Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Only with that kind of policy will the middle-income peasants understand that the possibility of higher prices is a lie invented by speculators, that the kulak and the speculator are enemies of Soviet power, that linking their own fate with the fate of speculators and kulaks is dangerous.18

  At about this time Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership also brought back the phrase chrezvychainye mery, ‘extraordinary measures’, as well as the chrezvychaishchina, a state of emergency, words still redolent of Tsaritsyn, the Red Terror and the civil war. And along with the language of the civil war, the tactics of the civil war – the violence Stalin had deployed in Tsaritsyn ten years earlier – returned too.

  In early January, Genrikh Yagoda, now the chairman of the OGPU, issued abrupt instructions to immediately arrest ‘the most prominent private grain procurement agents and most inveterate grain merchants … who are disrupting set procurement and market prices’. In practice, anyone making a living trading grain was now liable to be reclassified as a criminal. By the middle of the month more than five hundred people had been imprisoned across Ukraine, and more investigations were underway. In Cherkasy, Mariupol and Kharkhiv, among other places, police discovered many tonnes of grain that had been kept back because peasants had, quite rationally, been waiting for prices to rise. The police pounced upon this evidence of conspiracy.19

  The OGPU meanwhile concluded that some of the dealers concealing this grain were aware of police repression and seeking actively to avoid it. Many had moved their grain to prevent being arrested; others, hoping for the wave of repression to subside, were paying peasants to hold onto grain in order to wait for a better moment.20 The OGPU ended all this activity with a blunt decree on 19 January: anyone who refused to sell grain to the state at the agreed price would be arrested and tried.21 With that order the New Economic Policy effectively came to an end.

  The grain traders were useful scapegoats. But in truth, Soviet economic policy in the 1920s had rested on a fundamental contradiction, and even ordinary people could see it. At the beginning of 1929, Semen Ivanisov, an educated peasant from Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine, wrote a letter to a friend who was a party official. The letter praised Lenin, who had once written of the ‘indispensable link’ between workers and peasants. But Ivanisov feared that Lenin’s sentiments had been forgotten. ‘What do we see now? The correct relationship with the peasantry, a relationship of allies – it doesn’t exist.’

  Instead, wrote Ivanisov, he and his fellow peasants were now in an impossible situation. If they worked hard and built up their farms then they became kulaks, ‘enemies of the people’. But if they took the other option and remained bedniaks, poor peasants – then they were worse off than the ‘American peasants’ with whom they were supposed to be competing. There seemed no way out of the trap. ‘What shall we do,’ Ivanisov asked his friend, ‘how shall we live?’ His own situation was deteriorating. ‘Now we have to sell our cows, without that there is nothing. At home there are tears, endless shouting, suffering, curses. I would suggest that if you should go soon and visit a peasant family and listen, you would say: this isn’t life, but rather hard labour, hell, worse than the devil knows what. That’s all.’22

  Ivanisov, like many others, faced an impossible choice: ideologically approved poverty on the one hand, or dangerously unacceptable wealth on the other. The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state. Even Maurice Hindus, the American journalist who generally admired the USSR, could see the problem: ‘When therefore a man came into possession of two or three horses, as many or a few more cows, about half a dozen pigs, and when he raised three or four hundred poods of rye or wheat, he fell into the category of kulak.’23 Once a peasant became wealthy and successful he became an enemy. Farmers who were too efficient or effective immediately became figures of suspicion. Even girls stayed away, Hindus recorded: ‘Nobody wants to marry a rich man nowadays.’24 Eugene Lyons in Moscow noted that ‘the more industrious, more unscrupulous and more prosperous peasants’ were all under huge pressure. The writer Mikhail Sholokhov, in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, also depicted a character whose farm had simply prospered too much:

  I sowed twelve, then twenty, and even thirty hectares, think of that! I worked, and my son and his wife. I only hired a labourer a couple of times at the busiest season. What was the Soviet government’s order in those years? Sow as much as you can! And now … I’m afraid. I’m afraid that because of my thirty hectares they’ll drag me through the needle’s eye, and call me a kulak.25

  Thus had the Soviet Union comprehensively destroyed the peasants’ incentive to produce more grain.

  Perhaps not all of the Bolsheviks understood this contradiction. But Stalin certainly did, and in the winter of 1928 he and his most senior comrades decided to take it on directly. The Politburo sent one of its members, Anastas Mikoyan, to the North Caucasus in order to uncover the source of the food shortages. Molotov went to Ukraine. Stalin himself decided to go to Siberia.

  The records of Stalin’s three-week trip are revealing. In the reports he wrote afterwards, he observed that most of his party colleagues on the ground – some of whom still dared to argue with him – were convinced that the grain shortage could be solved by technical changes, for example by offering the peasants more manufactured goods in exchange for grain. But would a better supply of shoes for peasant children really fix the longer-term problem? At a meeting with Siberian party leaders, Stalin, clad in a brand-new sheepskin coat, unexpectedly began to think aloud about the deep flaws of Soviet agriculture. After the revolution, he reminded them, peasants had occupied and divided up the private estates of aristocrats and monasteries, thus creating hundreds of thousands of tiny, unproductive farms and similar numbers of poor peasants. But this was precisely the problem: kulaks – rich farmers – were so much more productive than their poor neighbours because they had held on to bigger properties.

  The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay ‘in the fact that his farming is large scale’. Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology. Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became kulaks, and therefore ideologically unacceptable.

  What should be done about this? Stalin’s ideology would not let him conclude that successful farmers should be allowed to accumulate more land and build up major estates, as had happened in every other society in history. It was impossible, unimaginable, that a communist state could contain major landowners, or even wealthy farmers. But Stalin also understood that persecution of successful peasants would not lead to higher grain production either. His conclusion: collective farming was the only solution. ‘Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms … for us is the only path.’26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms. The peasants had to give up their privately owned land, pool their resources, and join them.

  Collectivization had, as noted, been tried on a small scale and mostly abandoned in 1918–19. But it aligned with several other Marxist ideas and had some advocates in the Communist Party, so the idea had remained in the air. Some hoped that the creation of collectively owned communal farms – kolkhoz – would ‘proletarianize’ the peasantry, making farmers into wage labourers who would begin to think and act like workers. During a discussion of the subject in 1929 one advocate explained that ‘the large kolkhoz – and this is entirely clear to everyone – must in its type be a production economy similar to our socialist factories and state farms’.27 The collectivization propaganda also contained more than a whiff of the Soviet cult of science and of the machine, the belief that modern technology, increased efficiency and rationalized management techniques could solve all problems. Land would be shared. Farming equipment would also be shared. In the name of efficiency, tractors and combine harvesters would be
controlled by state-owned Machine Tractor Stations, which would lease them out as needed to the collective farms.

  Collectivization and centrally planned agriculture also matched Stalin’s plans for Soviet industry. In 1928 the Soviet government would approve its first ‘Five-Year Plan’, an economic programme that mandated a massive, unprecedented 20 per cent annual increase in industrial output, the adoption of the seven-day week – workers would rest in shifts, so that factories would never have to close – and a new ethic of workplace competition. Foremen, labourers and managers alike vied with one another to fulfil, or even to over-fulfil, the plan. The massive increase in industrial investment created thousands of new working-class jobs, many of which would be taken by peasants forced off their land. It also created an urgent need for coal, iron and natural resources of all kinds, many of which could only be found in the far north or far east of the USSR. These resources would also be mined by peasants made redundant by collectivization.

  The ‘emergency methods’, the collectivization drive and rapid industrialization quickly became Stalin’s signature policies. This ‘Great Turnaround’ or ‘Great Upheaval’, as it became known, represented a return to the principles of War Communism and, in practice, a second revolution. Because the new policies represented a clear departure from ideas that Stalin and others had been advocating for several years, and because his main party rivals were bitter opponents of collectivization in particular, he became deeply invested, both personally and politically, in their success. Eventually, Stalin would personally redraft the collectivization orders so as to implement them as radically and rapidly as possible.28

  In the wake of Stalin’s visit, the Siberian OGPU realized that they had to ensure their leader’s success. Instead of waiting for contributions from the peasants as they had done in the past, they abandoned any pretence of rule of law, sent agents into the countryside, searched and arrested farmers and took their grain, just as they had in the days of the civil war. ‘Comrade Stalin gave us our motto,’ declared one local grain collector: ‘Press, beat, squeeze.’29 They got results. Even before he had returned to Moscow, Stalin sent a telegram to his colleagues, declaring success: ‘We greet the Central Committee with 80 million poods [1.31 million metric tonnes] of grain for January. This is a great victory for the Party.’ February, he claimed, would be the ‘most important fighting month in Siberia’.30

  Buoyed by these reports, Stalin intensified the argument for collectivization at two tumultuous Central Committee meetings in the spring and summer of 1928. In the speeches he made at the time, it is clear that he was, in part, pushing hard for the policy change precisely because it was opposed by his remaining serious party rivals, especially Bukharin, whom he now denounced as a ‘Right-Opportunist’. Even apart from its ramifications in the countryside, the collectivization policy was an ideological tool that established Stalin as the indisputable leader of the party. Eventually, the acceptance of his policy would invest him with authority and legitimacy inside the party. His opponents would recant their dissent.31

  In the spring and summer of 1928 the reverse was also true: Stalin used the internal party conflict in order to build up an ideological case for the collectivization drive. At the July plenum, he argued, infamously, that the exploitation of the peasants was the key to the industrialization of the USSR: ‘You know that for hundreds of years England squeezed the juice out of all its colonies, from every continent, and thus injected extra investment into its industry.’ The USSR could not take that same path, Stalin argued. Nor, he declared, could it rely on foreign loans. The only remaining solution was, in effect, for the country to ‘colonize’ its own peasants: squeeze them harder and invest this ‘internal accumulation’ into Soviet industry. To support this transformation, peasants would have to pay ‘a tribute’ so that the Soviet Union could ‘further develop the rate of industrial growth’:

  This situation, one must say, is unpleasant. But we wouldn’t be Bolsheviks if we skated over this matter and closed our eyes to the fact that without this additional tax on the peasants, unfortunately, our industry and our country will not be able to manage.

  As for the ‘emergency methods’ that were causing so much pain, these had already ‘saved the country from a general economic crisis … we would now have a serious crisis of the whole national economy, starvation in the cities, starvation in the army’. Those who opposed them ‘are dangerous people’. The once-lauded ‘tight link’ between the peasants and the working class was no longer necessary: ‘the only class which holds power is the proletariat’.32

  Stalin’s language was deeply rooted in his Marxist understanding of economics. He had arrived at the ‘solution’ of rapid collectivization not by accident, but after a careful logical process. He had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialize the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land. He had knowingly decided that they would have to pay ‘tribute’ to the workers’ state, and he knew that they would suffer in the process.

  Was forced collectivization, accompanied by violence, really the only solution? Of course not. Other options were open to the Soviet leadership. Bukharin, for example, believed in voluntary collectivization and raising the price of bread.33 But Stalin’s understanding of Soviet agriculture, his fanatical commitment to his ideology and his own experiences – especially his faith in the efficacy of terror – made mass, forced collectivization appear to him inevitable and unavoidable. He would now stake his personal reputation on the success of this policy.

  The New Economic Policy was not the only inconsistent Bolshevik policy, nor was it the only one to hit a crisis point in 1927. ‘Ukrainization’ also contained within itself a profound contradiction, which became obvious around this time. On the one hand, the policy was essentially instrumental: the Bolsheviks in Moscow created it in order to placate Ukrainian nationalists, to convince them that Soviet Ukraine really was a Ukrainian state, and to draw them in to Soviet power structures. Yet to succeed, Ukrainization could not appear to be instrumental: if Ukrainian nationalists were to become loyal citizens of the USSR, they needed to believe that Ukrainization was real.34

  In order to win over Ukrainian nationalists, the Soviet state was therefore obliged to appoint ethnic Ukrainians to leading positions in the country, to fund the teaching of Ukrainian, and to allow the development of an ‘authentic’ Ukrainian national art and literature that would be regarded as distinct and different from Russian or Soviet culture. But these actions did not placate the nationalists. Instead, they encouraged them to demand more rapid change. Eventually, they encouraged them to question the primacy of Moscow altogether.

  The loudest noises of discontent came from the literary world, where ambitions were expanding rapidly. Both the Hart and Pluh groups, like the rest of the Soviet artistic avant-garde, survived only briefly. In January 1926 they were folded into a more explicitly political organization, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoï Literatury, known by its Ukrainian acronym, VAPLITE. The group’s leader, Mykola Khvylovyi, had joined the Bolsheviks during the civil war and even belonged briefly to the Cheka. But his identification with Ukraine afforded him some distance from the Moscow Bolsheviks, and he began to develop in a different direction. Eschewing provincialism, ‘backwardness’ and the peasantry, railing against the ‘servile psychology’ of his compatriots, Khvylovyi aspired instead for Ukraine to develop an urban literary culture. He sought to identify Ukraine with Europe, not Russia, and by 1925 he was willing to say so:

  Since our literature can at last follow its own path of development, we are faced with the question: by which of the world’s literatures should we set our course? On no account by the Russian. This is definite and unconditional. Our political union must not be confused with literature. Ukrainian poetry must flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles … the point is that Russian literature has weighed down upon us for centuries as master of the si
tuation, it has conditioned our psyche to play the slavish imitator …35

  The Ukrainian artist Mykhailo Boichuk, a modernist who had been part of the revolutionary avant-garde, had come to a similar conclusion around this time. Ukraine should construct a ‘great wall’ on its border with Russia, as the Chinese had done, ‘a barrier even for birds’, so that Ukrainian culture stood a chance of developing by itself.36

  An echo of that language appeared in the Ukrainian press, which was becoming evangelistic about spreading the benefits of Ukrainization beyond the country’s borders. As we have seen, the state approved of the idea that Soviet Ukraine should begin to exercise influence on Ukrainian speakers abroad, particularly in Poland. But in 1927, Soviet Ukraine also began looking to exercise influence on Ukrainians in Russia, and in particular on those in Kuban, a province of the North Caucasus where Ukrainian speakers outnumbered Russian speakers by two to one, and three to one in the countryside. The republic’s government newspaper published a series of twelve articles on Kuban and the North Caucasus, describing the history of Ukrainian influence in the province and the warm feelings that Ukrainians in Kuban felt for their brethren in Ukraine.

  The series of articles openly advocated Ukrainization, infuriating the Russophone communists who ruled Kuban. Soon after, they arrested and prosecuted a group of alleged saboteurs, accusing them of advocating the transfer of Kuban to Ukraine. One confessed, or was made to confess, that he had been inspired by articles in the Ukrainian press.37 Fears that the region might become ‘Ukrainianized’, and thus to the Bolsheviks politically unreliable, would have fatal significance a few years later.