Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  At the time, such thoughts were treasonous, and several Orikhiv party officials were arrested and sentenced. Some spent long terms in the Gulag. Many never returned home. The OGPU justified these extreme punishments by giving their actions a deeper interpretation: although they pretended to be party members, communists such as those in Orikhiv secretly planned to overthrow the state. The Orikhiv communists had followed the ‘kulak path of betrayal of the party and the workers’ state, the path of sabotage, of demoralization of the collective farms, of organized sabotage of the grain collection, all the while concealing their kulak-thievery beneath the pretence of “agreement” with the general party line’.14

  One of those sentenced – Maria Skypyan-Basylevych, a party bureaucrat who spent ten years in the Gulag – declared, thirty years later, that ‘absolutely innocent people had suffered, honest and principled communists’.15 But in 1933 the Orikhiv arrests sent out a strong message: party members themselves were not immune from prosecution. Anybody, however apparently loyal, however good a communist, could now become a scapegoat if he or she dared to disagree with the authorities.

  The language used to condemn the Orikhiv communists was applied all over the republic. On 18 November, the same day the Ukrainian Politburo called for the confiscation of all remaining stores of grain, it also issued a decree ‘on the liquidation of counter-revolutionary nests and the defeat of kulak groups’. In blacklisted villages, ‘kulaks, Petliurites, pogromists and other counter-revolutionary elements’ were slated for arrest.16 Four days later the Soviet Politburo in Moscow resolved to establish death sentences for party and collective farm leaders who had failed to meet grain targets. A special ‘troika’ of Ukrainian officials, including Kosior, received the authority to order executions. They were also under instructions to report their decisions to Moscow every ten days.17

  They moved quickly. Within four days the OGPU discovered not only widespread dissatisfaction but evidence of a ‘kulak-Petliurite’ conspiracy in 243 Ukrainian districts.18 The secret police arrested 14,230 people in November 1932 alone; the total number of arrests for that year was 27,000, enough to eviscerate the party at the grassroots level.19 Even young people who were not yet members of the party fell under a cloud: between late 1932 and early 1934 the Komsomol expelled 18,638 of its members.20

  As the arrests progressed, the language of the OGPU grew even more shrill. ‘The operational strike against internal-collective farm anti-Soviet groups continues at a rapid pace’, declared the Ukrainian OGPU’s operational bulletin in December 1932:

  The counter-revolutionary activities of uncovered and liquidated groups on collective farms had consisted of undermining important agricultural campaigns, especially grain procurement; of squandering, concealing and hiding grain; and of anti-collective farm and anti-Soviet agitation … The overwhelming majority of liquidated internal-collective farm groups were closely influenced by kulak and counter-revolutionary groups, especially Petliurite elements that corrupted the collective farms and their administrative apparatus …21

  The fictitious ‘conspiracy’ also grew denser, more complex, and more closely linked to the rebellions of the past. Many of those arrested, especially in November and December, were the chairmen or leaders of collective farms; others were accountants or clerks. The names of the arrested were often listed with their real or imagined links and credentials too: ‘former Petliurite commander’; ‘son of a trader, whose mother has been sent to the North’; ‘former landowner’; ‘former active participant in Petliurite and Makhno bands’. Their ‘crimes’ always involved the supposed theft of bread, criticism of the grain collection campaign, or other activities that somehow explained the harvest failure in Ukraine.22 Yet their motives were described not merely as political but also as counter-revolutionary. They were said to have been influenced by Makhno, Petliura, the SVU, by class-hostile elements, kulaks, or some other past revolutionary movement.

  In a few cases the past and the present were explicitly linked. The authorities in the village of Kostiantynivka, in Odessa province, arrested Tymofii Pykal in December 1932 on the grounds of his present behaviour as well as his past connections. In the account of the case Pykal was quoted telling his fellow farmers not to hand over grain: ‘This year Soviet authorities are going to take all of our bread, we will all collapse from hunger if we give away our bread.’ At the same time the police noted that Pykal had been a ‘commander of a unit during the peasant uprising’ a decade earlier. He was arrested under the infamous Ukrainian article 54-10 – ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ – and sent away to be sentenced.

  Petro Ovcharenko, the inhabitant of another village in Odessa province, met a similar fate. Ovcharenko was simultaneously accused in December 1932 of having ‘organized a sectarian group’ in the past as well as ‘systematic agitation against the grain collection plans’. Supposedly, he had been overheard asking, ‘Why do we need these plans? Who has the right to collect our grain and leave us to starve? We won’t hand over our grain …’23

  By the end of the year, the ‘conspiracy’ had acquired international aspects too. In late December, Balytsky revealed the existence of a plot, a ‘Polish-Petliurite insurgent underground encompassing 67 local districts in Ukraine’. In February 1933 he wrote again of the ‘counter-revolutionary insurgent underground, linked to foreigners and foreign espionage, mainly the Polish general staff’.24 Balytsky’s Russian colleagues reinforced this particular brand of conspiracy thinking early in that year, when the Soviet OGPU organs in Moscow prepared an even more elaborate report ‘on the uncovered and eradicated kulak-White-Army-insurgent counter-revolutionary organizations’ not only in Ukraine but – following the December 1932 decrees – in the Northern Caucasus, the Central Black Earth province and the Urals.

  The Moscow report went even beyond Balytsky’s fantastical claims, claiming that it had found links between the underperforming collective farms and the ‘Russian All-Military Union’, an organization of exiled former tsarist officers led by Piotr Wrangel, a White Army general. In Ukraine the OGPU had captured a ‘kulak’ named Barylnykov, who had supposedly been sent by Wrangel from Paris to agitate against grain procurements and collectivization. They had also found ‘23 Polish-Petliurite representatives’; a ‘widely established insurgent underground’ in the western districts of Ukraine as well as Donbas, supposedly linked to a ‘Warsaw-based’ Ukrainian government in exile; a ‘kulak-White Army diversion group’ connected to Romanian intelligence; and, in Kuban, organizations with links to ‘Cossack centres of White emigrés’. These various groups were accused, among other things, of distributing political leaflets; carrying out arson attacks against kolkhoz property; destroying a poultry farm and killing 11,000 birds; setting up links with foreign counter-revolutionary organizations using sailors as agents; and, of course, sabotaging the harvest and stealing grain.25

  While the low-level party resistance had been real, these vast international connections were, even by OGPU standards, absurd. Poland had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932.26 The White Army generals named in the reports were already semi-retired and living in Paris, old men with no real reach or influence in the USSR. Petliura was long dead.

  But the accusations cooked up by Balytsky and the OGPU chief, Genrikh Yagoda, weren’t designed to reflect the truth. The discovery of this vast political conspiracy provided an explanation: why the harvest was failing, why people were hungry, why the Soviet agricultural policy, so closely and intimately linked with Stalin, was failing. To reinforce the point, Stalin personally sent out a letter at the end of December to the members and candidate members of the Central Committee, as well as to party leaders at the republican, provincial and local levels. Attached were lengthy, wordy, legal documents detailing the ‘sabotage of the grain collection in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk provinces’ as well as the activity of ‘wrecking groups in Kuban’. Lists of guilty officials, with their crimes, were tacked on to the end.27

  The tale
of the conspiracy also provided those who remained in the party with an ideological justification for what they were about to do. The deadly new decrees could not be enforced by Moscow alone. The policy would require local collaborators. Within a few weeks thousands of people would be required to carry out policies leading to the starvation of their neighbours. They would need multiple motivations: fear of arrest, fear of starvation – as well as hysteria, suspicion and hatred of their enemies.

  PURGING THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT: ‘THE EXECUTED RENAISSANCE’

  The Ukrainian Communist Party was the immediate victim of the December decrees. But the orders linking Ukrainization to grain requisition also marked the end of the Ukrainian national movement in the Soviet Union.

  In fact, the situation of national cultural leaders had already deteriorated significantly by the autumn of 1932. Since the orchestrated outcry against ‘Shumskyism’ in 1927, the lives of many of those associated with Ukrainian culture had grown more precarious. Mykhailo Hrushevsky had remained under assault both in ways that he could see and in ways that he could not. His secret police detail had deliberately encouraged animosity all around him, goading his friends into becoming critics. His funding had dried up. A new school of Marxist historians now attacked his books on Ukrainian history, arguing that he paid insufficient attention to the story of the working class and showed too much interest in the evolution of Ukrainian identity.

  The OGPU finally arrested Hrushevsky in the spring of 1931 while he was on a trip to Moscow. They brought him to Ukraine, where Balytsky personally decided to send Ukraine’s greatest historian into exile rather than to prison. The OGPU returned him to Russia, and told him to stay there. Soon afterwards the authorities organized three public debates designed to delegitimize his work altogether. These ‘show trials’ were staged with great pomp and circumstance in three buildings associated with the national movement: the Kyiv opera house, the former Central Rada building and the Academy of Sciences. They ‘unmasked’ Hrushevsky as an active enemy agent, a ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist and fascist allegedly working toward the separation of Ukraine from the USSR and its subjugation by the capitalist West’.28 His name disappeared from public life, and he never returned to Ukraine. He died under what many still believe to be suspicious circumstances in the Caucasian resort town of Kislovodsk in 1934.

  In the months following the Hrushevsky trials, the national communists – the faithful Bolsheviks who had believed they could inspire Ukraine’s peasants and workers with both Ukrainian culture and Soviet rhetoric – all met a similar fate. Mykola Skrypnyk, who had led the charge against Shumsky, acquiesced in the denunciations of Hrushevsky and faithfully toed the party line, was now the primary victim. In January 1933 the party abolished the Ukrainian history and language courses that Skrypnyk had established in Ukraine’s universities. In February, Skrypnyk was forced to defend himself against the charge that he had tried to ‘Ukrainize’ Russian children by force. In March, while the famine was raging in the countryside, Postyshev, in his role as Stalin’s de facto spokesman in Ukraine, forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children.29

  Skrypnyk’s school system now lay in ruins. In June, Postyshev accused him of having made theoretical ‘mistakes’ at the People’s Commissariat of Education. But Postyshev also went further:

  these [theoretical errors] are trivial in comparison to that wrecking that took place in the education organs that aimed at the confusion of our youth with an ideology hostile to the proletariat … [As a result] Ukrainization often was put into the hands of Petliurite swine, and these enemies with party cards in their pockets hid behind your broad back as a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, and you often defended them. You should have talked about that. That is the main issue.

  Postyshev didn’t call Skrypnyk himself a ‘hidden enemy’, but he came very close.30 Soon after, a series of articles in the communist press attacked Skrypnyk’s language and linguistics policy, including his brand-new Ukrainian orthography, compiled over many years with the input of scholars from across the Ukrainian-speaking world.31 At a Politburo meeting on 7 July, Skrypnyk protested to a roomful of his colleagues against all these charges. They formally rebuffed his comments: ‘Skrypnyk has not completed his obligation to give the Central Committee a short letter admitting his errors.’ But by then he had walked out of the Politburo meeting, returned home and shot himself.32

  The noose was tightening around others as well, especially the Ukrainian artists and writers who had taken up residence at the Budynok ‘Slovo’, the House of Writers, the apartment block reserved for cultural figures in Kharkiv. Since 1930 the Budynok ‘Slovo’ had been the focus of almost hysterical OGPU surveillance. Minders watched the building at all times; police conducted regular searches of the sixty-eight apartments and broke up any chance courtyard conversations involving more than three people, on the grounds that they might be illegal ‘organizational’ meetings, planning a plot. One writer, Ostap Vyshnia, stopped leaving his apartment altogether; another, Mykola Bazhan, slept every night in his clothes, preparing to be hauled away.

  Arrests began to empty the building, creating an atmosphere that was particularly painful to Mykola Khvylovyi, the writer whose calls for a ‘European’ literature in Ukraine had so shocked Kaganovich and Stalin. By then, Khvylovyi had withdrawn or retracted much of his more provocative work, including his famous slogan, ‘Away from Moscow!’ He had also travelled around the decimated countryside and witnessed the growing numbers of starving peasants, and he returned to Kharkiv devastated. He told a friend that the famine he had witnessed was a purely political construction, ‘designed to solve a very dangerous Ukrainian problem all at once’. To Khvylovyi, the link between the deadly grain requisition policy and the crackdown on Ukrainian culture was already clear. The secret police watching him also wrote that after his return from the famine districts, ‘his emotions had possessed him more than anything else’. The arrest of one of his close friends, the writer Mykhailo Ialovyi, seems to have finally tipped him over the edge. In the hours before he too shot himself, he composed a suicide note. In it he spoke of ‘the murder of a generation … for what? Because we were the most sincere communists? I don’t understand.’ His conclusion: ‘Long live communism. Long live the construction of socialism. Long live the Communist Party.’33

  Khvylovyi’s death made a bad situation worse: informers in the Budynok ‘Slovo’ told their OGPU minders that the writer’s remaining friends looked upon his suicide as an ‘act of heroism’. Others complained bitterly that there could be no protests during his funeral, because the party would ‘control all speeches in advance’. The informers’ conclusion: ‘Anti-Soviet elements from academic research institutes and the Ukrainian intelligentsia are using the death of Khvylovyi as a new occasion for counter-revolutionary plotting.’ More arrests followed; among the new victims was Oleksandr Shumskyi. A few months later a party journal lumped Khvylovyi, Shumskyi and Skrypnyk together: all of them wanted to ‘break Soviet Ukraine away from the USSR and turn it into an imperialist colony’.34

  By then, the purge of Skrypnyk’s Commissariat of Education was well underway. The ground had been prepared back in 1927, when an OGPU investigation into their political views had concluded that teachers, like collective farm workers, were hiding their ‘anti-Soviet views’ behind a facade of support for the state.35 During the SVU trials of 1929 and 1930 thousands were accused of counter-revolutionary conspiracy.36 But after Skrypnyk’s resignation and suicide the systematic sacking of Ukrainian teachers, professors and education bureaucrats progressed to its logical conclusion. In 1933 all the regional heads of education departments were fired, along with the vast majority of local education bureaucrats. Some 4,000 Ukrainian teachers were named as ‘class-hostile enemies’. Out of twenty-nine directors of pedagogical institutes, eighteen were dismissed.37 Across the republic anyone with any conceivable link to nationalism – or anyone with an imagin
ary link to anything that might resemble nationalism – lost his job. Many were subsequently arrested.

  By any standard the number of victims was very large: in the course of two years, 1932 and 1933 – the years of the famine – the same Soviet secret police responsible for overseeing the hunger in the countryside would arrest nearly 200,000 people in the republic of Ukraine.38 But even this figure, as large as it is, underrates the catastrophic impact of this targeted purge on specific institutions and branches of society, especially education, culture, religion and publishing. In essence, the 200,000 represented an entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians. In the Ukrainian context this 1932–3 purge was similar in scale to the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–8, which eradicated most of the Soviet leadership and would take many Ukrainian victims too.39

  During the crucial years 1932–3 whole institutions – the Polish pedagogical institute, a German secondary school – were shut down or else cleansed entirely of faculty and staff.40 University faculties and publishing houses were shut down. Forty staff employed by the Ukrainian National Library were arrested as ‘national-fascist wreckers’.41 All the remaining departments of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were liquidated.42 The Ukrainian Academy of Agricultural Sciences lost between 80 and 90 per cent of its presidium. Other organizations similarly wiped out in 1933 included the editorial board of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, the Geodesic Administration, the Cinema Studio, the Chamber of Weights and Measures, the Institute of Soviet Law in Kharkiv and many others. Two hundred ‘nationalistic’ Ukrainian plays were banned, along with a couple of dozen ‘nationalistic’ Ukrainian translations of world classics.43

  Particularly poignant was the fate of the pedagogical institute in Nizhyn, Chernihiv province, whose origins dated back to the early nineteenth century, and whose graduates included Nikolai Gogol. In the second half of 1933 a special Central Committee commission investigated the institute and ‘uncovered’ a vast web of suspicious elements residing in its classical buildings. The findings were ominous: the institute’s journal was said to be full of dangerous examples of nationalism, the professors were propagating the now unacceptable works of Hrushevsky, the researchers were idealizing the Cossack leaders of the past. The chair of the Soviet history department had ignored the role of class struggle in Ukrainian history, and was forced to publicly retract his views; the chair of the economics department had supported an ‘anti-Leninist’ theory of economic crisis. After absorbing this report, the local party cell dismissed the heads of many departments – including the departments of biology, history and economics – and closed the institute’s museum and journal. The Nizhyn institute survived, but was renamed and repopulated with completely different teachers.44