Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  But the violence was greatest in areas that were not under any political control at all. The worst damage was inflicted by disintegrating military units or bandits with little sense of allegiance to anybody.36 One testimony, written by a Jewish trader, Symon Leib-Rabynovych, describes what happened in the village of Pichky, near Radomysl, when twenty members of ‘Struk’s gang’ took over in 1919. On the first evening the Jews of the village were taken hostage until they agreed to pay 1,800 roubles. A few days later most of them fled temporarily, following a Bolshevik attack on the village. When they returned, they discovered that their homes had been plundered and their possessions distributed among their neighbours. Leib-Rabynovych went to one of them and asked for his feather bed back:

  He fell on me like a wild beast; how did I dare to demand of him, the head man of the village? He would arrest me and hand me over to the Strukists as a communist. I saw that some change had taken place in my neighbour. He had previously been peaceable, and extraordinarily conscientious, and had always been kind to me. I understood that I could not stay any longer in the village. I had to get away to save my life.37

  Leib-Rabynovych escaped. The next day the Struk gang took the entire Jewish population of the village out into the field, stripped all of them of their clothes and possessions, demanded money, and murdered those who could not pay.

  Similar scenes unfolded in Makariv, a large village in the Kyiv district, over the course of 1919. The first attack was organized by one of the local warlords. His gang, which one memoirist described as a band of ‘barefoot teenagers, armed with rifles’, appeared in the village in June. The Jews vanished ‘like mice to their holes’; the young people, ‘having amused themselves with their bullets’, began destroying the stalls in the bazaar. Their leader, Matviienko, encouraged the local peasants to join in. Eventually the Jews agreed to negotiate:

  ‘50,000,’ said Matviienko.

  ‘We’ll get it.’

  ‘In two hours,’ he added gloomily.

  They fulfilled the demand.38

  A few days later Matviienko came back for more, this time taking valuables and clothes as well. A few weeks after that he demanded six local Jews as hostages: he wanted to trade them for his brother, who had been captured by Bolsheviks fighting in the area. When the Jews asked why it had to be them, he shrugged: ‘Communists are yids, and all yids are communists.’ Six Jews were taken; two weeks later Matviienko demanded that the community provide another 150,000 roubles to buy them back. Soon after, the local villagers decided to play the same game, and began demanding money and hostages too. Then the Bolsheviks arrived, with new demands; then Matviienko came back. The Jews sent a delegation to him, and this time he shot them all on the spot. After that, his men went through the village, looking for Jews and killing those they found: ‘In total, about 100 people were killed. Naturally, all of the property was stolen.’39

  The violence against Jews left its mark on those who witnessed it, perpetrated it or experienced it. The pogroms, like the civil war itself, contributed to the brutalization of the population, which quickly learned to conform to the will of men with guns. The methods used in the pogroms would also find echoes in the drive to collect grain in 1921, when Lenin proposed to take hostages in order to force peasants to hand over their supplies. They also haunted the collectivization campaign a decade later, when the kulaks were terrorized using exactly the same methods that had been used in 1919. Like the Jews, kulaks would be rounded up, stripped to their underclothes, blackmailed out of their possessions, mocked and humiliated, and sometimes shot.

  The pogroms also foreshadowed later events in another sense. Much as they would one day use history, journalism and politics to cover up the famine and to twist the facts of Ukrainian history, Soviet propagandists also sought to use the pogroms to discredit the Ukrainian national movement. For decades, Soviet historians characterized Petliura as little more than an anti-semite. They denied the Bolshevik role in pogroms; they denied that either the Directory or the Central Rada before it had ever represented a real national movement at all. Instead, they linked Ukrainian nationalism to looting, killing and above all pogroms. Great efforts were made to gather ‘testimony’ against Petliura and the generals who were associated with him, and to publish it in different languages.40 Petliura himself was murdered in Paris in 1926 by a Russian Jew, Sholom Schwartzbard, who claimed to be taking revenge for the pogroms. Even if Schwartzbard wasn’t a direct Soviet agent, as many thought at the time, he was certainly inspired by Soviet propaganda that demonized Petliura.

  The Ukrainian community in Paris and elsewhere fought back. They published several Directory pamphlets as well as Petliura’s own proclamations from 1919 calling on Ukrainian soldiers to defend Jews.41 They didn’t, of course, also explain that many of Petliura’s own generals had pursued a very different policy, in defiance of their leader. Of all the many things that were lost in the propaganda war between the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalism, none disappeared more quickly than nuance.

  The Ukrainian peasant uprising devastated the countryside and created divisions that would never heal. It also altered, profoundly, the Bolshevik perceptions of Ukraine. If the Bolsheviks had previously been inclined to dismiss Ukraine as ‘Southwest Russia’, a province of no real interest except for its rich soil and abundant food, the experiences of 1919 taught them to see Ukraine as potentially dangerous and explosive, and Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals as threats to Soviet power.

  The rebellion also taught them to see Ukraine as a source of future military threats, for it was thanks to the chaos in Ukraine that Denikin’s last campaign nearly succeeded. Following the bloody summer of 1919, Denikin seized Kyiv in August. He took Kursk on 20 September and Orel on 13 October. He came within 200 kilometres of Moscow – so close that he might have taken the city. Had Denikin formed an alliance with Ukrainian national forces he might well have toppled the Bolshevik regime before it really got started. Yet his unpopular land policies, his opposition to Ukrainian institutions, and his officers’ brutal tactics instead provoked Ukrainian partisans to attack his supply lines. His hold on Ukrainian territory weakened rapidly and so he withdrew.

  But Deniken’s offensive also paved the way for one more attack on Bolshevik power. As the White Army pulled back, Petliura prepared one last stand in concert with Józef Piłsudski, the Polish national leader who had just helped his own country re-establish sovereignty. Unlike Denikin, Piłsudski did not seek to occupy central or eastern Ukraine. Although he did incorporate what is now western Ukraine into the new Polish republic, he also hoped to establish a strong Ukrainian state that would serve as a counterweight to Soviet Russia. The agreement made by the two leaders began ‘with the deep conviction that every nation possesses the right to determine its own fate and to decide upon its relationship with its neighbours’.42 Piłsudski himself issued a proclamation to the Ukrainians, using language that the Bolsheviks would long remember:

  The armies of the Polish Republic, on my orders, have advanced deep into Ukraine. I want the inhabitants of this country to know that Polish troops will remove from your lands the invader against whom you have risen up in arms to defend your homes against violence, conquest and pillage. Polish troops will remain in Ukraine only until the rightful Ukrainian government assumes power.43

  The Poles and the Ukrainians began their joint campaign in the spring of 1920 and at first faced little resistance. On 7 May, Piłsudski’s army occupied Kyiv, which was so poorly defended that his soldiers entered the city riding tram cars. Belatedly, another White Army commander, General Peter Wrangel, agreed to join them from his base in Crimea.

  Their occupation was short. On 13 June the Red Army forced Polish troops to retreat. By early August it was just outside Warsaw. Piłsudski pushed them back, following a battle remembered later as the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. Polish troops again advanced into Ukraine, but ultimately failed to create an independent Ukrainian state. Piłsudski signed an armistice in October
and concluded a border treaty between Poland and the Soviet Union the following year.44

  But even after the Poles withdrew and the remnants of the White Army, stranded in Crimea, scrambled onto boats and sailed across the Black Sea, the problem of Ukraine loomed large in the Bolshevik imagination. Trotsky, in a letter to his colleagues, explained that peace would be difficult to enforce there. For although the Red Army had won a military victory, there had been no ideological revolution in Ukraine: ‘Soviet power in Ukraine has held its ground up to now (and it has not held it well) chiefly by the authority of Moscow, by the Great Russian communists and by the Russian Red Army.’45 The implication was clear: force, not persuasion, had finally pacified Ukraine. And force might one day be needed again.

  The security threat waned, in other words, but the ideological threat remained. Ukrainian nationalism had been defeated militarily, but it remained attractive to the Ukrainian-speaking middle class, intelligentsia and a large part of the peasantry. Worse, it threatened the unity of the Soviet state, which was still struggling to find ways of accommodating national differences. Most ominously of all, nationalism had the power to attract foreign allies, particularly across the border in Poland.

  The Ukrainian rebellion also posed a broader threat to the Bolshevik project. The radical, anarchic, anti-Bolshevik rhetoric used during the peasant uprising had reflected something real. Millions of Ukrainian peasants had wanted a socialist revolution, but not a Bolshevik revolution – and certainly not one directed from Moscow. Although their leaders represented a wide range of views, from anarchist to monarchist, villagers across the country expressed a coherent set of beliefs. They wanted to vote for their own representatives, not for communists. They wanted big landowners dispossessed, but they wished to farm that land themselves. They did not want to return to the ‘second serfdom’ represented by collective farms. They sought respect for their religion, language and customs. They wanted to be able to sell their grain to traders, and they hated the enforced requisition of their produce.46

  This critique – socialist but not authoritarian, communist but not Bolshevik – would resonate strongly throughout the 1920s, finding a spokesman, among others, in Trotsky himself. But the first and most damaging appearance of the anti-Soviet ‘left’ was in Ukraine. The ‘cruel lesson of 1919’, as the Ukrainian peasant revolt came to be called, loomed over the Bolsheviks for many years afterwards.47

  3

  Famine and Truce, the 1920s

  We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance in the coming decades.

  Lenin, in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, 19221

  Since our literature can at last follow its own path of development … we must not, on any account, follow the Russian … Russian literature has been burdening us for ages, it has trained us to imitate it slavishly.

  Mykola Khvylovy, 19252

  The truce with Piłsudski as well as the defeat of Denikin, the Directory and a wide array of rebels, finally allowed the Bolsheviks to force an uneven peace on Ukraine in the course of 1920–1. The bloodshed did not stop right away: Makhno’s Black Army kept on fighting through the summer of 1921, and some of Petliura’s forces were still fighting that autumn even though Petliura himself had fled. The Cheka killed 444 rural rebel leaders in Ukraine during the first half of that year, and reckoned that thousands of ‘bandits’ still roamed the countryside.3 Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s gloomy founder, personally brought 1,400 men to Ukraine to help his local allies finish them off.4

  Ukraine’s new rulers, not trusting the mood in Kyiv, moved the republican capital east to Kharkiv, a city further from the Polish border, closer to Russia, and with a large, Russian-speaking proletariat. The Red Army divisions stationed in Ukraine retained their foreign character, with the majority of soldiers hailing from Russian districts far away. In a 1921 speech the Red Army’s top commander in Ukraine and Crimea, Mikhail Frunze, described the Ukraine-based Red Army as 85 per cent Russian and only 9 per cent Ukrainian. (The rest consisted of ‘other nationalities’, including Poles and Belarusians.)5

  The shaky ‘peace’ did not bring prosperity either. Waves of violence had displaced people and destroyed villages, towns, roads and railroads. The politics and policies of the Bolsheviks had rendered the economy nearly dysfunctional. The abolition of trade, the nationalization of industry, the failed experiments with collectivization and the use of forced labour had all taken their toll. ‘Industry was dead,’ wrote one observer:

  Trade existed only in violation of Soviet law. Agriculture, still in the process of communization, had almost reached the point where what it produced, if evenly distributed, was scarcely enough to maintain the people of the country. Administrative chaos and physical deterioration of rail and river transport made distribution impossible. Hunger, starvation, disease were increasing.6

  Prospects for the future were hardly any better. This time a Ukrainian government, directed by the Ukrainian Communist Party – a separate entity from the Soviet Communist Party, with its own Politburo and Central Committee – was formally in charge. But in practice, policy was made in Moscow, and it sounded much the same as in the past. At the national level, Trotsky called for the militarization of the economy, the use of forced labour brigades and requisitioning, the same tactics deployed in the months following the 1917 revolution.7 During a visit to Kharkiv, Stalin announced the creation of a ‘Ukrainian Labour Army’. In a speech to the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920, he argued that the military tactics used to win the civil war could be applied to the economy: ‘We shall now have to promote economic non-commissioned officers and officers from the ranks of the workers to teach the people how to battle against economic disruption and build a new economy … this requires training “officers of labour”.’8

  But the renewed language of War Communism held no attraction for Soviet peasants, and ‘officers of labour’ offering lessons in the ‘new economy’ could hardly have inspired them either. In practice, the end of the civil war brought back Shlikhter’s hated prodrazvyorstka, the mandatory food confiscation, as well as the komnezamy, the poor peasants’ committees in Ukraine. The party was taking no chances: it wanted once again to strengthen its hand against the wealthier peasants and to ensure some control over the village soviets (the Bolshevik name for village councils), many of which were led by the same village elders as in the past.

  To the peasants, the newly reinforced requisitioning committees seemed to have no scruples. Their members, now veterans of the brutal peasant uprising, were clearly working to gain privileges and protection in a devastated and hungry world. Their behaviour was described by one peasant very succinctly: ‘If they want, they take the grain; if they like it, they arrest; what they want, they do.’9 Another remembered that nobody seemed to control the committees at all: ‘The komnezamy were left to themselves and were guided in all their actions by their “revolutionary” self-consciousness.’ Those further up the chain of command deliberately reinforced this sense of impunity. The party authorities told one local committee that anyone who showed any signs of ‘kulak counter-revolution’ should be locked up for fifteen days. If that didn’t work – then ‘shoot them’.10

  The cruelty they used was no secret. During a confidential meeting in the summer of 1920, the Soviet ‘procurements commissars’, the men tasked with organizing the collection of grain, considered the ‘impact of the requisitions on the population’. After a long debate, they made a decision: ‘no matter how heavy the requisitions can be for local inhabitants … state interests must anyway come first’.11

  This harsh attitude created a harsh response. Matvii Havryliuk, a peasant who worked as a grain requisitioner in 1921, remembered the violent emotions of this period in testimony he gave a decade later:

  In 1921, when the state needed food, I worked in the food procurement squad collecting bread from the kulaks in our village and then in five villages in Ruzhyn district and helped the army squads,
deployed outside the village, catch those who would spread kulak unrest. Despite this very trying time, when kulaks did not want to submit any grain and even threatened to kill me and my family, I persevered and stayed vigilant on behalf of the Soviet power. I requisitioned grain under the supervision of special plenipotentiary Bredykhin [from the Cheka] who rated my work highly. From that moment on I learnt to work in the village, how to organize poor peasant masses, to motivate them to participate in the campaign. Siding with Soviet power right from the beginning made me an enemy of the kulaks in the village too. I always fought with the kulaks … they care about their own interests rather than those of the state.12

  Thanks to the ‘perseverance’ and ‘vigilance’ of men like Havryliuk, the great grain collections of 1920 spared nobody. Lenin’s instructions explicitly called for the requisitioning of all grain, even that needed for immediate consumption and for planting next year’s harvest, and there were many people willing to carry out his orders.13

  In response, the peasants’ enthusiasm for growing, sowing and storing grain plunged. Their ability to produce would have been very low in any case: across Ukraine and Russia, up to a third of young men had been mobilized to fight in the First World War. Even more had joined the armies of the civil war, on one side or another, and hundreds of thousands had not returned. Many villages lacked sufficient numbers of men fit to work the fields. But even those who had returned and could work had no incentive to produce extra grain that they knew would be confiscated.

  As a result, the peasants sowed far less land in both Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 1920 than they had at any time in the recent past.14 And even that land wasn’t particularly fruitful, for that spring turned out to be ‘hot and almost rainless’, as one observer wrote: ‘the land at the time of the spring planting was caked and dry’. Very little rain fell that summer or the following winter either.15 As a result, between a fifth and a quarter of the grain sown in the summer of 1921 withered on the stalk.16 The drought eventually struck about half of the food-producing areas in the country, of which roughly a fifth experienced total crop failure.17