Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Buffered sometimes by faith, sometimes by anger at the theft of their possessions, the peasants grew bolder. In response to the Soviet propaganda songs that they heard played over and over again – songs with refrains such as ‘Our burdens have lightened! Our lives have gladdened!’ – they began to write their own:

  Hey, our harvest knows no limits or measures.

  It grows, ripens, and even spills over onto the earth,

  Boundless over the fields … While the patrolling pioneers

  Come out to guard the ripening wheat-ears of grain.19

  Songs and poetry of resistance were passed from village to village. According to one inhabitant of the Dnipropetrovsk province, they were sometimes even printed and bound into small booklets.20 Graffiti formed a part of the culture of resistance too: one Ukrainian peasant later remembered inscriptions appearing on the walls of houses: ‘Down with Stalin’, ‘Down with Communists’. They were wiped off, and the next day they appeared again. Eventually, two men were arrested as members of the ‘organization’ that had written them.21

  Protest also took the form of escape, not just from the countryside but from the Soviet Union itself. Already in January 1930 guards caught three peasants in the Kamianets-Podilskyi border province trying to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border.22 A month later, a group of 400 peasants from several villages marched towards the border shouting ‘We don’t want collectives, we’re going to Poland!’ Along the way they attacked and beat up anyone who stood in their way, until they were finally stopped by border guards. The following day another crowd from the same group of villages marched towards the border, also shouting that they would ask for help from the Poles. They too were stopped by guards, this time only 400 metres from the border. Secret police also recorded several attempts to raid grain warehouses near the border. Peasants who lived close to the border seem to have been inspired by the proximity of the ‘normal’ life of their neighbours on the other side.23

  Inevitably, these spontaneous protests, church meetings and border marches gave way to organized violence. All across the USSR – but with significantly higher numbers in Ukraine – people who saw that they were about to lose their possessions and possibly their lives took matters into their own hands. The OGPU archives record what happened next.

  In Sumy province thirteen ‘kulaks’ took the weapons they had saved from the civil war, slipped into the forest and became partisans. Near Bila Tserkva, in Kyiv province, another ex-partisan was, according to a secret police report, organizing an armed band. Pasha Angelina, the female tractor-driver who had so delighted in the downfall of her kulak neighbours, felt this violence first hand:

  In the summer of 1929, when my brother, Kostia, my sister, Lelia and I were walking to a Komsomol meeting in the neighboring village of Novobesheve, somebody shot at us with a sawed-off shotgun … I will never forget how we ran, barefoot, through the prickly grass, our hearts beating wildly with fear.24

  The OGPU responded immediately to these early ‘terrorist incidents’. By 6 February 1930, only a few months after collectivization had been formally launched in November, the Soviet secret police had already arrested 15,985 people across the Soviet Union for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ in the countryside. Of that number, about a third were Ukrainians. Between 12 and 17 February the secret police across the USSR made another 18,000 arrests. Those hauled into prison were accused of planning organized armed uprisings, of ‘recruiting’ rebels among the poor and middle peasants, and even of seeking contacts with the peasant soldiers in the Red Army, in order to alienate them from the government and convert them to the kulak cause.25

  None of this news was sufficient to convince Stalin to abandon collectivization or to reconsider whether it was a good idea to force farmers into collective farms they detested. The situation still seemed as if it was under control. Nevertheless, he was worried enough by these initial reports to tone down the collectivization rhetoric – with unexpected results.

  ‘Dizzy with Success’. That was the title of an article written by Stalin and published in Pravda on 2 March 1930. The phrase might well have been borrowed from Josef Reingold, the Chekist who had used the same expression in 1919 to bring a halt to the bloody repression of the Don Cossacks. But whether or not he hinted at any such allusion, Stalin certainly did not intend any irony. ‘Dizzy with Success’ began with a long tribute to the great achievements of collectivization. Not only was the policy going well, he declared, it was proceeding far better and far more quickly than expected. The USSR had already ‘overfulfilled’ the Five Year Plan for collectivization, he declared: ‘Even our enemies are forced to admit that the successes are substantial.’ After only a few weeks the countryside had already made a ‘radical turn … towards socialism’. An extraordinary amount had been accomplished – so much so that perhaps it was time to slow the pace of change. Even such a great achievement had drawbacks, he warned:

  Such successes sometimes induce a spirit of vanity and conceit … People not infrequently become intoxicated by such successes, they become dizzy with success, lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities … adventurist attempts are made to solve all questions of socialist construction in a trice … Hence the party’s task is to wage a determined struggle against these sentiments, which are dangerous and harmful to our cause, and to drive them out of the party.26

  Collectivization, Stalin disingenuously reminded the cadres, was intended to be ‘voluntary’. It was not supposed to require force. It might not progress uniformly: not every region would be able to collectivize at the same pace. Because of the enormous enthusiasm, he feared these principles had been forgotten. Some excesses had occurred.

  Of course, neither Stalin nor anyone else back in Moscow took responsibility for these ‘excesses’, either then or later. Nor did he give any real details. The murders and beatings, the children left outside in the snow with no clothes – all of this naturally went unmentioned. Instead, Stalin shifted the blame for any mistakes squarely onto the shoulders of local party members, the men and women on the lowest rung of the hierarchy, who had ‘become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision’. He mocked them for using militaristic language – which was, of course, an echo of his own – and condemned their ‘blockheaded’ attempts to lump different kinds of farms together. He even took them to task for removing church bells: ‘Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of the collective farm movement, these unworthy threats against the peasants? Nobody, except our enemies!’27

  Why did he write this article? By the time it appeared, Stalin would have seen the secret police accounts of rebellion, resistance and armed attacks on party members. He may also have known that at least some of the Communist Party leadership in both Russia and Ukraine had doubts about the policy. Although these critics only began to speak openly some months later, Stalin might already have sensed the potential for a backlash against him in the wake of a failed or chaotic drive to collectivization, so he sought someone else to blame. The lowest party officials – the local leaders, the village bosses – made the perfect target: they were far away, they were nameless, and they were powerless. The letter neatly shifted the responsibility for what was clearly a disastrous policy away from him, and onto a social group far from Moscow.

  Ostensibly, the article was also conciliatory. Stalin seemed to be seeking at least a temporary halt to the worst excesses of his policy. In the wake of the article some genuine concessions were made as well: the Central Committee decided, for example, to allow peasants to keep a family cow, some poultry, and their own kitchen gardens.28 But if these gestures were meant to stop the rebellion then they backfired. Far from calming the peasants, ‘Dizzy with Success’ inspired a new wave of insurrection, a vast array of armed and unarmed resistance. One official christened this movement ‘March Fever’, but that expression was misleading: it implies that the protest wave was a brief illness, or perhaps a for
m of temporary insanity. What began to happen was in fact far more profound. ‘What the state labelled a fever,’ wrote Lynne Viola, ‘was in fact a massive peasant rebellion, reasoned in cause and content.’29

  The impact was immediate. All across the USSR party officials read and discussed Stalin’s article at party meetings and with one another. In Myron Dolot’s village, as in many villages, a local activist read the ‘Dizzy with Success’ article aloud to the villagers. As he was explaining that mistakes had been made, that errors had been committed, and that party members had made grave miscalculations, ‘the assembled crowd was deathly still’. Then the activist added his own view: the Jews within the party were at fault, not the party itself. This explanation neatly exempted himself and his comrades from blame. ‘What happened next,’ wrote Dolot, ‘was a spontaneous riot.’ ‘Away with you!’ one man shouted. ‘We’ve had enough of you,’ cried another. ‘We have been duped! Let’s get our horses and cows out of that stinking collective farm before it’s too late!’ In a disorganized wave the villagers ran to get their livestock, tripping over one another in the dark. About twenty peasants were shot in the subsequent chaos.30

  In the days that followed, similar riots broke out all across the Soviet Union, and in a few places they acquired new layers of sophistication. The first signs of organized opposition that had so worried Balytsky in January became, by March, April and May, a real movement. The riots quickly became organized – sometimes very well organized – and they acquired a much more obvious political character. Men and women across the USSR, but especially and most numerously from Ukraine, attacked, beat and murdered activists in the spring of 1930. They organized raids on warehouses and grain storage containers. They broke locks, stole grain and other food, and distributed it around villages. They set fire to collective and Soviet property. They attacked ‘collaborators’. In one village those who were ‘not satisfied with the regime … burnt down the houses of the [collective farm] activists’.31 The activist who had ‘donned the priest’s vestments’ and stomped on the iconostasis was found dead in a ditch the following day.’32

  There was little pity for the victims. One man who had played in a local concert band remembered being asked to play at the funerals of ‘Twenty-Five Thousanders’ who had been murdered by peasants. ‘For us it was a happy event because every time somebody was killed, they would take us to the village, give us some food and then we would play at the funeral. And we were looking forward every time to the next funeral, because that meant food for us.’33

  Some of the angriest protests took the form of babski bunty, a phrase that literally translates as ‘women’s revolts’ or ‘riots’, though the word baba connotes not just a woman but a peasant woman, and implies something uncouth and irrational. Women had organized protests in the USSR before, in 1927 and 1928. But these riots had focused on food shortages, not politics. As one secret policeman wrote about those earlier protests, ‘In this period, demonstrations with the participation of women didn’t have, as a rule, any kind of clearly defined anti-Soviet character: crowds or groups of women gathered at state and cooperative organizations, demanding bread.’34

  In the spring of 1930 the peasant women’s inchoate demand for bread turned into equally rudimentary attacks on the men who had confiscated it. Crowds of women mobbed activists, Soviet officials and visiting dignitaries, demanding their property back. They shouted and chanted, sang songs and hurled threats. Others took matters into their own hands. In one Ukrainian village a young girl watched her mother, along with other ‘hungry women’, break the locks of the collective farm storehouse and take the stored grain; local officials, intimidated by the mob, called in provincial party officials and Komsomol members to help arrest the women and recover the grain. They remained in prison for two weeks.35 In another Ukrainian village a boy watched activists go from house to house claiming property on behalf of the collective farm. In response, a group of women stormed the farm and demanded everything back: ‘One woman grabs her plough; the other her horse; a third, the cow.’ Soldiers, or possibly secret police troops – the memoirist isn’t clear – then ‘came and chased all of these women away … all of the confiscated items, agricultural implements and horses, once again became part of the collective farm’.36 In early March 1930 some 500 ethnic German women from three different villages also spent a week demonstrating, demanding their property back from the collective farms and preventing them from functioning.37

  Sometimes the crowds went even further. The OGPU itself recorded an incident in Mariupol province in Ukraine, which began when a ‘mob’ of 300 women descended on the village council and demanded the key to the village church, which had been turned into an administrative building. The women then shouted that Naumenko, the boss of the village soviet, had broken down the door of a member of the church council. When he denied doing so, ‘The women sat him on a wagon (tachanka) and forcibly took him to the man’s house, where it was established that he had indeed been present. The mob decided to hold an impromptu trial.’

  The women then forced Naumenko to sign a paper promising to free the churchman – and then attempted a citizens’ arrest of a local party official, Filomynov. They publicly mocked both officials, spitting in their eyes and face, calling the communist officials ‘bandits, thieves and White guards’. The two men were freed only by the intervention of the OGPU. For several days afterwards, crowds armed with sticks and clubs continued to meet in front of local administrative buildings, demanding their property back. The rebellion was finally put down, and the peasants were ‘pacified’. But nobody believed that the Soviet state had won them over.38

  There were many such incidents. By the end of March 1930 the OGPU had recorded 2,000 ‘mass’ protests, the majority of which were exclusively female, in Ukraine alone.39 At the Ukrainian Party Congress in the summer of 1930 several speakers referred to the problem. Kaganovich, no longer head of the Ukrainian Communist Party but still keenly interested in Ukrainian affairs, declared that women had played the ‘most “advanced” role in the reaction against the collective farm’.40 The OGPU explained this phenomenon, naturally, as evidence of the influence of the ‘kulak-anti-Soviet element’ on their ignorant wives and daughters. More propaganda work and agitation among peasant women would surely solve the problem.41

  The OGPU also suspected that women were protesting precisely because they knew that they were less likely to be arrested. They may have been right: even without bringing in the men, women could attack officials – even physically attack them – with far less fear of retribution. Women’s protest also offered a ‘legitimate’ way for men to join: if activists arrived to fight peasant women, then the village men could leap in to defend them on the grounds that they were defending the honour of their wives, mothers and daughters.

  Not all of them needed a pretext. Many Ukrainian men had, in recent memory, taken up arms against hated rulers. As they had done during the civil war, some began to organize themselves into partisan units. As one remembered, ‘Rifle fire was heard at night. Partisan groups operated out of the forests. It was a typical peasant uprising. The village soviet was destroyed. Heads of the village soviet either fled or ran the risk of being killed.’42 Many local communists failed to escape and were killed on the spot.

  The violence was real, and it was widespread. Soviet documents from 1930 record 13,794 ‘incidents of terror’ and 13,754 ‘mass protests’, of which the largest number took place in Ukraine and were caused, in the OGPU’s own view, by collectivization and de-kulakization.43 The local records of the secret police in Ukraine are both more emotive and more precise about the rebellions on their territory. Despite prior attempts to confiscate weapons, they noted that peasants still had them: shotguns and rifles, kept in storage since the civil war period, as well as pikes and staves. In the spring of 1930 they began once again using them in a coordinated fashion. Balytsky did not doubt that he was witnessing the same kind of ‘anti-Soviet activity’ that had taken place in Ukraine
in the past. ‘Kulak counter-revolutionary activists have not stopped their struggle,’ he declared, ‘but are rather fortifying their position.’ Between 20 January and 9 February his men arrested 11,865 people, including members of ‘counter-revolutionary organizations and groups’, people who were preparing to carry out ‘armed revolution’ as well as those who could become the ‘ideologists’ of such a revolution. Anybody with any foreign links – especially links to Poland – was suspicious because they might receive ‘active assistance’ from abroad. The secret police also focused on those who were using anything that sounded like a ‘Ukrainian-chauvinist’ or ‘Petliurite’ slogan, and identified three major groups of such activists in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kremenchuk provinces, all important centres of strife during the civil war era.44

  Towards the middle of March the situation had worsened. On 9 March, Balytsky reported ‘mass uprisings’ in sixteen districts of Ukraine. Most had been ‘pacified’ by the time of his report, but in Shepetivka district in the western part of the country, ‘anti-Soviet and criminal elements’, some in groups as large as 300 to 500 people, had armed themselves with sawn-off shotguns, hunting rifles and axes. The Shepetivka peasants had been fighting since February, when Balytsky himself had arrived in the district. On his orders the OGPU had brought in cavalry units, armed with machine guns and backed up by border guards and militia.45 Balytsky claimed the OGPU had broken up the gang, but they had killed a Komsomol leader and were holding other communist leaders hostage; he feared the gang had made contact with another armed gang in a neighbouring district.46 Within only a few weeks of the publication of ‘Dizzy with Success’, the rebellion seemed very close to spinning out of control.