Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Certainly during the winter of 1933 he did not offer any additional food aid, nor did he ease up on grain collection. Grain exports continued to flow out of the USSR, albeit more slowly than in the past. Since the spring of 1932 Soviet foreign trade officials had complained about the drop in the quantity of grain for export. In Odessa those responsible for shipping also complained that they were receiving poor-quality and poorly packed grain. Soviet officials had in the past been specifically instructed to take Western businessmen out to dinner and to flatter them, as a way of making up for the fact that grain shipments were late or non-existent.31 Such gestures may well have been required in 1932, for export levels did sink that year, as noted earlier.32

  But the number never fell to zero. Nor did exports of other kinds of food stop either. In 1932 the USSR exported more than 3,500 tonnes of butter and 586 tonnes of bacon from Ukraine alone. In 1933 the numbers rose to 5,433 tonnes of butter and 1,037 tonnes of bacon. In both years Soviet exporters continued to ship eggs, poultry, apples, nuts, honey, jam, canned fish, canned vegetables and canned meat, food that could have helped to feed Ukraine.33

  BLACKLISTS

  In November and December 1932, as the significance of the new ‘unconditional’ requisition orders was sinking in, the Ukrainian Communist Party enlarged and formalized the republic’s system of blacklists. The term ‘blacklist’ (chorna doshka, which translates more literally as ‘black board’) was not new. From their very earliest days in power, the Bolsheviks had grappled with the problem of low productivity. Since neither bosses nor workers in state companies had any market incentives to work hard or well, the state created elaborate schemes of reward and punishment. Among other things, many factories began to place the names of their most successful workers on ‘red boards’, and those of the least successful workers on ‘black boards’. In March 1920, Stalin himself gave a speech in Donbas and referred specifically to the need to ‘favour one group over another’ and to reward ‘red medals’ to the work brigade leaders, ‘as in a military operation’. At the same time, those comrades who were avoiding work must be ‘pulled by the hair’: ‘For them we need black boards’. During the civil war, in 1919–21, the Bolsheviks had placed whole villages on blacklists if they failed to fulfil grain requisition requirements.34

  In 1932 the blacklist returned as a tool for the reinforcement of grain procurement policy. Although they were used to some degree in all the other grain-producing regions of the USSR, blacklists were applied earlier, more widely and more rigorously in Ukraine. From the beginning of that year, provincial and local authorities had begun to blacklist collective farms, cooperatives and even whole villages that had failed to meet their grain quotas, and to subject them to a range of punishments and sanctions. In late summer local leaders expanded the blacklists. In November the practice became ubiquitous, spreading to include villages and collective farms in almost every district of Ukraine.35

  All across the republic, the names of blacklisted villages appeared in newspapers, along with the percentage of the grain quota they had achieved. One such article, for example, simply entitled ‘The Black List’, appeared in the Poltava province in September 1932, with a black border around it. The list contained seven villages, each of which had produced between 10.7 per cent and 14.2 per cent of the yearly plan.36

  Because records were kept separately in each province of Ukraine, the total number of blacklisted entities is hard to determine. But by the end of the year there were hundreds and possibly thousands of villages, collective farms and independent farms on blacklists all across the republic.37 At least seventy-nine districts were entirely blacklisted, and 174 districts were partially blacklisted, nearly half of the total in the entire republic.38 Although the names were compiled by local leaders, Moscow took a keen interest in the process. Kaganovich personally pushed for the system of blacklisting to be spread to the Kuban, the historically Cossack and majority Ukrainian-speaking province of the North Caucasus.39 Kuban had attracted negative attention a few years earlier, when enthusiasts of Ukrainization had begun promoting the language there. Kaganovich himself now took charge of a commission set up to combat the combined problem of grain deliveries and national sentiments there. On 4 November the leadership of the North Caucasus duly published a blacklist of fifteen Cossack settlements (stanitsy).

  A series of sanctions on blacklisted farms and villages followed. In a telegram sent to all the provinces the Ukrainian Central Committee banned blacklisted districts that had failed to meet grain targets from purchasing any manufactured or industrial goods. In the initial order an exception was made for kerosene, salt and matches. Two weeks later, in a telegram from Moscow, Molotov ordered Kosior to ban the delivery of those three items too. After the ban went into effect, any peasant who might possess food would soon have great difficulties cooking it.40

  A complete ban on trade came next. Earlier in 1932 an edict had forbidden peasants from trading grain and meat products if their farms had not met requisition quotas. Now, districts which had failed to meet the grain procurement targets – and this included most of Ukraine – could no longer legally trade grain, seeds, flour or bread in any form at all. Anyone caught trading anything was liable to be arrested. Policemen seized grain or bread from bazaars. The peasants who lived on underperforming farms could neither purchase grain, barter for grain, nor legally obtain or possess grain at all.

  The Politburo’s next decree purged ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ in blacklisted communities. Local activists in Kuban won the right to conduct their own ‘trials’ of local saboteurs, and in the weeks that followed they deported 45,000 people and imported demobilized Red Army soldiers and other outsiders to replace them.41 Kaganovich was in no doubt about the purpose of the Kuban blacklist. As he wrote to Stalin, he wanted ‘all Kuban Cossacks to know that in 1921 the Terek Cossacks who resisted were deported. Just like now – we cannot allow them on Kuban land, its golden land, to refuse to sow and to obstruct us instead.’42

  The blacklists also served as a lesson in the folly of resistance in Ukraine. Unlike Russia and Belarus, where the term ‘blacklist’ was confined to grain producers, in Ukraine it could be applied to almost any entity. Whole districts were blacklisted. Machine tractor stations, timber companies and all kinds of provincial enterprises only distantly connected to grain production were blacklisted. As one historian has written, ‘the blacklist became a universal weapon aimed at all rural residents’ in Ukraine.43 Blacklisting affected not just peasants but artisans, nurses, teachers, clerks, civil servants, anyone who lived in a blacklisted village or worked in a blacklisted enterprise.

  As the number of people affected increased, the definition of what it meant to be ‘blacklisted’ would also evolve. Like everyone in the regions that had not met the grain targets, those on the blacklists were prohibited from receiving any manufactured goods whatsoever – including, thanks to Molotov, kerosene, salt and matches. The activists also forced them to hand back to the central authorities any manufactured goods – clothes, furniture, tools – they had stored in shops and warehouses.

  Financial sanctions then also followed: blacklisted farms and enterprises could no longer receive credit of any kind. If they had outstanding loans they had to repay them early. In some cases all of their money was confiscated: the state could close their bank accounts and force their employees to pay their collective debts. The state prohibited the milling of grain, making it impossible to prepare flour (even if any grain could be obtained) in order to bake bread. Blacklisted farms could not receive the services of the machine tractor stations, which meant that all farm work had to be done by hand or with livestock.44 In some places the blacklists were enforced by special brigades or teams of soldiers or secret policemen who blocked trade to the village, farm or district.45

  Sometimes particular farms received extra sanctions. After the village of Horodyshche, in Voroshilov district, Donetsk province, was blacklisted in November 1932, local authorities noticed that th
e rules weren’t having much impact. Horodyshche was near the large railway station of Debaltseve where a good deal of illicit trading took place. Many of the villagers were craftsmen or worked in nearby mines, they had a wide range of contacts as well as private plots of land, and they were finding ways to get hold of the products they needed. Worse, Horodyshche had a suspect history: during the civil war, the local party committee report noted, the village had hosted many ‘groups of bandits, horse thieves and the like’. Collectivization had ‘encountered active resistance’ in the town as well, thanks to a ‘large kulak community’. The district leaders decided to tighten the rules just for Horodyshche. They demanded the early return of a 23,500-ruble loan that had been borrowed by the collective farm. They seized three tractors. They confiscated all of the village’s seed stock. They levied meat ‘fines’ – which meant the confiscation of livestock – and confiscated the miners’ garden plots. They arranged for 150 people to be dismissed from their jobs in local factories, because their families had failed to hand over grain. Finally, they arrested and put on trial the collective farm leadership, and warned all of the village residents that if ‘sabotage’ did not cease, they would be deported and replaced with ‘conscientious collective farmers’. Their houses would be confiscated and given to ‘industrial laborers in need of accommodations’.46

  Ostensibly, the blacklists were designed to persuade the peasants sanctioned by them to work harder and produce more grain. In practice, they had quite a different impact. With no grain, no livestock, no tools, no money and no credit, with no ability to trade or even to leave their places of work, the inhabitants of blacklisted villages could not grow, prepare or purchase anything to eat at all.

  BORDERS

  As Ukrainian peasants grew more hungry, another problem arose: how to prevent starving people from leaving their homes in search of something to eat.

  The issue was not a new one. Already in 1931 the OGPU had been warning of a ‘systematic’ exodus of peasants from Ukrainian villages, and the numbers had continued to rise.47 Their own statistics showed the number of rural workers dropping rapidly as thousands of people escaped the collective farms.48 In January 1932 the problem grew suddenly worse. In a report sent to Stalin, Vsevolod Balytsky, still the head of the Ukrainian OGPU, reckoned that more than 30,000 people had left the Ukrainian Republic during the previous month.49 A year later the Ukrainian OGPU produced an even more alarming tally: between 15 December 1932 and 2 February 1933 nearly 95,000 peasants had left their homes. The OGPU stopped short of admitting that people were leaving because they were starving – ‘most of those fleeing are private farmers and kulaks who have failed to fulfil their grain procurement obligations and are afraid of facing repression’ – but they did concede that some of the escapees had ‘concerns over problems with food supplies’.50

  Some were crossing the Ukrainian border to search for food in Russia. ‘When their potatoes were gone,’ one Ukrainian worker remembered, ‘people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food. Interestingly enough, beyond Kharkiv where the Russian territory starts there was no hunger.’51 Indeed, officials in Russian districts along the Ukrainian border had already begun complaining of the Ukrainian influx in early 1932. ‘Crowds’ of individuals, whole families with small children and old people were pouring over the border, looking to buy or beg for bread: ‘The situation is becoming dangerous,’ wrote one Russian local official. His letter also spoke of the ‘moral’ threat from the hungry arrivals and the rise of theft.52

  A few weeks later a group of Belarusian workers wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Communist Party. They protested that starving Ukrainians were blocking their roads and railways:

  It’s shameful, when you look at these wandering, starving Ukrainians, and when you ask, why don’t they stay at work, they answer that there aren’t any seeds to sow and there’s nothing to do at their collective farms and the supplies are bad … a fact is a fact, millions of people are wandering naked, starving in the woods, stations, towns and farms of Belarus, begging for a piece of bread.53

  But the Ukrainians kept leaving, not least because there really was more food available in Russia and Belarus. At the end of October 1932 one young girl’s father made it all the way to Leningrad. Departing in secret, in the middle of the night, her family managed to join him weeks later, travelling through stations packed with starving Ukrainians. ‘At that time neither Moscow nor other cities close to it were starving,’ she remembered. ‘Only Ukraine was honoured with this crown of thorns.’ By making the arduous trip to the far north, the entire family survived.54

  Others made it out as well: in January 1933 the OGPU observed that 16,500 long-distance tickets had been purchased at Lozova station and 15,000 at Sumy, both towns in Kharkiv province in the northern part of Ukraine.55 Tens of thousands of others were trying to leave with them. By the end of 1932, stations all across Ukraine were already crowded with emaciated, ragged people, trying to beg food and tickets from passengers, since many of them had no money. A boy who travelled to join his mother at that time saw corpses at the Kharkiv railway station, and watched a young girl grab chicken bones off the floor of the station buffet and begin gnawing them. Those who did manage to board a train hid themselves beneath benches; the conductors threw them off, but more kept getting on.56 These same crowds had disturbed Voroshilov, Budyonny and Kira Alliluyeva in the summer of 1932. In the autumn of 1932 and winter of 1933 their numbers only grew larger.

  Others left by ship. One of several unusually observant Italian consuls, this one in the city of Batumi, Georgia, on the Black Sea coast, reckoned in January 1933 that ‘every steamship that arrives from Odessa – three arrive per week – usually delivers one to two thousand Ukrainians’. Previously, the Ukrainians seemed to have been looking to buy food in Batumi, to purchase flour or seeds that they could eat at home or else sell at a profit. But in the late autumn, the mass movement of people had taken on the character of a refugee influx, with thousands seeking to settle ‘where the means of existence and opportunities to obtain food are more abundant’.57

  As in 1930, some peasants tried to leave the country as well. Maria Błażejewska, an ethnic Pole, entered Poland from Ukraine in October 1932 by pretending to be a washerwoman. While laundering clothes in the Zbruch River, which then served as the border, she slipped across to the other side. Two of her sons made the dangerous crossing with her; a third had already been deported to the Far East. ‘From 1931,’ she told the Polish border police, ‘life in Soviet Russia … turned into unbearable torture because the Soviet authorities began taking almost all the grain and the livestock away from us, leaving me only a very small amount which did not suffice even for the most modest standard of living.’58 Leon Woźniak, aged fifteen, also escaped in October: ‘We were driven away from our own house … both my brother and I worked in the forests, yet with this we could not make a living. Because presently all work has ceased and I was dying of hunger, on 15 October, together with my mother Małgorzata and my brother Bronisław, I escaped from Soviet Russia into Poland.’59

  Others tried to escape the same way, but failed in the attempt. A few months after Maria and Leon slipped over the border, a group of sixty people tried to cross the Zbruch River together. Only fourteen succeeded; the rest drowned or were shot by border guards. Another 250 families would try to cross the border during the winter of 1932–3. By December 1932 the Polish Interior Ministry had established a special commission for Ukrainian refugees, including a representative of the Red Cross and one from the League of Nations.60

  Still others tried to walk, ride or get onto trains heading into Ukrainian cities. If they had left early enough, if they had relatives to meet them, and if they were strong enough to work, they sometimes succeeded. Many ‘kulaks’ had earlier escaped deportation by moving to Kyiv and Kharkiv as well as to the mines and factories of Donetsk. But by late 1932 the numbers of people began to multiply, and the cities, especially Kyiv, Kharkiv and
Odessa, could no longer cope. In the autumn of 1932 one memoirist recalled an ‘uneasy mood’ in Kharkiv:

  There was no food. There were long lines, and there was much noise in newspapers about the grain procurements, about the way the anti-Soviet element, the so-called ‘kurkuls’ or ‘kulaks’ were supposedly hiding grain from the government … Bread, which could be obtained with ration cards, was sold only irregularly. Lines began to form at night, but were often dispersed by the militia. In order to mask the situation, bread was issued not in shops but out in the open.61

  As more peasants drifted into the centre of Kharkiv, things grew worse. They were easily identifiable by their ragged clothes and bare feet: thanks to the trudodni system of rationing, they had no money, and no way to buy either food or clothing. Instinctively, the city-dwellers, who themselves had very little food and also relied on rationing, stayed away from them. By the winter, the peasants in the city were hardly better off than those who had remained at home:

  Many villagers roamed the streets there. You met them everywhere. They were of various ages – old, young, children, and infants. Their state of physical deterioration was evident in the slow way they moved their bodies. The light was extinguished from the downcast eyes on the haggard and occasionally swollen faces. They were hungry, exhausted, ragged, filthy, cold and unwashed. Some of them dared to knock on people’s doors or maybe on someone’s window, and some could barely stretch out their begging hands. Others yet were sitting against the walls, and they were motionless and speechless.62