Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  In the wake of this acrimonious meeting, the Ukrainian Politburo met again at the end of December. Once more the Ukrainian communists paid lip service to the Five Year Plan. They agreed to collect 8.3 million tonnes of grain, although everyone in the room must have known that it was impossible. They declared that they themselves would go out to the villages to supervise the procurement, although each one of them must have known that would make no difference either. To increase the efficiency of the whole operation, they reorganized Ukraine into six collection districts, and put a single party leader in charge of each one. All of them must have felt deep anxiety about the task ahead.

  Perhaps they were reassured by the news that each district boss would receive emergency powers, including the power to sack anyone who stood in the way of fulfilling the plan: anyone who failed would be able to place some of the blame, yet again, on scapegoats.34 But at the same time the stakes were raised. The harvest had been unsatisfactory in the Urals, the Volga, Kazakhstan and western Siberia. That meant the Ukrainians and others in the western USSR would have to collect not only their original grain quota, but also an extra amount of seed grain, to be used for spring planting in other regions. To an impossible quota, in other words, the state had added an even more impossible new demand.35

  In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the USSR. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity. Visiting the Moldovan autonomous republic that was then part of Ukraine, a Pravda correspondent was shocked to discover the lengths to which grain procurement officials would now go.36 In a private letter to a colleague, he wrote of ‘openly counter-revolutionary attacks’ on the peasantry: ‘The searches are usually conducted at night, and they search fiercely, deadly seriously. There is a village just on the border with Romania where not a single house has not had its stove destroyed.’

  Worse, anyone found in possession of any bread or grain at all – even the poorest of peasants – was dragged from his or her home and stripped of their possessions, just as had happened to the kulaks in the months before. But this was unusual: ‘Very rarely did they find a more or less solid amount, usually the searches finished with the confiscation of the very last few pieces of bread in the smallest possible amount.’37 No one in authority questioned the wisdom of this behaviour: the fact that the OGPU and Communist Party officials allowed journalists, even those loyal to the regime, to observe the confiscation of grain meant that, at the highest levels, they were convinced of the legitimacy of what they were doing.

  Local party leaders, their careers on the line, organized groups of activists and sent them, village by village, to begin confiscating whatever grain they could find. A peasant in the village of Sobolivka, in the western part of Ukraine, wrote to his Polish relatives describing how this worked:

  The authorities do as follows: they send the so-called brigades which come to a man or a farmer and conduct a search so thorough they even look through the ground with sharp metal tools, through the walls with matches, in the garden, in the straw roof, and if they find even half a pood, they take it away on the horse wagon. This passes for life here … Dear brother Ignacy, if it is possible, I ask you to send me a package, as it is very needed. There is nothing to eat and one must eat.38

  All these methods recalled the events of the past: in the days of ‘War Communism’ the Red Army had searched peasants’ property with similar violence, and with similar disregard for their lives. But they also foreshadowed the immediate future: these were the first of what would be thousands of many intense, destructive searches, conducted by activists all across Ukraine a year later, in the winter of 1932–3. The use of violence, the smashing of walls and furniture in search of hidden grain – these were a harbinger of what was to come.

  The pockets of real starvation all across the USSR were an ominous warning too. Reports from the Volga district, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan already spoke of starving children, people too weak to work, whole districts deprived of bread. In Ukraine the situation of several villages in Odessa province was so dramatic that in March the local party leaders in Zynovïvskyi district sent a medical team to investigate. The doctors were stunned by what they found. In the village of Kozyrivka half the inhabitants had died of hunger. On the day of their visit 100 households remained out of 365, and the rest ‘are emptying’: ‘Quite a few of the remaining huts are being taken apart, the window and door frames are being used as fuel.’ The family of Ivan Myronenko – seven people, including three school-age children – were surviving ‘entirely on carrion’. When the team entered their hut, the Myronenkos were eating boiled horsehide together with a ‘stinking yellow liquid’ made from the broth. Nearby, the inspectors met the Koval family that had four children. On entering the hut, they found Maria Koval boiling the bones of a dead horse. An elderly woman lay on a bed, asking for medicine ‘in order to die more quickly’.39

  In the village of Tarasivka the situation was not much better. Here the number of households had halved, from 400 to 200. Corpses lay on the street, as there was no one to bury them. The medical team was told that this had become normal in villages where corpses sometimes went untouched for three or four days. The doctors visited a home where the father was ‘yellow, emaciated, barely able to stand on his feet’.40 With equal horror the group reported that provincial, district, village and party officials ‘try not to notice the incidence of starvation, and try not to speak about it’. The local leaders were actually ‘hiding’ the rising mortality. This too was a pattern that would soon be repeated.41

  The OGPU in Ukraine had no illusions about what was happening. In the first quarter of 1932, their operatives recorded that eighty-three Ukrainians had become swollen with hunger, and that six had died. Informers also reported on sporadic food shortages in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Vinnytsia provinces. Horses were observed to be dying at a high rate too; across Ukraine their numbers had dropped by more than half since collectivization.42 The leaders of one collective farm jointly informed party authorities that they were losing up to four horses a day to starvation and overwork. Worse, they were unable to prevent the peasants from eating them. ‘We have several times warned the kolkhozniks not to eat the carcasses, but they answer: “We’re going to die anyway from hunger, and we’ll eat the carcasses, even those of infected cattle. You can shoot us if you want.” ’43

  Letters flooded into the party offices, and especially to Stalin. ‘It’s horrible, having children and not being able to raise them in civilized conditions – better not to have them,’ one woman wrote to him from Nyzhniodniprovsk.44 A party member wrote of collection teams entering the huts of poor and middle peasants who had ‘filled all of their grain requisition obligations’, yet taking all the rest of their grain, ‘leaving nothing to eat, nothing for the fall sowing’.45 Another wrote:

  Dear Stalin,

  Please answer me, why are the collective farmers on the collective farms swelling with hunger and eating dead horses? I got a holiday and went to Zynovïvskyi district, where I saw for myself how people are eating horses …46

  In the spring of 1932 secret police informers also began, for the first time in a decade, to use the word ‘famine’ in describing the situation in Ukrainian villages.47 The republican government in Kharkiv also began to act as if it understood that the threat of hunger was very real. Government grain warehouses released more than 2,000 tonnes of millet in April, to help those ‘in the most difficult situations’.48 A month later the Kyiv provincial government discussed the provision of extra food to thirty districts, particularly for the children.49 They also decided to send emergency grain supplies immediately to two districts where the need was extreme.50

  The sense of impending crisis affected the foreigners living in Ukraine too. The Polish consul in Kyiv cabled to Warsaw his observations of ‘severe food shorta
ges’ in many villages. He had seen people collapsing on the streets from starvation in Vinnytsia and Uman.51 The German consul reported that he had received appeals from members of the German minority, who were petitioning to be recognized as citizens in order to emigrate: ‘There is not enough bread, villagers are forced to eat unacceptable ersatz [food] … villagers who are underfed at the collective farms and workers whose rations are insufficient are begging for food.’52

  Given the scale of the food shortages it was hardly surprising that the peasants balked, that spring, and, as in 1921, refused to sow their land: if they planted their last remaining kernels of seed grain, then they would have nothing to eat. They must also have known that whatever they did manage to grow would be confiscated. In April 1932 the OGPU raised the alarm: more than 40,000 households were not going to plant anything at all.53 As hunger spread, many were too weak to work in the fields. The empty fields were no secret: Visti VUTsVK, the main newspaper of the Ukrainian republican government, openly reported that only about two-thirds of Ukrainian fields had been sown that spring.54

  No unbiased observer, at that moment, could possibly have believed that Ukraine had any chance of meeting Moscow’s demands for grain that year. The food supply was clearly going to drop. The grain for export was not going to materialize. And many, many people were going to starve.

  In the spring of 1932 a few high-ranking Ukrainian communists finally gathered the courage to call for a drastic change of direction. In February, Hryhorii Petrovskyi – an ‘Old Bolshevik’, a party member since before the revolution, member of the Ukrainian Politburo and chairman of Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet – wrote a short letter to his colleagues. He did not name scapegoats, and did not seek to explain away shortages as ‘temporary’ or imaginary. Instead, he observed the lack of food in ‘not only villages but also working-class towns’ all across Ukraine, in Kyiv and Vinnytsia provinces as well as Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv.

  Petrovskyi made a list of suggestions: write a letter to the Central Committee, describing the ‘drastic shortages of produce for the population and feed for livestock’; ask it to halt grain collections in Ukraine and restore free exchange of goods ‘according to the law’; call upon the Red Cross and other emergency relief organizations to pool their resources, as they had in 1921, in order to rescue people in the worst affected areas, especially children; mobilize organizations within the Ukrainian republic to help out famine-struck regions. Bluntly, he declared that the Soviet state should expect to collect nothing in Ukraine at all in 1932. In order to feed hungry Ukrainian peasants, any food harvested should remain inside the republic.55

  The Ukrainian party leadership heeded Petrovskyi’s call. In March, reversing their earlier statements, party officials abruptly told local leaders to stop collecting grain. Despite having not met the spring quotas, the peasants should concentrate on sowing the next season’s crop.56 Encouraged by these signs from the top, several Ukrainians officials lower down the hierarchy refused to comply with demands from other republics and other state institutions for Ukrainian grain. One official, having been asked to send 1,000 tonnes of grain to the Urals, wrote back that this was ‘impossible’. A request to send beans and peas was refused as well.57

  The ensuing arguments – within the Moscow leadership, the Ukrainian Communist Party in Kharkiv, and between Moscow and Kharkiv – were murky and guarded, even confusing and contradictory. The potential for widespread famine was by now well understood on all sides. But, again, Stalin’s personal responsibility for the collectivization policy – he had conceived and argued for it, backed and stood by it – was perfectly well understood too. To oppose it openly, let alone imply that it had somehow failed, sounded like a criticism of the leader himself. Everyone knew that the provision of food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure – yet if the Ukrainian peasants were not spared their grain and encouraged to sow their crops, everyone also knew that catastrophe would follow.

  Different leaders tried different strategies, choosing their words carefully. On 26 April, Kosior wrote a long, exceedingly cautious letter to Stalin on the general situation in the Ukrainian countryside, rather downplaying the problems. He had, he said, just been to visit several of the southern districts. Despite all the negative reports he was certain that the 1932 harvest would surpass that of the previous year, mostly because the weather had improved. Contradicting his colleagues’ fearful missives, he declared that ‘all conversation about “famine” in Ukraine must be categorically abandoned’. Yes, ‘serious mistakes had been made in carrying out the grain collection’ in a few provinces, but he expected them to be rectified. Kosior also conceded that there had been some ‘incidents’ in Kyiv province, where certain protests of a ‘Petliurite’ character had taken place: hungry peasants were refusing to sow any grain. But he assured Stalin that all was well. The state had offered a bit of food aid to those provinces, including some millet, corn and horse feed. This little hiccup prompted him to ask for a favour: because of these small disruptions, some ‘extra help’ might be useful in some other parts of Ukraine. For this ‘we will be obliged to turn once again to the Central Committee’.58

  Kosior was delicately asking for food aid, in other words, but only for a few districts, only in a limited quantity, and only because some counter-revolutionaries had disrupted the sowing season with their political protests. He and other Ukrainian communist leaders had reason to believe that Stalin would look favourably upon such carefully worded requests. Throughout the spring of 1932 the Soviet leader had several times seemed open to changing the policy. He told Kaganovich that more industrial goods ought to be made available to peasants, the better to inspire them. He had offered some small shipments of cereals in April to ease the food shortages.59 Even as exports to Western countries continued, he had authorized secret purchases of corn, wheat and other grain from the Far East and Persia, demonstrating that he knew there were shortages inside the USSR.60 He had backed a Politburo decision to authorize another small shipment of grain to Odessa province.61 Stalin had even toyed with the idea that the grain procurement plans all across the USSR were ‘too mechanical’ and ought to be adjusted for regional weather and other local factors. Both Kaganovich and Molotov would reiterate that point later in the summer.62

  But in April his tone shifted: Stalin had received some alarming material on the political situation in Ukraine. The archives don’t record exactly what it was he read, though it is possible to guess. Perhaps it was the ‘Petliurite’ protests to which Kosior alluded, or a report from the Pavlohrad district. Perhaps it was a report on the mood within the Communist Party itself. Balytsky’s OGPU was diligently collecting informers’ reports from the countryside, recording in particular the dissatisfaction of party members, their dislike of collectivization, and their resentment of Moscow. Later that autumn he would present Stalin with a list of angry remarks from Ukrainian party officials, reported by informers, and descriptions of party members turning in their party cards; it may be that Stalin saw something similar that spring. Whatever it was, Stalin lashed out on 26 April in a letter to Kosior: ‘Judging from this material, it seems that in several places in Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist. Is this really true? Is the situation in the countryside really that terrible? Where are the GPU organs, what are they doing? Could you verify this case and report back to the Central Committee on what measures you’ve taken?’63

  Prompted by whatever had provoked his note, Stalin immediately withdrew the millet and other food aid to Ukraine. He also demanded that the Ukrainian Communist Party maintain its policy of confiscating tractors and other equipment from underperforming farms. He did not want any generous gestures to be misinterpreted as an independent action of the Ukrainian leadership, and he certainly didn’t want them to be seen as a ‘demonstration against Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party’.64 He was deeply concerned about the Ukrainian party’s reliability. Using language that illustrates how far the Soviet state had gone
in the direction of personal tyranny, he told Kaganovich and Molotov that the local leaders were insufficiently loyal. ‘Pay serious attention to Ukraine,’ he wrote to both of them on 2 June: ‘[Vlas] Chubar [head of the Ukrainian government], through his rotten and opportunistic nature, and Kosior, through his rotten diplomacy … and his criminally light-minded attitude to affairs, are completely ruining Ukraine. These comrades are not up to leading today’s Ukraine.’65

  These ‘rotten’ and reviled leaders did nevertheless make one last appeal. On 10 June, Petrovskyi wrote the frankest letter of all. He had just been to visit several rural districts where people were beginning to starve. He had faced down the starving peasants himself:

  We knew beforehand that fulfilling state grain procurements in Ukraine would be difficult, but what I have seen in the countryside indicates that we have greatly overdone it, we have tried too hard. I was in many villages and saw a considerable part of the countryside engulfed in famine. There aren’t many, but there are people swollen from starvation, mainly poor peasants and even middle peasants. They are eating food scraps from the bottom of the barrel, if any are available. During big meetings in the villages, the peasants of course curse me, old women cry and men sometimes do also. Sometimes the criticism of the worsening situation becomes very deep and broad – Why did they create an artificial famine? After all, we had a good harvest. Why did they take away all of the sowing seeds? That did not happen even under the old regime. We didn’t have that even under the old regime. Why are Ukrainians forced to make treacherous journeys to find bread in less fertile regions? Why isn’t bread being brought here? and so on … It’s difficult, in these conditions, to offer an explanation. You obviously condemn those who committed excesses, but generally feel like a carp squirming on a frying pan …66