Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Reading through the archival documentation of the 1930 rebellions, it is not always easy to separate fact from fiction. How well organized was the dissent in reality? How much were the secret policemen inventing conspiracies where none existed? How much were they ‘finding’ the nationalist movements that they were seeking? To what extent were they inventing a problem that they could later claim to have solved? The OGPU had, after all, invented the fictitious SVU only a year earlier. A few years later, Soviet secret policemen would manufacture hundreds of thousands of false accusations in the course of the Great Terror of 1937–8.

  The archival accounts of the 1930 rebellion do at times sound deliberately embroidered, as if the OGPU was trying to show Moscow that it was faithfully following orders. In February 1930, for example, the OGPU conducted an operation against ‘counter-revolutionary kulak-white guard and bandit elements’ all across the Soviet Union, again arresting the largest numbers in Ukraine, where they identified seventy-eight individual cells of ‘anti-Soviet activists’. Among the most serious were the ‘Petliurivska’ bandits whom they believed had been organizing an armed uprising in the Kremenchuk district in central Ukraine, scheduled to take place in the spring of 1930. They identified the leader, ‘Manko’ – a name suspiciously similar to ‘Makhno’ – as a ‘former Petliura officer’ who had entered Ukraine illegally, crossing the Polish border in 1924.

  The report on the operation quoted Manko: ‘When the state authorities carry out collectivization, they will ensure their influence over the masses, their eyes will be everywhere, as a result of which it will be difficult to approach them and our organizational efforts will lead to failure.’ His group was also said to have ‘set as its goal the creation of an independent Ukraine on the basis of the right to private ownership of land’ and the preservation of the Cossack class. Allegedly, Manko intended to launch an attack on the city of Kremenchuk by starting fires outside the town and taking over the train station and the telegraph office.47

  Other groups were believed to harbour similar goals. Some were said to have links with one another, others were suspected of sowing traitorous ideas within the Red Army. Yet another group, in the western districts of Ukraine, had created a ‘kulak-Petliurite’ organization that was supposedly conducting ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’ and spreading ‘provocative rumours’ as well. The same report recorded the arrest of 420 members of ‘counter-revolutionary organizations and groups’ in the North Caucasus region, in the course of only five days, as well as arrests in the Volga regions too.48 Balytsky himself recorded his visit to Tulchyn district in the spring of 1930, where he found armed rebels, trenches around the villages, and peasants shouting ‘Down with the Soviets’ and singing ‘Ukraine has not yet died’, the anthem of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in the era of the Central Rada.49

  The tone of these accounts can seem exaggerated and hysterical. Yet both documentary and memoir evidence does show that not all of these movements were invented. There was real violence, well organized and nationalist in character. In a number of places it was armed and contagious, spreading from village to village as peasants gained confidence from the actions and slogans of their neighbours.

  In mid-March 1930, for example, a string of villages in the Tulchyn district staged protests, one following the next. The archival reports are clear: peasants were shouting, ‘We don’t want leaders who rob peasants!’ and ‘Down with the communists, who are leading the country to disaster!’ Even when they didn’t kill the local authorities, they drove them out of office. In 343 villages, peasants elected their own ‘starostas’, or traditional village elders, and refused to cooperate with the communists.50 In many places they also fired Soviet teachers, banned cooperatives and announced the return of free trade. Some of the villagers began to talk about organizing armed resistance, and a few passed around leaflets that the OGPU described darkly as having ‘an anti-Soviet character’. At one meeting those gathered called for property to be given back to the ‘kulaks’, and for the liquidation of the collective farms. On several occasions, rebels reportedly sang the national anthem. The victory in Tulchyn was short-lived: the OGPU blamed ‘Petliurists’ and called for ‘operational measures’. The province was duly divided into sectors, and each sector was assigned an armed OGPU cavalry unit.51 Balytsky told a colleague that he had been instructed, by Stalin himself, ‘not to make speeches but to act decisively’.52

  In several places the rebellions were not only genuinely political, they were also genuinely led by people who had played some role in the peasant rebellions, the Ukrainian national movement or the civil war. Certainly this was the case in Pavlohrad, a district in the Dnipropetrovsk province of eastern Ukraine, whose armed rebellion has now been extensively documented.53 Even before the ‘March fever’ rebellions, the authorities expected violence in Pavlohrad itself, a town originally founded as a Cossack base. In the nineteenth century one of the villages in the Pavlohrad district took part in a revolt against local gentry; in 1919 many in the district had supported Makhno.54 Anticipating violence after collectivization, local police in February 1930 arrested seventy-nine people and executed twenty-one of them for plotting rebellion.

  Even after that several Pavlohrad leaders with prior military experience were still willing to resist. In March 1930, Kyrylo Shopin, a former soldier in the army of Hetman Skoropadsky, escaped arrest and began travelling through the region. He went from village to village encouraging peasants to revolt. Some of those who would eventually join him had previously fought for Petliura or Makhno.

  Shopin’s efforts paid off in early April, when representatives from around the region met in Bohdanivka and began to plan their uprising. Many of those present had lost possessions during collectivization, and were partly motivated by the belief that they could get them back. But they had political goals as well, and they used political slogans: ‘Down with Soviet power’ and ‘Let’s fight for a different kind of freedom.’ After the first group meeting small rebel cells formed, somewhat chaotically, around the nearby countryside. On 4 April many of their members began arriving in Osadchi, a small hamlet near Bohdanivka, hoping to join the rebellion and expecting to be given weapons.

  Precautions were taken: the rebels agreed that if the revolt were to fail, everyone who joined should claim that he had been forced against his will to take part. Their leaders tried to reach out to the soldiers of the Pavlohrad district militia, in the hopes that they would sign on as well. They outlined a plan: March on Pavlohrad, gather weapons, use them to storm Dnipropetrovsk and, eventually, take over the rest of Ukraine. From the documentation – the interrogations, investigations, memoirs, accounts written afterwards – it seems clear that the participants in the Pavlohrad uprising were convinced that they could succeed. All over Ukraine, they told one another, abused peasants would rise up and join them.

  On 5 April they began their rebellion in Osadchi, where they murdered the local Soviet and party activists, and then moved on quickly to nearby villages, where others joined them. Arriving in Bohdanivka at mid-day, they rang the church bells, took control of a key bridge, and began fighting the local militia. Over the course of the day, the insurgents killed several dozen government figures, including party members, Komsomol members, village councillors and others. Towards the end of the day they managed to cut the telephone lines, but it was too late: the head of the village council had already telegraphed to Pavlohrad for help.

  The Pavlohrad militia, which had not taken up the rebels’ call to join them, arrived in the evening. The rebellious peasants retreated, but in the meantime another group of insurgents had taken over the village council and party buildings in a nearby village, Ternivka. Finally, on 6 April, an armed OGPU unit arrived in Bohdanivka from Dnipropetrovsk – 200 men, fifty-eight on horseback. Balytsky had given them explicit orders, using the strongest language possible: ‘liquidate these counter-revolutionary bands’.

  In the end, the fighting lasted no more than two days. Although th
e insurgents had killed several dozen government figures, including party members, Komsomol members, village councillors and others, the peasant army never really had a chance. The mostly illiterate leaders had no communications or logistics, and not enough weapons. They were easily overpowered, arrested and killed. Thirteen of them died, a handful were badly injured.

  More than 300 were detained, of whom 210 were convicted in a trial which, unlike the SVU trial, was firmly closed to the public: the party could not risk staging a ‘show trial’ for a genuine rebellion. The witnesses could not be so easily manipulated, the story could not be retold in such a way as to hide what had really happened: poor peasants, led by men with genuine military backgrounds, had taken up arms against the state. Nor could the survivors be allowed to live to tell the true story. On 20 May twenty-seven of them were executed.

  The Pavlohrad rebellion was unusually brutal, but it was not unique. In March the OGPU had also been surprised by a rebellion in Kryvyi Rih province in eastern Ukraine, a region that had a ‘nearly 100 percent’ collectivization record and was considered docile. Although the arrest and deportations there had been ‘accompanied by some negative phenomenon’, according to an OGPU report, de-kulakization had been enthusiastically supported by poorer and middle-income peasants.

  But a ‘change of mood’ followed orders to confiscate seed grain in anticipation of the spring sowing season. One local peasant was heard to declare that the collection of seed grain meant that ‘all bread will be taken out of Ukraine, and Ukraine will be left with nothing’. In another village someone expressed the fear that ‘they will take our last grain and leave the peasants starving’. Following Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with Success’ article, the OGPU men blamed ill humour on over-enthusiastic Kryvyi Rih officials putting pressure on peasants who were not ‘kulaks’. One set of officials had reportedly confiscated some ‘dirty linen’ from a poor peasant, and demanded milk and lard for his brigade; others had broken down the doors of peasant cottages, stripped the inhabitants and thrown them out on the street. In response, a mob of women gathered around a local party activist and shouted that Stalin had said that the collective farms were to be organized ‘voluntarily’. Others organized petitions demanding their land back, or had rushed to the collective farms to reclaim equipment and livestock.

  Some of their demands went further. ‘Under the influence of anti-Soviet and kulak agitation’, the OGPU reported, peasants in the village of Shyroke made a series of ‘counter-revolutionary political demands’. Finally, on 14 March, a mob of 500 men and women surrounded the local government offices and demanded the return of seed grain, the dissolution of the Komsomol, the restitution of property confiscated or forcibly ‘donated’ to the collective farm, and the refund of monetary fines paid to the local authorities.55

  Once again, the documentation makes clear that all these rebellions, in Tulchyn, Pavlohrad, Kryvyi Rih and elsewhere, were real. They represented an organized reaction to a much-hated policy, as well as to the violence used to enforce it; some of the people who led the revolts were, unsurprisingly, people who had opposed Soviet rule all along.

  But even if the rebellions were real, the OGPU’s explanation of their sources and influence is harder to believe. The secret policemen in Stalin’s Soviet Union could not tell their superiors that their policy was failing, or that honest Soviet citizens opposed it for understandable reasons. Instead, they had to imply the influence of class enemies and foreigners, inventing or exaggerating links and connections. The report on Kryvyi Rih, for example, attributed all the violence to ‘anti-Soviet elements, kulaks and relatives of kulaks’: Karpuk, a ‘refugee from Poland’; Lisohor, the brother of an exiled kulak; Krasulia, a bootmaker, and thus a man who owned a bit of property.56 All of them belonged to suspect categories: people with foreign connections, with previously arrested family members, with any property at all.

  Over and over again, officials also sought explanations for the strength of the rebellion in the province’s history, drawing attention especially to the rebellions of 1918–20. At one point, the OGPU assigned a group of officers to work across several districts, citing the ‘especially important political significance of the border zones and the historical past of these regions’. Among them were the districts of Volyn, Berdychiv, Mogilev, Vinnytsia, Kamianets and Odessa, all sites of major fighting in the previous decade.57 Balytsky noted elsewhere that special care had to be taken in one region because it was the territory of the ‘Zabolotny gang’, one of the partisan units during the civil war.58

  This obsession with the civil war past was not unique to Ukraine. It spread to include the North Caucasus, where Soviet authorities also attributed violent resistance to collectivization to the influence of Cossacks as well as Ukrainian nationalists. It also encompassed Siberia and the Urals, where Soviet secret policemen targeted ‘former White Guard officers’. Violent resistance to collectivization in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Tatarstan and Bashkiria was also immediately understood to be anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary – again, not without reason. In the Fergana region of Central Asia, Red Army troops arrived to pacify the Basmachi guerrilla movement. Although it had been repressed a few years earlier, the movement was revived by anger at collectivization. Violent struggles also followed collectivization in the Caucasian autonomous republics of Chechnya and Dagestan.59

  But in Ukraine the strength of nationalism in the cities made this anger in the countryside more dangerous. In 1930, OGPU analysts returned repeatedly to the matter of city-country contacts, and to the links between intellectuals and peasants predicted in 1929. Some of these may have been real; others were clearly invented. On 21 March, Balytsky sent a report to Stanislav Kosior, the general secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and to Yagoda, now the boss of the OGPU: in a village in the Vinnytsia district, he had discovered a link between leaders of the local uprising and the SVU. Allegedly, a rebel there had declared, ‘After the liquidation of the SVU it is necessary to work according to other methods – to incite the ignorant masses to revolt.’ Other SVU members were ‘discovered’ in Vinnytsia in subsequent days. Balytsky congratulated himself for finding them, and indeed for predicting the influence of the SVU – an organization that he himself had conjured into existence. The cells, he wrote, ‘correctly confirm the SVU’s strong links with active cadres of rural counter-revolution and SVU’s expectations for an uprising in 1930–31’. He patted himself on the back: ‘it was only the timely liquidation of the SVU that disorganized the splinters of the organization, forcing them to act at their personal fear and risk’. Perhaps this is how Balytsky escaped criticism for failing to stop the rural uprisings: had he not rid Ukraine of the non-existent SVU, he was arguing, they might have been worse.60

  During subsequent months the police kept up the search for new and undiscovered conspiracies. Even after the SVU had supposedly been rounded up, the OGPU was still anticipating the ‘strengthening of links between counter-revolutionary elements in the city and the countryside’, claiming that a wide range of rural organizations had their headquarters in towns. Counter-revolutionaries from the cities were allegedly roaming around Ukraine; in the western provinces of the republic, ‘a range of counter-revolutionary organizations (mainly Petliurite) liquidated in Ukraine … were tightly linked to Poland’.61

  The search for the SVU and ‘Petliurites’ would continue well into the end of the decade. In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the ‘Great Terror’ – the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes – were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of par
ty leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.

  7

  Collectivization Fails, 1931–2

  We could lose Ukraine …

  Stalin to Kaganovich, August 19321

  The secret policemen triumphed. Although the protests slowed the progress of collectivization, the state fought back with mass arrests, mass deportations, mass repression. The Communist Party waited – and then pressed ahead. The temperate language of Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with Success’ article turned out to be just that: language. The same policies continued, and even grew harsher.

  In July 1930, just a few months after the angriest ‘March fever’ protests, the Politburo itself set new targets: up to 70 per cent of households in the main grain-growing regions, Ukraine among them, were to join collective farms by September 1931. In December 1930, eager to prove their enthusiasm, Politburo members raised that same target to 80 per cent of households.2 A Central Committee resolution again confirmed that in certain regions – Ukraine, as well as the Northern Caucasus and the Lower and Middle Volga provinces – the achievement of this goal would require the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.3

  All through the subsequent autumn sowing and the winter harvests, and again during the spring sowing and summer harvest – pressure on the peasants continued. Taxes on peasants who remained on their own land remained high. Deportations to the fast-expanding camps of the Gulag increased. Food shortages became permanent. In the summer of 1930 secret police reports again identified the first signs of starvation, as people once more began to suffer from diseases caused by hunger. A driver weakened by lack of food fell from his tractor in one Ukrainian village; in another, people were beginning to swell with hunger. In the course of a few months 15,000 peasants in the North Caucasus abandoned their farms to look for work in the cities. In Crimea people began eating horse feed, which made them ill.4