Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  And a third: ‘We will not accept the grain requisitions plan, since in its current form it cannot be fulfilled. And to again force the people to starve is criminal. For me it is better to turn in my Party card than to doom the collective farmers to starve through deceit.’

  And a fourth: ‘I see that this plan dooms me. I will ask the party cell to remove me from my job, since otherwise I will soon be excluded from the party for failing to cope with my work and failing to fulfil the party’s tasks.’107

  Had they been deliberately trying to prejudice the Soviet leader against Ukraine, the men of the OGPU could not have chosen a better way, for the report confirmed all of Stalin’s worst fears. He had long perceived a clear connection between the grain collection problem in Ukraine and the threat of nationalism in the republic. Now he heard a clear echo of the events of the previous decade: the civil war, the peasant revolt, the Bolshevik setback. His response, in a letter to Kaganovich, was harsh:

  The chief thing now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are terrible. It’s terrible in the party. They say that in some parts of Ukraine (it seems, Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk) around 50 district committees have spoken out against the grain requisition plan, considering it unrealistic. In other district committees, it appears the situation is no better. What is this? This is not the party, not a parliament, this is a caricature of a parliament …

  If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine. Keep in mind that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior think. Keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist Party includes more than a few rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites as well as direct agents of Piłsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will not be slow in opening a front within (and without) the party against the party. The worst thing is that the Ukrainians simply do not see this danger …108

  Stalin went on to list all the changes that he wanted to make in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He wanted to remove Stanislav Redens, the head of the Ukrainian secret police (and his brother-in-law). He wanted to transfer Balytsky, his reliable ally, back to Ukraine from Moscow, where he had briefly served as deputy leader of the OGPU, an order that would be carried out in October. He wanted Kaganovich himself to take full responsibility for the Ukrainian Communist Party once again: ‘Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic. We won’t spare money on this task.’109 He believed that this was the moment to revive tactics deployed in the past: ‘Lenin was right in saying that a person who does not have the courage to swim against the current when necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader …’

  He also believed that time was short: ‘Without these and similar measures (ideological and political work in Ukraine, above all in her border districts and so forth) I repeat – we could lose Ukraine …’110

  For Stalin, who remembered the civil war in Ukraine, the loss of the republic was an exceedingly dangerous prospect. In 1919 a peasant revolt in Ukraine had brought the White Army within a few days’ march of Moscow; in 1920 chaos in Ukraine had brought the Polish army deep into Soviet territory. The USSR could not afford to lose Ukraine again.

  8

  Famine Decisions, 1932: Requisitions, Blacklists and Borders

  Like the Jews that Moses led out of Egyptian slavery, the half-savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages … will die out, and a new tribe will take their place – literate, sensible, hearty people.

  Maxim Gorky, On the Russian Peasant, 19221

  Sometime in the early hours of 9 November 1932 – two days after the solemn celebrations of the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution – Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, shot herself with a small pistol. She died instantly.

  A few hours later a doctor examined her corpse and declared the cause of death to be ‘an open wound to the heart’. Soon afterwards, after exchanging a few sharp words with Molotov and Kaganovich, the doctor changed his mind. On her death certificate he listed the cause of death as ‘acute appendicitis’. The politics behind this change would have been perfectly clear to Stalin’s inner circle: in the autumn of 1932 all of them knew that Nadya’s suicide, whatever its real causes, would be interpreted as a form of political protest – even as an anguished outcry against the spreading famine.2

  Rightly or wrongly, this is indeed how Nadya’s suicide was remembered. Years later their daughter Svetlana wrote of her mother’s ‘terrible, devastating disillusionment’ with her father and his politics.3 A talkative Ossetian who met Nadya at a student party in 1929 recalled her sympathy for Stalin’s most important opponent, Bukharin, who opposed collectivization and lost his Politburo seat, and eventually his life, for doing so.4 The famine had been a common topic of conversation among their fellow students at the Industrial Academy, and several people there heard her denouncing collectivization. In the last months of her life she suffered from migraine headaches, stomach pains, rapid mood swings and bouts of hysteria. Retrospectively, these maladies have been attributed to acute depression. At the time they were described, in whispers, as symptoms of bad conscience, of disappointment and of despair.5

  Certainly others in Stalin’s immediate entourage were unhappy about the famine. Peeking through the lace curtains of their well-appointed trains, many senior Bolsheviks saw things that summer that horrified them, and a few of them were brave enough to tell their leader about it. In August 1932, while Stalin was still in Sochi, he had received a letter from Klement Voroshilov, soon to become Commissar of Defence:

  Across the Stavropol region, I saw all the fields uncultivated. We were expecting a good harvest but didn’t get it … Across the Ukraine from my train window, the truth is that it looks even less cultivated than the North Caucasus … Sorry to tell you such things during your holiday but I can’t be silent.6

  Another senior military figure, the civil war hero Semyon Budyonny, also wrote to Stalin from his train: ‘Looking at people from the windows of the train, I see very tired people in old worn clothes, our horses are skin and bone.’7 When Kira Alliluyeva, Nadezhda’s niece, travelled to Kharkiv to visit her uncle – Stanislav Redens, then head of the Ukrainian OGPU – she too saw beggars at the train stations, emaciated people with swollen bellies. She told her mother, who told Stalin. He dismissed the story: ‘She’s a child, she makes things up.’8

  Others who were less intimate with the Soviet leader saw or heard the same things. Bukharin had by now recanted his views: in December 1930 he had declared that he now understood the need for the destruction of the kulaks and for a ‘direct break with the old structure’.9 But others had not. Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow party boss, was one of them. Ryutin had been evicted from the party in 1930 for ‘expounding right-opportunist views’, but unlike Bukharin he had refused to recant. Ryutin was arrested and then released. But he kept in touch with other would-be dissidents, and in the spring of 1932 he invited a dozen of them to help him write a statement of opposition. In August the group met in a Moscow suburb to put the finishing touches to a political platform calling for change, as well as a shorter ‘Appeal to all Party Members’.10 Both documents were copied and circulated, by hand and by post, in Moscow, Kharkiv and other cities.

  ‘Ryutin’s Platform’, as it came to be known, denounced Stalin in no uncertain terms. The authors called him an ‘unscrupulous political intriguer’, mocked him for his pretensions to be Lenin’s successor, and accused him of having terrorized workers and peasants alike. Above all, Ryutin was angered by Stalin’s attack on the Soviet countryside. The policy of ‘all-out collectivization’, Ryutin declared, had not been voluntary, as the propaganda claimed, and it was not a success. On the contrary:

  It is founded on direct and indirect forms of the most severe coercion, designed to force the peasants to join the collective farms. It is founded not on an improvement in their condition, but on their direct and indirect expropriation an
d massive impoverishment … outcries directed by Stalin at the kulaks at the present time are only a method of terrorizing the masses and concealing his own bankruptcy.

  These were not just mistakes, wrote Ryutin, but crimes. He called on his fellow dissidents to organize a revolt:

  In the struggle to destroy Stalin’s dictatorship, we must in the main rely not on the old leaders but on new forces. These forces exist, these forces will quickly grow. New leaders will inevitably arise, new organizers of the masses, new authorities … A struggle gives birth to leaders and heroes. We must begin to take action.11

  This was distinctly Bolshevik language, which may help explain why Stalin, when he read it, took it so seriously. He had seen revolutionary passion before, and he knew it could be triggered again. After an informer tipped off the OGPU in September, he showed no mercy. Within days the Communist Party expelled and arrested twenty-one people, including the son of Hryhorii Petrovskyi, the chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, as well as Ryutin himself. All were condemned as counter-revolutionaries. All were executed, as were, in due course, Ryutin’s wife and two adult sons.12 In later years, to have read ‘Ryutin’s Platform’, or even to have heard of it, became a capital crime.

  Stalin must have assumed that Ryutin’s views were nevertheless widely shared, especially at the lower levels of the party and among people who had daily contact with the hungry rural population, for the Ryutin affair sharpened his sensitivity to other signs of discontent. Throughout the summer of 1932 he had been reading the reports from across the Soviet Union, including the disturbing ones from Ukraine. More arrived in early September. In the North Caucasus the OGPU claimed to have discovered a counter-revolutionary group that objected to Soviet policy because ‘the pace of all-out collectivization has been too rapid’.13 Across the USSR secret policemen were warning their superiors about ‘new tactics practised by the kulaks’, now including ‘fake’ complaints of famine. They were advised to investigate: ‘where a case of feigning hunger is brought to light, the perpetrators are to be considered counter-revolutionary elements’.14

  Nadya’s death, the Ryutin affair, the worrying letters from close colleagues, the stark missives from the field – all this fed Stalin’s growing paranoia that autumn. Discontent was seething all around him, and the prospect of counter-revolution suddenly seemed real. Historians have long thought that the events of the summer and autumn of 1932 were the catalyst for the mass arrests and executions of 1937–8, later known as the Great Terror.15 But they also formed the immediate backdrop to an extraordinary set of decisions affecting Ukraine.

  That autumn it would still have been possible to turn back. The Kremlin could have offered food aid to Ukraine and the other grain-growing regions of the USSR, as the regime had done in 1921 and as it had begun to do, in fits and starts, already that year. The state could have redistributed all available resources, or imported food from abroad. It could even have asked, as it had also done in 1921, for help from abroad.

  Instead, Stalin began using stark language about Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus, the Russian province that was heavily Ukrainian. ‘Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic’, were Stalin’s words to Kaganovich in August. ‘Curse out the North Caucasus leadership for their bad work on grain requisitions,’ he declared.16 Others echoed his words on the ground. Early in October, Stanislav Kosior, General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, accused district officials who could not collect enough grain of harbouring ‘right-wing attitudes’. A few days later, after a week in which the Ukrainian provinces produced only 18 per cent of their grain quota, the Ukrainian Politburo sent a panicked letter to local leaders warning them that there was ‘little time left’ and calling for ‘an end to the calm attitude of party and state agencies’.17 Soon after that, Molotov arrived in Kharkiv and Kaganovich headed to the North Caucasus to ‘struggle with the class enemy who sabotaged the grain collection and the sowing’.18

  By November 1932 it was nevertheless clear that the autumn harvest would not meet the plan. It came in 40 per cent lower than the planners had expected in the USSR as a whole, and 60 per cent lower in Ukraine.19 Intriguingly, the overall drop in production was not as dramatic as it had been in 1921, and over the next few years it remained about the same. All across the USSR the total grain harvest for 1931–2 was 69.5 million tonnes (down from 83.5 million in 1930–1); for 1932–3 the total was 69.9 million tonnes. In 1933–4 the USSR harvested 68.4 million tonnes, and in 1934–5 the total was 67.6 million. But the state’s unrealistic demands on the peasants – the expectation that they meet unattainable goals – created the perception of total failure. The insistence that the peasants deliver grain that Stalin believed should exist created, in turn, a humanitarian catastrophe.20

  Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

  Several sets of directives that autumn, on requisitions, blacklisted farms and villages, border controls and the end of Ukrainization – along with an information blockade and extraordinary searches, designed to remove everything edible from the homes of millions of peasants – created the famine now remembered as the Holodomor. The Holodomor, in turn, delivered the predictable result: the Ukrainian national movement disappeared completely from Soviet politics and public life. The ‘cruel lesson of 1919’ had been learned, and Stalin intended never to repeat it.

  REQUISITIONS

  In July 1932, Stalin had toyed with the idea of reducing his unrealistic demands for grain from Ukraine in order to appear more benevolent. In the autumn, as it became clear that Ukraine would not come anywhere near the required number, he changed his tactics. Ukraine could indeed be ‘allowed’ to produce less than required, even by 70 million poods (1.1 million tonnes). But this meant that every bit of the remaining quota – which was still unrealistic – had to be collected. On 29 October, Molotov sent a telegram to Stalin confirming what he had told the Ukrainians: the remaining plan had to be ‘fulfilled unconditionally, completely, not lowering it by an ounce’.21

  On 18 November the Ukrainian communists carried out his wishes. The party issued a resolution declaring that ‘the full delivery of grain procurement plans is the principal duty of all collective farms’, to be prioritized above and beyond anything else, including the collection of grain reserves, seed reserves, animal fodder and, ominously, daily food supplies. In practice, both individual and collective farmers were forbidden from holding back anything at all. Even those allowed to keep grain in the past had to give it back. Any collective farmer who produced grain for his family on a private plot now had to turn that over too.22 No excuses were accepted.

  A few weeks after this order was issued, Kaganovich arrived in Ukraine to ensure that it was carried out. Following another tumultuous Politburo meeting, this one lasting until 4 a.m., he posted a telegram to Stalin. Myriad Ukrainian communists had begged for the peasants to be allowed some reserves for their own consumption, as well as some seeds for the next season’s crop, but he assured Stalin that he had stood firm: ‘We are convinced that this “preoccupation” with reserves, including seed reserves, is seriously hampering and undermining the entire grain procurement plan.’23 Two days later, on 24 December, the Ukrainian Communist Party gave up trying to resist. The leadership conceded completely and gave all underperforming collective farms ‘five days to ship, without exception, all collective farm reserves, including sowing seeds’.24

  Grain was not the only food that Moscow now determined to squeeze out of Ukraine. During past years of poor harvests and bad weather, peasants had survived thanks to their livestock
and to vegetables grown in their kitchen gardens. Following the bad harvest in 1924, Soviet agronomists noted that the dairy and poultry industries actually expanded.25 But in the autumn of 1932 underperforming private farmers and collective farms not only had to give up their seed reserves, they also had to pay a meat penalty – a ‘fifteen-month quota of meat from collectivized and privately owned livestock’ – as well as a potato penalty, comprising a ‘one-year potato quota’. In practice, this law forced families to relinquish whatever potatoes they had stored away, and to turn over their remaining livestock, including the family cows that they had been allowed to keep since March 1930.26

  To ensure that nobody protested or resisted those orders, Stalin sent a telegram to the Ukrainian Communist Party leaders in Kharkiv on 1 January 1933 demanding that the party use the 7 August law on ‘theft of state property’ to prosecute collective and individual farmers in Ukraine who were allegedly hiding grain.27 The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food – after which they would also die of starvation.28

  Two and a half weeks later the Soviet government issued another order that seems, at first glance, to have been intended to soften the blow. In an oddly worded statement, the Council of Ministers denounced the irregular methods of food collection that had been used all across the country – the plans, the plan failures, the supplementary plans – and called, instead, for peasants to pay a tax, in the form of a fixed percentage of their production. But there was one caveat: the tax was to take effect only in the summer of 1933. Until then the deadly requisitions would continue.29 In other words, Stalin knew that the methods being used were damaging, and he knew they would fail. But he allowed them to continue for several fatal months, during which time millions died.30