Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  The peasant farmers themselves, whether or not they were classified as kulaks, were even less enthusiastic about the urban activists. The oral historian William Noll, interviewing Ukrainians in the 1980s, found that folk memories of the Twenty-Five Thousanders were still strong. As in Dolot’s description, they were remembered as incompetent: they used the wrong seeds for the soil, gave bad advice, knew nothing about the countryside.21 They were also remembered as foreign, Russians or Jews. Oleksandr Honcharenko, a young man at the time, later recalled – incorrectly, since many of his subjects came from Ukrainian cities – that the Twenty-Five Thousanders were ‘all Russians’. He also remembered that in his village in Cherkasy province the brigadier – ‘obviously’ a Russian – was rejected immediately: ‘He came to convince the peasants how wonderful life was under the Soviets. But, who listened? No one. This liar made his way from one end of the village to the other. No one wanted anything to do with him.’22

  Of course the urban activists were unpopular not just because they seemed ‘foreign’, but because their policy was unpopular – profoundly so, as the next chapter will explain. But if a small number of peasants eventually came, like Kopelev, to sympathize with their views, most had the opposite reaction. If anything, the peasants’ stubborn opposition made the activists angrier, more prone to violence, and more convinced of the rightness of their cause. In January 1930, Genrikh Yagoda, the deputy director of the secret police at the time, told his senior staff that resistance would be fierce. The kulak ‘understands perfectly well that he will perish with collectivization and therefore he renders more and more brutal and fierce resistance, as we see already, [ranging] from insurrectionary plots and counter-revolutionary kulak organizations to arson and terror’.23

  This notion trickled down to the villages, where the emissaries of the working class saw the peasants’ unfriendliness as evidence of the ‘kulak counter-revolutionary tendencies’ that they had been warned to expect. Much of the subsequent cruelty can be explained by this clash between what the urban activists wanted and the very different reality in the countryside itself.

  They also had to prove themselves and their loyalty. ‘Your task,’ a local communist told Antonina Solovieva, ‘is to engage in agitational work among the village youth … and to find out where the kulaks are hiding the grain and who is wrecking agricultural machinery.’ In addition, ‘you will need to talk to these people and explain party policies and collectivization to them’. Solovieva, then a young student, had a moment of doubt: ‘This was a huge task; were we up to it? We really knew nothing about these things; we did not know how to begin.’ Resolved to prove herself – ‘there was no time to lose’ – she had no incentive to be kind.24

  There is no doubt that the collectivization drive was ordered by Moscow, imposed ‘from above’, and that it was Stalin’s personal policy, as first outlined on his trip to Siberia at the end of 1928. Nor is there any doubt that collectivization was first brought to the countryside by urban outsiders who were culturally alien and, in the case of Ukraine, linguistically and often ethnically alien as well. But the collectivization drive did find some supporters among both local officials and peasants. Just as Aleksandr Shlikhter had set poor villagers against wealthier ones in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the Bolsheviks yet again sought to empower one group of peasants so that they could exploit their neighbours on behalf of the state.

  As soon as they arrived, the outside agitators began to identify and elevate local collaborators – the aktiv – who could help them to do just that. Pasha Angelina, later a celebrated ‘shock worker’ and one of the first female tractor-drivers in the USSR, wrote a highly politicized memoir of collectivization in Starobesheve, her village in Donetsk province. The memoir is notable for its rigid conformity to the socialist realist template – being a predictable tale of the triumph of the Communist Party over all obstacles – as well as for the genuine hatred evoked in her wooden prose. Although she gave few details, Angelina and her family had played an active part in forcing their neighbours to join the new collective farms: ‘Those were difficult days, filled with tension and fierce class struggle. It was only after defeating the kulaks and chasing them off the land that we, the poor, felt truly in charge.’ Neither she nor her parents and siblings felt any remorse:

  We went after the ‘kurkuls’ who were strong and ruthless in their hatred of everything new … Our family, and many families like ours, had been working for the kulaks for many generations. We realized that it was impossible for us to live on the same earth as those bloodsuckers. The kulaks stood between us and the good life, and no amount of persuasion, constraint or ordinary taxation was sufficient to move them out of the way. Once again, the party understood our needs and showed us the solution. Through Comrade Stalin, the party told us: ‘Move from limiting the kulaks to the liquidation of the kulaks as a class …’25

  She and her siblings were not alone. A Ukrainian secret police report from February 1930 described with enthusiasm the crowds of poor and so-called ‘middle’ peasants, who were rather less impoverished, gathering with ‘red flags and revolutionary songs’ in some villages to oversee collectivization.26 Some of these local participants were former members of the ‘committees of poor peasants’, exactly the same people who had led the grain requisition drives in 1918–20 and felt some loyalty to the Soviet system. Matvii Havryliuk, who had worked as a requisitioner in 1921 despite the kulaks ‘threatening to kill me and my family’, leapt at the chance to rejoin the struggle: ‘All of 1930 I was an agitator, participated in the brigades … I even found those kulaks who tried to avoid de-kulakization by hiding in the woods. I personally brought them to justice.’27

  Others sought to use the new revolutionary situation to improve their status. As the OGPU itself recognized, many of the ‘poor peasants’ were in fact ‘criminal elements’ who saw a way to profit off the misfortune of their neighbours.28 Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the OGPU boss who travelled back and forth between Ukraine and Moscow at this time, worried that the authorities relied too much upon people with no background or experience: ‘We take a Komsomol member, we add two or three poor peasants and we call this an “aktiv”, and this aktiv conducts the affairs of the village.’29

  Like the Twenty-Five Thousanders themselves, some of these local collaborators found Bolshevik ideology appealing. They believed the promises of a ‘better life’, a phrase that must have meant full stomachs to some and something more mystical to others, and they thought that the destruction of the party’s ‘enemies’ could make the better life arrive faster. As in 1918, collectivization would eventually help create a new rural elite, one that felt confident about its right to rule. Activists argued, even years later, that despite the opposition, the collectivization was ‘for the greater good’.30 Many, though not all, would be rewarded with jobs and better rations. The strengthening of this new elite also helped, in turn, to intimidate the opponents of collectivization further. An OGPU report from Ukraine in March 1930 explained, approvingly, that ‘the activity of the village masses was so great that throughout the period of the operation there was no need to call on the armed forces.’ Thanks to the ‘enthusiasm and activity’ of local volunteers, opponents of collectivization felt abandoned and alone. This, according to the OGPU, removed the incentive for resistance and demoralized those under arrest.31

  It is impossible to know, from the evidence available, just how much of the ‘enthusiasm and activity’ was real. The existing memoirs hint that many of those who joined the collectivization brigades, perhaps even the majority, were neither enthusiastic nor cynical nor criminal, but simply afraid: they felt that they had no option but to join in. They were afraid of being hurt or being beaten, of going hungry, of being named as ‘kulaks’ or enemies themselves. Komsomol members received direct orders to participate, and may have believed that it was impossible to refuse.32 One later remembered, ‘once all of the students and teachers who were Komsomol and party members were ordered to surro
und one of the villages to prevent anyone from escaping while [secret police vans] drove the peasants out of the village to the heated box-cars of the trains waiting to deport them’.33 A teacher recalled that ‘all teachers were considered helpers in the socialization of the village, so that we were automatically recruited as activists to encourage people to join the collective farms’. Those who refused could lose their property or be transported to another village.34

  To those who opposed them, these collaborators were ‘lazy loiterers’ or ‘thieves’ who hoped to profit from the misfortune of others.35 But many of the local perpetrators would have been as terrorized and traumatized as their victims, intimidated by the same undertones of violence and the language of threat. And when famine took hold, some of them would become victims themselves.

  One morning in January 1930, not long after the Twenty-Five Thousanders had arrived in Dolot’s village, the peasants awoke to discover that several of their most prominent citizens – a teacher, a clerk, a store owner and several relatively wealthy farmers, all among the most respected members of the community – had been arrested. Immediately afterwards, the wives of the arrested men were evicted from their homes along with their children. One of the women, the wife of a farmer known as Uncle Tymish, tried to fight back after they grabbed her:

  She struggled and pulled their hair. She was finally dragged out of the house and thrown onto the sleigh. While two men held her, the children were brought out. A few of their possessions were thrown onto the sleigh and it moved off. Still restrained by the two officials, Uncle Tymish’s wife and his children, wailing and shouting, disappeared in the winter haze.36

  Within days of deporting this prosperous farmer and his wife – whether to Siberia or to another part of Ukraine nobody knew – the men from Moscow had occupied Uncle Tymish’s house and refitted it to serve as a district office.

  What Dolot had witnessed was the beginning of ‘de-kulakization’ – the ugly, bureaucratic term that was shorthand for the ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’.37 But who was a kulak? As noted, this term was not traditional everywhere in the USSR, and certainly not in Ukraine. Although widely used in newspapers, by agitators and by authorities of all kinds since the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, it had always been vague and ill-defined. In her memoir of the Russian Revolution, Ekaterina Olitskaia noted that in the civil war era:

  Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks. A household that had two cows, a cow and a calf or a pair of horses was considered kulak. Villages that refused to give up excess grain or expose kulaks were raided by punitive detachments. So peasants had special meetings to decide who was going to be a kulak. I was astonished by all this, but the peasants explained: ‘We were ordered to uncover kulaks, so what else can we do?’ … To spare the children they usually chose childless bachelors.38

  In 1929, just as in 1919, the notion of a ‘wealthy’ peasant remained a relative thing. In a poor village, ‘wealthy’ could mean a man with two pigs instead of one. A ‘wealthy’ peasant might also be one who inspired dislike or envy among his neighbours – or who acquired enemies among the village rulers or the local communists.

  As the state demands to ‘eliminate the kulaks as a class’ became a priority, Ukrainian authorities felt the need to find a better definition. In August 1929 the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree identifying the ‘symptoms’ of kulak farms: a farm that regularly hired labour; a farm that contained a mill, a tannery, brick factory or other small ‘industrial’ plant; a farm that rented buildings or agricultural implements on a regular basis. Any farm whose owners or managers involved themselves in trade, usury, or any other activity that produced ‘unearned income’ was certainly run by kulaks too.39

  Over time, this economic definition would evolve. Needing to explain how it was possible that people who did not employ hired labour or rent property could still oppose collectivization, the authorities invented a new term. The podkulachniki, the ‘under-kulaks’ – or perhaps better translated as ‘kulak agents’ – were poor peasants who were somehow under the influence of a kulak relative, employer, neighbour or friend. A podkulachnik might be a poor man who had had wealthier parents and thus inherited some kind of kulak essence. Alternatively, he might have been somehow duped or misled into opposing the Bolsheviks, and could not be re-educated.40

  Other poor peasants became kulaks simply because they refused to join the collective farm. Maurice Hindus stood in the back of the room while a visiting party member harangued a gathering of women in the Belarusian village of Bolshoe Bykovo about the so-called benefits of joining the collective farm: ‘They would have to bother hardly at all with their babies, he declared, for these would be cared for in well-equipped nurseries. They would not have to roast over ovens, for community kitchens would do all the cooking …’

  The response to this tirade was silence – and then a ‘babel of shouts’. Finally, one of the women spat at the whole gathering: ‘Only pigs have come here; I might as well go home.’ A local agitator shouted back: ‘What do we see? What do we hear? One of our citizens, a poor woman, but one with a decided kulak quirk in her mind, has just called us pigs!’ In other words, it was not her wealth that defined the woman as ‘kulak’ – or rather as a person with a ‘kulak quirk in her mind’ – but her opposition to collectivization.41

  The definition, infinitely adaptable, seemed to expand most easily to encompass the smaller ethnic groups who lived in the USSR, including Poles and Germans, both of whom had a distinct presence in Ukraine. In 1929 and 1930 many Ukrainian officials believed that all of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine, who had been there since the eighteenth century, should be classified as kulaks. In practice, they were de-kulakized and deported at about three times the rate of ethnic Ukrainians, and were often targeted for special abuse. ‘Wherever you destructive insects have settled in our land,’ a collective farm boss told one group of ethnic German villagers, ‘no God will drop manna from heaven to help you, and nowhere will anyone hear your miserable complaints.’42 Jews, by contrast, were very rarely classified as kulaks. Although many were arrested as speculators, very few of them owned land, since the Russian empire had restricted their ability to own property.

  Initially, some in the OGPU were uneasy about how quickly the definition of ‘kulak’ evolved. In a note to Stalin written in March 1930, Yagoda feared that ‘middle-income peasants, poor peasants, and even farm labourers and workers’ were falling into the ‘kulak’ category. So were former ‘red partisans’ and the families of Red Army soldiers. In the Central Volga province, ‘middle and poor peasants’ were counted as ‘dyed-in-the-wool kulaks’. In Ukraine, Yagoda complained, poor peasants were counted as kulaks merely on the grounds that they were ‘babblers’ or troublemakers. In the Central Black Earth province – one of the Russian administrative districts to the north of Ukraine – the list of kulaks was found to contain three poor peasants and a day labourer, the declassé son of a merchant.43

  Yet the OGPU was itself responsible for the rapidly expanding definition: in large part, the numbers of people identified as kulaks kept increasing because Moscow said the numbers had to go up. Orders to liquidate the kulaks came accompanied by numbers and lists: how many should be removed, how many exiled, how many sent to the newly expanding concentration camps of the Gulag, how many resettled in other villages. Policemen on the ground were responsible for meeting these quotas, whether they were able to identify kulaks or not. And if they couldn’t find them, then they would have to be created.

  Like the central planners of the same era, the OGPU was nothing if not ambitious. Of all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks: 15,000 of the most ‘diehard and active kulaks’ were to be arrested, 30,000–35,000 kulak families were to be exiled, and all 50,000 were to be removed to the Northern Krai, the northern Russian region near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. By contrast, the comp
arable kulak numbers from Belarus were 4,000–5,000, 6,000–7,000 and 12,000. From the Central Black Earth province 3,000–5,000 were arrested, 10,000–25,000 were to be exiled, and a total of 20,000 were to be resettled. The high numbers for Ukraine may have reflected the higher percentage of peasants there. They may also have reflected Moscow’s perception that the Ukraine’s peasants remained the greatest source of political threat.44

  The need to meet these high numbers also meant that anti-kulak rhetoric tended to become more extreme over time, not more moderate. As early as January 1930 an OGPU operative used the term ‘kulak-White-Guard-bandits’ to describe opponents of collectivization, thus stigmatizing the kulaks not only as class enemies but as national enemies – agents of the ‘White Guard’ – and criminals.45 Language also quickly became more extreme on the ground. In Dolot’s village one mandatory meeting ended in chaos after villagers refused to sign up for the collective farm. The brigade ‘propagandist’ urged them on, but no one responded:

  ‘Come on! It’s late,’ he urged us. ‘The sooner you sign in, the sooner you go home.’ No one moved. All sat silently. The chairman, bewildered and nervous, whispered something in the propagandist’s ear … We kept our silence. This irritated the officials, especially the chairman. A moment after the propagandist finished his admonishment, the chairman rushed from behind the table, grabbed the first man before him, and shook him hard. ‘You … you, enemy of the people!’ he shouted, his voice choking with rage. ‘What are you waiting for? Maybe Petliura?’46