled for a time with Denikin recorded that the White general’s officers and men, in line with their tsarist upbringing, ‘laid practically all the blame for their country’s troubles on the Hebrew’:

  They held th
at the whole cataclysm has been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews who in the pay and at the orders of Germany had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government … Among Denikin’s officers this idea was an obsession of such terrible bitterness and insistency as to lead them into making statements of the wildest and most fantastic character.31

  By contrast, Petliura is not known to have used anti-semitic language. He was a former member of the Central Rada, which had deliberately included Jews among its leaders; more than once he went out of his way to discourage anti-semitism in his own ranks: ‘Because Christ commands it, we urge everyone to help the Jewish sufferers,’ he declared. During his brief tenure in power his government had granted autonomous status to the Jews of Ukraine, encouraged Jewish political parties, and funded Yiddish publications.32

  But his Directory soldiers felt varying levels of loyalty to their commander, and the results on the ground were often different. A Red Cross committee met one of Petliura’s generals in Berdychiv in 1921: ‘In a cynical fashion he abused the whole of Jewry and accused them of lending support to the Bolsheviks.’33 The same committee told another general that the Directory leadership had ordered a halt to the pogroms. In response, he replied that ‘the Directory was a puppet in the hands of the diplomats, most of whom were Jews’, and that he would do as he pleased.34

  The Bolshevik leadership also formally opposed pogroms, though that didn’t stop Red Army soldiers from blackmailing Jewish communities or stealing their money. Lenin was informed that Red Army soldiers in Zhytomyr province were ‘destroying the Jewish population in their path, looting and murdering’, in October 1920. Despite his arguments to the contrary, followers of Makhno were also responsible for attacks on Jews, as were some Polish soldiers.35