Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Theft was increasing in the villages, Petrovskyi explained. In the shops he had been unable to buy bread, sugar or anything else. Prices were rising, and ‘speculation’ was spreading. Local offices were refusing to sell train tickets, and they didn’t know why. Each one of these facts was ‘being used against the party, and against the collective farms’, he wrote, and he finished with a plea for aid: ‘To conclude, I ask again that you consider all methods and resources available to provide urgent food aid to Ukrainian villages, and to supply buckwheat for sowing as quickly as possible, in order to make up for what has not been sown.’67

  On the same day Chubar, the Ukrainian leader, also wrote a long letter to Stalin and Molotov, describing the poor spring harvest and the pockets of famine: ‘It is now possible to count at least 100 districts in need of food aid.’ Like Petrovskyi, Chubar had been in the countryside. Like Kosior, he avoided putting direct blame on state policy, instead attributing the crisis to the ‘poor planning and management’ of the harvest. But he was absolutely clear about what was happening: ‘In March and April, there were tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people dying from famine in every village; children abandoned by their parents and orphans appeared. District and provincial governments provided food relief from internal reserves, but growing despair and the psychology of famine resulted in more appeals for help.’

  He came to the same conclusion: It was time to end the ‘unrealistic’ grain procurement policies. ‘Even some of those collective farms which had already fulfilled their quota received demands to fulfill it a second or even a third time.’68

  Kaganovich forwarded the two letters to Stalin. He told him that he found Chubar’s note to have a more ‘businesslike and self-critical character’. Petrovskyi’s letter by contrast, contained an element of ‘rot’. Kaganovich particularly disliked the Ukrainian leader’s criticism of the Soviet Communist Party and, by implication, of Stalin. Nevertheless, he supported their request: it was time to offer some help to Ukraine.69 Molotov also wrote to Stalin and suggested that Soviet grain exports might, for a time, be curtailed, so as to provide Ukraine with some food aid.70

  Stalin argued back. From the tone of his letter it is clear that he could not (or did not want to) believe that there really was insufficient grain in Ukraine:

  I did not like the letters from Chubar and Petrovskyi. The former spouts ‘self-criticism’ in order to secure a million more poods of bread from Moscow, the latter is feigning sainthood, claiming victimization from the [Central Committee] in order to reduce grain procurement levels. Neither one nor the other is acceptable. Chubar is mistaken if he thinks that self-criticism is required for securing outside ‘help’ and not for mobilizing the forces and resources within Ukraine. In my opinion, Ukraine has been given more than enough …71

  Stalin was of course talking about ‘giving’ grain to Ukraine that had been taken from the country in the first place. But no one challenged him. On 16 June, Kaganovich once again wrote to Stalin that ‘This year’s harvest campaign will be especially difficult, particularly in Ukraine. Unfortunately, Ukraine is not sufficiently prepared for it.’72 But he did not speak, as his Ukrainian colleagues had done, of sending mass food aid.

  Instead, in the summer of 1932, the policies that could have prevented mass famine in Ukraine were quietly abandoned. Some grain was granted to Kyiv and Odessa, though not as much as had been requested. No horses or tractors were included.73 Kosior told local party bosses that there was enough to help just ‘twenty districts’ – out of more than 600: ‘Quickly inform by telegram which districts in your province should be on that list.’74

  Even as hunger spread, the state continued to issue plans and orders designed to maintain the export of grain abroad. In March 1932, Moscow told Kharkiv that Ukrainian officials would be ‘made personally responsible for the export of rye from the Odessa port’. The Council of People’s Commissars urged all enterprises involved in export to improve the quality of their barrels and containers and the storage for goods heading abroad.75 To Ukrainians watching food leaving their hungry republic, the export policy seemed crazy, even suicidal. Mykola Kostyrko, an engineer who lived in Odessa at the time, remembered ‘foreign vessels’ coming into the port: ‘they exported everything in order to get foreign capital for the “needs of the state” to buy tractors and for propaganda abroad’. At one point, he remembered, longshoremen in Odessa refused to load pigs onto a ship. A detachment of Red Army soldiers was sent to do it for them.76

  An employee of the Italian consulate in Odessa also recorded widespread anger at the export policy: ‘there is no [vegetable] oil here, even while oil, and seed used for its production, are being sent abroad’.77 Public anger at the exports was no secret to the Communist Party either. In April 1932 the Ukrainian party leadership had agreed never to discuss the matter publicly, as it would only create ‘unhealthy moods’.78 By the year’s end export levels did fall dramatically – from 5.2 million to 1.73 million tonnes.79 The value to the state dropped dramatically as well, from 203.5 million rubles in 1931 to 88.1 million in 1932.80 But the shipments abroad never stopped altogether.

  The mood inside the party itself did not improve either. In July, Molotov and Kaganovich again arrived in Ukraine, with the goal once more of overriding any remaining objections. They had direct orders from Stalin, who wrote to them on 2 July, repeating his concerns about Ukraine and its leadership: ‘Pay more serious attention to Ukraine. Chubar’s deterioration and opportunistic nature, Kosior’s rotten diplomacy … and a criminally reckless approach to affairs will lose Ukraine in the end.’81

  They used the Third Party Conference – a grim affair – to make their point. All the Ukrainians present objected, as far as they dared, to the quota assigned to their country. Some local leaders were quite blunt. The first secretary of a district in the Kharkiv province pointed out that, thanks to the absence of reserves and seed grain, there were ‘food shortages’ in his area.82 One of his counterparts in Kyiv province complained even more bluntly that the collection brigades doomed peasants to death: the party, he said, was guilty of ‘distortions’ in its agricultural policy.83 A comrade from the Melitopol district complained that the central plan often did not bear any relationship to the situation of specific collective farms and that the centre seemed to prepare plans without consulting the local peasants.84 Roman Terekhov, from Kharkiv province, declared that every district knew perfectly well that the plans were badly made, that work was poorly organized, and that ‘huge losses’ had resulted, leading to ‘food shortages’ in at least twenty-five districts.85

  Although he didn’t repeat his call to end the grain procurement policy altogether, Mykola Skrypnyk, the Commissar of Education, was also quite blunt. Ukraine simply could not and would not produce the requisite amount of grain. The plan would not be fulfilled: ‘this is a huge, shameful failure’.86 Both Petrovskyi and Chubar spoke of ‘shortages’ and ‘failures’ as well.87 What they were asking for, however, was a reduction in the amount of grain Ukraine was required to produce.

  Molotov and Kaganovich refused to yield. Molotov told the Ukrainian communists that they had become ‘whisperers and capitulators’.88 Later, the two men told Stalin that they had turned down a Ukrainian resolution calling for lower quotas: ‘We categorically rejected a revision of the plan, demanded the mobilization of party forces to combat losses and the squander of grain and to invigorate collective farms.’89 The result was that instead of pulling back, the conference passed a resolution recognizing as ‘correct’ the unrealistic, impossible 5.8 million tonne (356 million pood) plan, and resolved to ‘adopt it for unconditional fulfilment’.90

  Molotov and Kaganovich also described the mood of the Communist Party leadership in Kharkiv as ‘more favourable’ than they had anticipated, by which they seem to have meant that the Ukrainians were still amenable to taking orders.91 Carefully, the two men suggested to Stalin that the seriousness of the situation remain concealed: ‘In order not to
give any information to the foreign press, we have to publish only modest criticism in our own press, without any information about the situation in the bad districts.’92 Accordingly, the official line remained positive. A few weeks after the conference, the Soviet government and the Communist Party jointly declared ‘complete victory’ in agriculture. The ‘bourgeois theory’ that the USSR would have to revert to capitalism and markets had been ‘battered and smashed into dust’.93

  There is no doubt that Stalin knew, by this point, that 5.8 million tonnes was an unrealistic figure. On 25 July he told Kaganovich that he intended to allow the ‘suffering’ collective farms in Ukraine to get by with reduced quotas. He had, he wrote, avoided speaking of a reduction in grain collection before, because he wanted to avoid ‘demoralizing’ the Ukrainians further or disrupting the harvest. He intended instead to wait until later to make the announcement, hoping to ‘stimulate’ the peasants during the harvest season – and to appear benevolent – by offering a small reduction of 30 million poods (490,000 tonnes) or ‘as a last resort’ (those words were underlined) 40 million poods (655,000 tonnes). Kaganovich wrote back in agreement: ‘Now is not the time to tell the Ukrainians’ about the decrease. It was better to let them worry about meeting an impossible demand.94

  Before this game could play itself out, Stalin was once again distracted by bad news from across the Soviet Union – and some especially bad news from Ukraine. All through the summer, the OGPU had been reporting growing levels of theft. People were stealing from railroads, shops, enterprises, and above all from collective farms. This was hardly surprising: collective farm workers (and factory workers too) often felt that state property belonged to no one and so there was no harm in taking it. More to the point, they were very hungry. That’s the clear implication of a report the OGPU filed in July, describing a worrying trend: many peasants were beginning to harvest grain prematurely, and secretly, and then keeping it for themselves. One report came from Central Volga province:

  On the night of 9 July, five women were found in the fields cutting the ears of wheat. When an attempt was made to detain the women, they fled in different directions. The guard fired twice with a hunting gun. One of the collective farm women who fled was severely wounded (she died several hours later) …

  On that same night, in the same village, a watchman also discovered a crowd of ‘fifteen thieves on horseback with sacks of stolen grain’. This group of ‘thieves’ fared better than the five women. After they put up violent resistance, the watchman took fright and escaped.95

  As so often in the past, Stalin found a political interpretation for these acts of desperation. On vacation in Sochi – having travelled on a ‘train well-stocked with fine provisions’ – he wrote several letters to Kaganovich on the subject.96 The two of them confirmed one another’s views. The state and its policies were not a danger to the starving peasants – but the starving peasants were a great danger to the state. ‘Kulaks, the de-kulakized and anti-Soviet elements all steal,’ Stalin told Kaganovich. ‘Crime must be punished with ten years or capital punishment’, and there should be no amnesty: ‘Without these (and similar) draconian socialist measures it is impossible to establish new social discipline, and without such discipline it is impossible to strengthen and defend our new order.’97

  A few days later, in another set of letters to Kaganovich and Molotov, he elaborated further, clearly having thought about the matter some more during his seaside holiday. A new law, he now worried, was an insufficient deterrent. In order to get people to stop stealing food, the law must be supported by a propaganda campaign fully grounded in Marxist theory. Capitalism had defeated feudalism because capitalism ensured that private property was protected by the state; Socialism, in turn, could defeat capitalism only if it declared public property – cooperative, collective, state property – to be sacred and inviolable too. The very survival of socialism might well depend on whether or not the state could prevent ‘anti-social, kulak-capitalistic elements’ from stealing public property.98

  Stalin’s obsessive belief in Marxist theory once again triumphed over what he would have called ‘bourgeois morality’. On 7 August 1932 the USSR duly passed an edict draconian even by Soviet standards. It began with a declaration:

  Public property (state, kolkhoz, cooperative) [is] the basis of the Soviet system; it is sacred and inviolable, and those attempting to steal public property must be considered enemies of the people … the decisive struggle against plunderers of public property is the foremost obligation of every organ of Soviet administration.

  It continued with a definition, and a conclusion:

  The Central Executive Committee and Soviet of People’s Commissars of the USSR hereby resolve …

  1) To regard the property of kolkhozes and cooperatives (harvest in stores, etc.) as tantamount to state property.

  2) To apply as a punitive measure for plundering (thievery) of kolkhoz and collective property the highest measure of social defence: execution with the confiscation of all property, which may be substituted … by the deprivation of freedom for a period of no fewer than ten years.99

  The theft of tiny amounts of food, in other words, could be punished by ten years in a labour camp – or death. Such punishments had hitherto been reserved for acts of high treason. Now, a peasant woman who stole a few grains of wheat from a collective farm would be treated like a military officer who had betrayed the country during wartime. The law had no precedent, even in the USSR. Only a few months earlier, the Russian republican Supreme Court had punished a person who had stolen wheat from a collective farm field with just one year of forced labour.100

  As Stalin wished, an educational press campaign followed. Two weeks after the decree, Pravda published an account of the case of ‘the female kulak Grybanova’, who had been stealing grain from the fields of the ‘Red Builder’ collective farm. She was sentenced to be shot. The Ukrainian press reported in detail on three cases tried in Odessa, including an account of a husband and wife who were both shot for ‘pilfering’.101 Other published stories included the case of a peasant shot for possessing a small quantity of wheat gleaned by his ten-year-old daughter.102

  This extraordinary law took an extraordinary toll. By the end of 1932, within less than six months of the law’s passage, 4,500 people had been executed for breaking it. Far more – over 100,000 people – had received ten-year sentences in labour camps. This preference for long camp sentences over capital punishment, dictated from above, was clearly pragmatic: forced labourers could get to work on the Gulag system’s vast new industrial projects – mines, factories, logging operations – that were just getting underway.103

  In subsequent weeks and months, thousands of peasants flooded into the camp system, victims of the 7 August law. According to official figures (which do not reflect all arrests), the number of Gulag inmates nearly doubled between 1932 and 1934, from 260,000 to 510,000. The camp system had neither the resources nor the organizational capacity to cope with this huge influx of people, many of whom arrived already emaciated by hunger. As a result, deaths in the Gulag also climbed from 4.81 per cent in 1932 to 15.3 per cent in 1933.104 Others may have been saved by their incarceration. Years later, Susannah Pechora, a Gulag prisoner in a later period, recalled meeting a fellow prisoner, a former peasant. Upon being given her meagre daily ration, the woman sighed and stroked the small, hard chunk of bread. ‘Khlebushka, my little bit of bread,’ she purred, ‘and to think that they give you to us every day!’105

  Theft was not Stalin’s only concern in the summer of 1932. Soon after passage of the 7 August law, he received a startling document from the Ukrainian secret police. The historian Terry Martin, the first to identify its significance, has called this document ‘extraordinary and unique’.106 Stalin may have seen comparable reports before. This one may have been similar to the material that had caused his outburst in April, when he had demanded to know whether ‘Soviet power has ceased to exist’ in some parts of Ukraine. But this ti
me, with a new food crisis building, his reaction was even harsher.

  Normally, the OGPU sent Stalin reports written in careful prose and filled with stock phrases about enemies and conspiracies. But in August 1932 the Ukrainian secret police sent him a straightforward set of quotations without commentary. The quotations were all collected from informers and attributed to Ukrainian party members operating at district level, all of whom were bitterly opposed to the grain requisition campaign. Normally, this kind of raw material would serve as the basis for a more elaborate report. This time, the raw material itself was striking enough that it was sent on its own.

  Almost all the evidence in the document expressed direct defiance of Moscow’s orders. ‘I will not obey this [grain requisition] plan’, one party member was quoted as saying: ‘I do not want to accept this plan. I will not complete this grain requisition plan.’ And after that, the secret policemen recorded, he ‘put his party card on the table and left the room’.

  Another had a similar reaction: ‘It will be difficult to fight for the completion of this grain requisitions plan, but I know a way out of this difficulty – I’ll send my party card to the local council, and then I will be free.’