Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  These numbers shook the regime’s confidence. The Bolsheviks feared that they were blamed for the disaster – and indeed they were. One survivor of the 1932–3 famine later remembered meeting a peasant from the Dnipropetrovsk province in 1922 and hearing of the famine there. The man explained what had happened that year in no uncertain terms: ‘The Bolsheviks robbed people, took horses and oxen. There is no bread. People are dying of hunger.’59

  By 1922 the Bolsheviks knew that they were unpopular in the countryside and especially the Ukrainian countryside. The expropriation of food had led to shortages, protest and finally starvation, all across the nascent USSR. Their rejection of everything that looked or sounded ‘Ukrainian’ had helped keep nationalist, anti-Bolshevik anger alive in Ukraine.

  In response, the regime changed course and adopted two dramatically new policies, both intended to win back the support of the recalcitrant Soviet peasants, and especially recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants with nationalist sentiments. Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy’, which put an end to compulsory grain collection and temporarily legalized free trade, is the better remembered of the two. But in 1923, Moscow also launched a new ‘indigenization’ policy (korenizatsiia) designed to appeal to the Soviet federal state’s non-Russian minorities. It gave official status and even priority to their national languages, promoted their national culture, and offered what was in effect an affirmative-action policy, replacing Russian cadres from Moscow with ethnic nationals. The policy was known in Ukraine as ‘Ukrainization’, a word that had actually been coined by Hrushevsky, who had called for the Ukrainization of the Russian-speaking state apparatus back in 1907.60 Hrushevsky (who was long gone from politics by the early 1920s) had wanted to use the language to solidify support for national independence. The goal of Lenin’s 1923 policy was precisely the opposite: he hoped to make Soviet power seem less foreign to Ukrainians, and thus reduce their demands for sovereignty.

  To the purists, both of these strategies represented a step ‘backwards’, away from Marxist-Leninist ideals, and many refused to believe that they would be permanent. One senior Bolshevik, Grigorii Zinoviev, called the New Economic Policy ‘a temporary deviation’ and a ‘clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labor against the front of international capitalism’.61 Lenin himself, when explaining the New Economic Policy to the party’s political educators in October 1921, used the expression ‘strategic retreat’. When discussing the policy, he often sounded almost apologetic. He told one group of educators that Soviet economic policy had so far been based on a mistaken assumption, namely that ‘the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution’.62 Because the peasantry had not yet reached the correct level of political evolution, some retrenchment was now required. Once they became enlightened, it might be possible to try more advanced communist economic policies once again.

  To those who had believed in a unified, homogenized, Russian-speaking workers’ state, the very notion of ‘Ukrainization’ was similarly disheartening. Rakovsky, who was still leader of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars in 1921, declared that widespread use of the Ukrainian language would mean a return to the ‘rule of the Ukrainian petit-bourgeois intelligentsia and the Ukrainian kulaks’. His deputy, Dmytro Lebed, argued even more forcefully that the teaching of Ukrainian was reactionary, because it was an inferior language of the village, whereas Russian was the superior language of the city. In an essay outlining his ‘Theory of the Two Cultures’, Lebed conceded that there might be a reason to teach peasant children in Ukrainian, since it was their native language. Later, however, they should all study Russian, in order to help them eventually merge with the Russian proletariat.63

  Beneath their fears of the ‘reactionary’ and ‘kulak’ Ukrainian language, Rakovsky, Lebed and the other Russophone Bolsheviks in Ukraine had a mixed set of motives. Once again, there was an element of Russian chauvinism in all of their thinking: Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else. Ukrainian, to many of them, was a ‘barnyard’ language. As the Ukrainian communist Volodymyr Zatonskyi complained, ‘it is an old habit of comrades to look upon Ukraine as Little Russia, as part of the Russian empire – a habit that has been drummed into you throughout the millennia of the existence of Russian imperialism’.64 Others had deeper objections and argued that Ukrainian was actually a ‘counter-revolutionary language’. Scarred by the peasant revolt, they had a well-founded fear of Ukrainian nationalism, which they identified with the Ukrainian language. Zatonskyi again explained: ‘Precisely in the year 1919 … there was a certain suspicion regarding the Ukrainian language. Such feelings were widespread, even in circles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry of undeniably proletarian origin.’65

  Their prejudice against all things Ukrainian of course had an ideological source too: the Bolsheviks were committed to a heavily centralized state and the destruction of independent institutions, whether economic, political or cultural. Intuitively, they understood that the autonomy of any Soviet province or republic could become an obstacle to total power. Class solidarity, not national solidarity, was supposed to guide the way. As another communist leader put it: ‘I think that if we concern ourselves with the culture of every nation individually, then this will be an unhealthy national vestige.’66

  Still, both of the new policies had enthusiastic supporters at the highest levels. The New Economic Policy found a champion in the Bolshevik intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, who came to believe that the USSR would reach the higher stages of socialism through market relations, and who argued forcefully against grain requisitioning.67 Partly thanks to his support, and to Lenin’s support in the months before his death in January 1924, the New Economic Policy – widely known by the acronym NEP – briefly evolved into a form of what Lenin called ‘state capitalism’. Under the new system, markets functioned, but only under heavy state control. The state abolished the prodrazvyorstka, the mandatory grain procurement, and replaced it with a tax. Peasants began to sell grain again in the traditional way – that is, for money. Small traders – ‘NEP men’ – also bought and sold grain and thus organized its distribution, as they had for many centuries. At this very elementary level, a market economy was restored and food gradually became more available.

  Ukrainization had real advocates too. After the experience of the peasant rebellions, Lenin himself said in 1919 that it would be a ‘profound and dangerous error’ to ignore nationalist sentiment in Ukraine.68 In February 1920, as the third and final Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine got underway, he sent a telegram to Stalin, telling him to hire interpreters for the Red Army in Ukraine and to ‘oblige unconditionally all their officers to accept applications and other documents in the Ukrainian language’.69 Lenin did not want to lose Ukraine again, and if that meant indulging Ukrainian national emotions, then he would do so.

  Inside Ukraine, the moment of the ‘national communists’ had arrived. Optimistically, they argued that Ukrainian national feelings would enhance the revolution, and that Ukrainization and Sovietization were not just compatible but mutually reinforcing. Skrypnyk – the same Ukrainian official whose resistance to American aid had so surprised the men from the ARA – was the most enthusiastic of all. Ever since he had served as Lenin’s envoy to Ukraine in December 1917, Skrypnyk had been arguing that the hostility between the Russian-speaking proletariat and the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry was counter-productive.70 His views were echoed by Zatonskyi, who told his fellow Bolsheviks in 1921 that they had missed the nationalist moment: ‘When the dark peasant masses rose up and became conscious of themselves, when the peasant who had previously looked at himself and his language with scorn put up his chin and started demanding more – we didn’t make use of it.’ As a result, the national revolution had been hijacked by the bourgeoisie: ‘We should say it straight: that was our great
mistake.’71

  Oleksandr Shumskyi and other members of the far left Borotbyst group, which had secured so much popularity in 1917–18, also joined the ranks of the national communists after 1920.72 By the standards of the USSR at the time, Shumskyi’s position was unusual. Although socialists, Mensheviks, anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries were already under investigation or arrest all over the Soviet Union, Moscow made an exception in Ukraine for a few of the Borotbyst group, who were brought into the Soviet fold. Lenin hoped that they would align their peasant supporters with the Bolsheviks and add a touch of native authenticity to the new regime.

  Shumskyi himself suspected that he was serving as a form of camouflage, but he accepted the arrangement and agreed to serve as Commissar of Education in Ukraine. Skrypnyk became Commissar of Justice. In the summer of 1923 the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party – the wider body of leaders, beneath the Politburo – passed its first decree on Ukrainization. The authorities in Kharkiv recognized Ukrainian as the majority language in the republic, and required all state employees to become bilingual within a year.73

  Through these changes, Ukraine’s national communists hoped to make Soviet communism seem more native, to make it look less like a Russian imposition. They also hoped to encourage the Ukrainian intellectual elite to be more sympathetic, and even to make Soviet Ukraine attractive to the ethnic Ukrainians who lived across the border in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The USSR was always looking out for foreign revolutions that it could support. To most people it looked as if Moscow had fully thrown its weight behind these policies, and for a few short years many sincerely believed that they might work.

  In March 1924, nearly seven years after his triumphant speech to the flag-waving crowds in Kyiv, Mykhailo Hrushevsky returned to Ukraine. After fleeing the country in 1919, he had lived for a time in Vienna. For a couple of years he contemplated moves to Prague or Lviv, even Oxford or Princeton. He negotiated with the Bolsheviks and seems to have sought a political role.

  Although he did not find one, Hrushevsky decided to come back anyway, returning to Ukraine as a ‘private person’ and a scholar. No one doubted the symbolic significance of his decision, including the Ukrainian communists. Between January and June 1921 the Ukrainian Politburo had discussed Hrushevsky and his possible return no fewer than four times.74 Many of the Ukrainian national leaders who remained in exile denounced his decision as a ‘legitimization’ of Bolshevik rule; the Bolsheviks celebrated it for the same reason. It was proof that their policy was working. Later, they would claim he had begged to return, having repented of his previous counter-revolutionary activity.75

  But Hrushevsky himself said repeatedly that he had made no concessions. He was returning, he said, because he believed that a Ukrainian political revival first required a Ukrainian cultural revival, and he thought that such a thing might now be possible. Restricted though he might be in the Soviet Union, Hrushevsky could not miss this moment, so pregnant with possibilities for Ukraine. ‘One must think how to avoid allowing cultural life to backslide,’ he wrote to a colleague. ‘So far, both government and society are holding their own.’76 Not everyone in the Ukrainian administration felt the same way: as soon as he arrived back in his homeland, the secret police began to construct what would become a massive surveillance operation all around him, recruiting dozens of people to report on his movements and his thinking.77 Hrushevsky may not have known the details of this operation, but he surely suspected something like it: before his return, he had asked both the Ukrainian Communist Party and the government to write him letters guaranteeing him immunity from political prosecution.78

  Nevertheless, on the surface the Bolsheviks accepted his presence, and he accepted the Bolsheviks. Hrushevsky received state support to set up a new institute for historical studies in Kyiv under the banner of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences – Vseukraïnska Akademiia Nauk – best known by its Ukrainian acronym, VUAN. He went back to work on his multi-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, began editing a journal, and encouraged younger colleagues in their work.79

  Hrushevsky’s return set the tone for a period of genuine intellectual and cultural ferment in Ukraine. For a few brief years his fellow historians at VUAN produced monographs on nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant rebellions and the history of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment.80 The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church declared itself fully independent in 1921; it rejected the authority of the Moscow patriarchate, decentralized the hierarchy, revived Ukrainian liturgy, and anointed a leader, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyi. Artists and architects in Kharkiv experimented with Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism, just like their counterparts in Moscow and Paris. Ukrainian architects built the first skyscraper complex in Europe, a cluster of buildings that included government offices, a library and a hotel. Years later, Borys Kosarev, an artist, set designer, and one of the stars of Kharkiv modernism, remembered that in Kharkiv ‘new theatres opened regularly. Performances were accompanied by heated debate.’ Kosarev worked on one production created to mark the opening of a tractor-production plant: ‘The plant was built by discharged Red Army soldiers and peasants from remote villages – our potential spectators. The task was to tell them the truth about their reality, as well as to create a fascinating performance. But first the spectators had to be lured in.’81

  Meanwhile, young Ukrainian literati dreamed of inventing whole new forms of artistic experience. One literary group, Hart (‘The Tempering’), sought to ‘unite the proletarian writers of Ukraine’ the better to create ‘one international, communist culture’. Not that its leaders, former Borotbysts, were sure what such a thing would look like in reality:

  We do not know whether, during Communism, emotions will disappear, whether the human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of the head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being. Therefore we do not know precisely what form art will assume under Communism …82

  Another organization, Pluh (‘The Plough’), sought to cultivate peasant writers, in the hope that they could help awaken the creativity of rural Ukraine. They started rural reading circles and sent evangelistic envoys into the countryside. Their literary programme proclaimed the group’s goal to be the ‘creation of broad pictures, works with universal themes, dealing primarily with the life of the revolutionary peasantry’.83 They also established one of the first writers’ colonies in Ukraine, an apartment compound in Kharkiv where writers and journalists could live together.84

  The Ukrainian intelligentsia also had, for the first time, the resources and the legal status that they needed in order to standardize their own language. Because Ukrainian had never before been the official language of a modern state, not everybody agreed upon proper usage. Ukrainians in the western half of the country had borrowed many words and spelling habits from Polish, whereas in the eastern half they borrowed from Russian. For the first time in its history the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences set up an orthography division to iron out the differences, and began work on a definitive Russian-Ukrainian dictionary. In 1925 the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars also created a special orthographic commission to formalize and standardize the language, under the leadership first of Shumskyi, and then of Skrypnyk. After many months of debate, the commission’s work culminated in a conference, held in Kharkiv in the spring of 1927, to which Skrypnyk invited leading scholars from Lviv, which was part of Poland. The resulting ‘Kharkiv orthography’, finally published in 1929, proved acceptable to both eastern and western Ukrainians. It was intended to become the standard textbook for those living inside the Ukrainian Republic as well as those outside its borders.85

  As their confidence rose, some of the Ukrainian leadership also began to seek to spread Ukrainian culture beyond the country’s formal borders, partly with Moscow’s support. The Stalinist leadership particularly approved of Kharkiv’s efforts to exert its influence on the Ukrainians across the border in Poland.
Shumskyi served as liaison to the Communist Party of western Ukraine, meaning the territories that then belonged to Poland. Stalin personally received a delegation from western Ukraine in 1925, and of course it was hoped that these West Ukrainian communists would help destabilize the Polish state.86 Things became more complicated when some of the national communists grew interested in the nearly 8 million Ukrainian speakers living across their eastern border in Russia, and especially the 915,000 living in the neighbouring North Caucasian district of Kuban. From 1925 onwards the Ukrainian leadership grew more enthusiastic in its pursuit of national links in Russia, agitating for more Ukrainian-language schools there and even seeking to change the republic’s eastern border in order to include more Ukrainian-speaking territory.

  Although the alarmed authorities in the North Caucasus successfully resisted all but the most minimal border change, they were forced to relent on schools after a Central Committee investigation into the political mood of the Cossacks found evidence of ‘mass counter-revolutionary work’ and general dissatisfaction. To placate them, Moscow granted the Cossacks all across Ukraine and Russia recognition as a national minority. Because the Kuban Cossacks spoke Ukrainian, they too had the right to open Ukrainian-language schools.87

  This ‘high’ cultural activism was accompanied by what was referred to as ‘low’ Ukrainization, meaning the promotion of the Ukrainian language in ordinary life – in the media, in public debate, and above all in schools. Just before the start of the school year in 1923, the republican government decreed that all Ukrainian schoolchildren should be taught in their own language, using a new educational programme designed to ‘cultivate a new generation of loyal citizens’.88 The idea was to make the peasantry both literate and Soviet. By absorbing Marxist thought in Ukrainian, they would come to feel like an integral part of the USSR. In order to promote the language more widely and faster, Skrypnyk even imported 1,500 schoolteachers from Poland, where Ukrainian-language schools had been in existence for longer and where the teaching of Ukrainian was more entrenched.89