Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Others took the hint. Although the Ukrainization policy continued to exist on paper, in practice the Russian language returned to dominance in both higher education and public life. Millions assumed that any association with Ukrainian language or history was toxic, even dangerous, as well as ‘backwards’ and inferior. The city government of Donetsk dropped its use of Ukrainian; factory newspapers that had been publishing in Ukrainian switched to Russian.45 The universities of Odessa, which had recently adopted Ukrainian, also went back to teaching in Russian. Ambitious students openly sought to avoid studying Ukrainian, preferring to be educated in Russian, the language that gave them greater access and more career opportunities.46

  Some now feared to use Ukrainian at all. The director of the fine arts academy in Odessa, which taught most of its courses in Ukrainian, put it most clearly: ‘After the Skrypnyk affair, every one switched back to Russian fearing that otherwise they would be labeled a Ukrainian nationalist.’47 Similar forces engulfed the local museums, as well as the little periodicals devoted to regional studies and Ukrainian history. Most lost their funding, and they began to disappear too.48

  A similar wave of repression washed over the Church. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, established in 1921 as an independent branch of Orthodoxy, had already been badly weakened during the SVU trials of 1929, when many of its leaders had been arrested and condemned. In February 1930, at the height of the peasant rebellion, the USSR had adopted its decree on ‘the fight against new counter-revolutionary elements in governing bodies of the religious unions’ and, as noted, promoted the theft of bells and icons as well as the arrests of priests.

  Between 1931 and 1936 thousands of churches – three-quarters of those in the country – ceased to function altogether. Many would be physically demolished: between 1934 and 1937 sixty-nine churches were destroyed in Kyiv alone. Both churches and synagogues were converted to other uses. The buildings, hungry peasants were told, were needed to serve as ‘granaries’. The result was that by 1936 services took place in only 1,116 churches in the entire Ukrainian Republic. In many large provinces – Donetsk, Vinnytsia, Mikolaiv – there were no Orthodox churches left at all. In others – Luhansk, Poltava, Kharkiv – there was but a single church in use.49

  The city of Kyiv also suffered. Because many Kyiv buildings were associated with past moments of national triumph, they too became the focus of the anti-national assault in the aftermath of the famine. In its professional journal the Architects’ Union of the USSR criticized the city’s architecture for embodying ‘class hostile ideology’. A special government commission was created to carry out the socialist reconstruction of Kyiv; Balytsky and Postyshev both participated.50 By 1935 the committee had approved a ‘general plan’ for the city, which would turn ‘a city of churches and monasteries into an architecturally complete, real socialist center of the Soviet Ukraine’.51 Only a few years earlier the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences had proposed creating a historical preservation zone, a ‘Kyiv Acropolis’ in the most ancient part of the city. But in 1935 the city instead destroyed dozens of architectural monuments, including Orthodox and Jewish cemeteries as well as churches and ecclesiastical structures. The graves and monuments of literary and political personalities from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries disappeared from Kyiv too.52 Allegedly, Postyshev believed that this vandalism would help the party combat the bourgeois nationalism inspired by this ‘historical junk’.53

  The destruction of the buildings was accompanied by an attack on the people who understood them best: a whole generation of art historians and curators. People who had dedicated their lives to the causes of art and knowledge met horrifying ends. Mykhailo Pavlenko of the Kyiv painting gallery was arrested in 1934 and shot in 1937, after three years spent living in exile. Fedir Kozubovskyi, director of the Institute of the History of Material Culture in Kyiv, was shot in 1938; before that, he was driven to such despair during his interrogation that he asked for poison to alleviate his suffering. Pavlo Pototsky, an art collector who had donated his paintings to the Historical Museum, was arrested at age eighty-one. He died of a heart attack inside the Lubyanka, the notorious Moscow prison.54

  Once the people and the monuments were out of the way, the attack on their books followed. On 15 December 1934 the authorities published a list of banned authors, decreeing that all their books, for all years and in all languages, must be removed from libraries, shops, educational institutions and warehouses. Eventually, four such lists would be published, containing works by Ukrainian writers, poets, critics, historians, sociologists, art historians, and anyone else who had been arrested. In other words, the extermination of the intellectual class was accompanied by the extermination of their words and ideas.55

  Finally, the new cultural establishment attacked the Ukrainian language itself, starting with Skrypnyk’s dictionary, the fruit of so much careful collaboration: it relied too much on pre-revolutionary sources, it neglected new revolutionary, ‘Soviet’ words, it included language components that had a ‘class enemy character’. Its authors represented the ‘language theory of bourgeois nationalism’, they ‘continued the tradition of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine [SVU]’, they had to be purged from their various institutions. Many were arrested, later murdered.56

  The abolition of the dictionary led to linguistic changes in official and academic documents, in literature and school textbooks. The Ukrainian letter ‘g’ (Ґ) was dropped, a change that made the language seem ‘closer’ to Russian. Foreign words were given Russian forms instead of Ukrainian ones. Ukrainian periodicals received lists of ‘words not to be used’ and ‘words to be used’, with the former including more ‘Ukrainian’ words, and the latter sounding more Russian. Some of these changes would be reversed again, in 1937, when the ‘Great Terror’ let to the arrest of the remaining Ukrainian linguists, including those who had enforced the 1934 changes. By the end of the decade chaos reigned, as the linguist George Shevelov has written:

  Teachers were confused and frightened, and students were bewildered. Not to follow the new trend was criminal, but to follow it was impossible, because of the lack of information. Instability seemed to be an inherent feature of the Ukrainian language, in contrast to Russian, which suffered no upheaval of any kind. The already damaged prestige of Ukrainian sank further.57

  The situation would be stabilized somewhat after Nikita Khrushchev became the first party secretary in Ukraine in 1939. But by then the experts were imprisoned or dead; neither their books nor their carefully produced grammars were ever revived in Soviet Ukraine.

  10

  Famine Decisions, 1932: The Searches and the Searchers

  I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. ‘They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash’ – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating …

  Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, 19611

  Long before collectivization began, the phenomenon of the violent expropriator – a man who brandished a gun, spouted slogans and demanded food – was familiar in Soviet Ukraine. Such men had appeared in 1918 and 1919, looking for grain to feed their armies. They had appeared again in 1920, when the Bolsheviks returned to power. They came back in 1928 and 1929, as a new wave of food shortages began. In the winter of 1932–3 they were back again, but their behaviour had changed.

  Unlike the other measures aimed at Ukraine in 1932–3, no written instructions governing the behaviour of activists have ever been found. Perhaps they were not put to paper, or perhaps they were destroyed along with other archival materials from Ukraine in this period, which, at the provincial and district level, are far sparser than those from the same period in Russia. Nevertheless, a remarkably consistent oral history record shows a sharp change in activi
sts’ behaviour on the eve of the Holodomor.

  That winter the teams operating in villages all across Ukraine began to search not just for grain but for anything and everything edible. They were specifically equipped to do so with special tools, long metal rods, sometimes topped by hooks, that could be used to prod any surface in search of grain. The peasants had many different names for these instruments, calling them iron wires, cudgels, metal sticks, sharp sticks, rods, lances, spears and spokes.2 Thousands of witnesses have described how they were used to search ovens, beds, cradles, walls, trunks, chimneys, attics, roofs and cellars; to pry behind icons, in barrels, in hollow tree trunks, in doghouses, down wells and beneath piles of garbage. The men and women who used them stopped at nothing, even trawling through cemeteries, barns, empty houses and orchards.3

  Like the requisitioners of the past, they were looking for grain. But in addition they also took fruit from trees, seeds and vegetables from kitchen gardens – beets, pumpkins, cabbages, tomatoes – as well as honey and beehives, butter and milk, meat and sausage.4 Olha Tsymbaliuk remembered that the brigades took ‘flour, cereals, everything stored in pots, clothes, cattle. It was impossible to hide. They searched with metal rods … they searched in stoves, broke floors and tore away walls.’5 Anastasiia Pavlenko recalled that they took a bead necklace from her mother’s neck, assuming it contained something edible.6 Larysa Shevchuk saw activists take away beet and poppy seedlings that her grandmother was cultivating to plant in her vegetable garden.7

  Maria Bendryk from Cherkasy province wrote that the activists ‘came and took everything. They looked in kitchen storage tins, took away one person’s kidney beans, another person’s dried crusts. They shook them out and took them away.’8 In Kirovohrad province, Leonid Vernydub saw the brigade take down three corn cobs that had been hanging from the ceiling to dry, in preparation for use as seeds in the following year. They also took ‘kidney beans, cereals, flour and even dried fruits for making compote’.9

  In Chernihiv province Mariia Kozhedub saw teams of people taking not only the buckwheat soup, but the pot that it had been cooking in. They also took ‘milk, eggs, potatoes, chickens … they had iron rods and used them to search for hidden food. Those who were clever hid their food in the forest; everything hidden in a house or barn could be found.’10

  In many places the activists also led away the cows that many families had been allowed to keep, even those who lived on collective farms, since 1930. Sometimes this loss was remembered more vividly, and with more sorrow, than even the deaths of people. A teenage peasant girl wept and held on to the horns of her family cow as it was led away.11 A father and son guarded their cow with guns and pitchforks to prevent it from being taken.12 ‘Whoever had a cow could survive,’ Hanna Maslianchuk from Vinnytsia remembered. Her family managed to keep theirs, and lived; the neighbours did not have one, became swollen from hunger and died.13 Unable to get or purchase fodder, families made huge efforts to keep their cows alive, even feeding them thatch from their own roofs.14

  The activists took other kinds of livestock too, including pigs and poultry, and sometimes dogs and cats. In Kyiv province Mykola Patrynchuk saw activists take ‘all our food … they even killed our dog and put it dead on a cart’.15 Many other survivors speak of dogs being taken or killed, so much so that the hunt for dogs – perhaps to stop them from barking or biting – almost took on the aspect of a sport: ‘I can never forget, so long as I live, how they drove their two vehicles, each carrying eight to twelve men … they were riding with their legs hung over the sides, and with their rifles they went from yard to yard to kill all the dogs. After this, when they had destroyed all the dogs, they started gathering all the food …’16

  The activists also had instructions to return, to surprise people in order to catch them unaware and with their food unguarded. In many places the brigades came more than once. Families were searched, and then searched again to make sure that nothing remained. ‘They came three times,’ one woman remembered, ‘until there was nothing left. Then they stopped coming.’17 Brigades sometimes arrived at different times of day or night, determined to catch whoever had food red-handed.18 If it happened that a family was eating a meagre dinner, the activists sometimes took bread off the table.19 If it happened that soup was cooking, they pulled it off the stove and tossed out the contents. Then they demanded to know how it was possible the family still had something to put in the soup.20

  People who seemed able to eat were searched with special vigour; those who weren’t starving were by definition suspicious. One survivor remembered that her family had once managed to get hold of some flour and used it to bake bread during the night. Their home was instantly visited by a brigade that had detected the noise and sounds of cooking in the house. They entered by force and grabbed the bread directly out of the oven.21 Another survivor described how the brigade ‘watched chimneys from a hill: when they saw smoke, they went to that house and took whatever was being cooked.’22 Yet another family received a parcel from a relative containing rice, sugar, millet and shoes. A few hours later a brigade arrived and took everything except the shoes.23

  But the activists also learned, over time, to identify the places where peasants might hide food. Because many people buried their grain in the ground, brigades began looking for signs of fresh digging, using their iron rods to poke into the earth.24 One survivor remembered that her mother put some millet in a bag, hid it up a chimney, and covered it with cement. But the cement was new, and so the millet was discovered. A neighbour, meanwhile, hid flour beneath her baby’s cradle, but that too was found: ‘She was crying and begging them to leave it because the baby would die of hunger, but they, the crucifiers, took it all the same.’25

  Even when not out on raiding parties, the brigades and their leaders collected information about food and who might have it. Informers were recruited to help out the activists. In some villages special boxes were set up where people could deposit anonymous confessions or information as to the whereabouts of their neighbours’ hidden grain.26 Hanna Sukhenko remembered that it was ‘popular’ to inform, because when a person found someone else’s food, he or she was given up to a third of it as a reward.27 Local civil servants were expected to contribute too. Ihor Buhaievych’s family survived in Poltava province because his mother, who had found work in Leningrad, regularly sent home packages of dried bread crusts. But the packages attracted the suspicion of the post office boss, who came to the house accompanied by an activist to find out what was in them. The activist confiscated half of the bread crusts.28

  Others were secretly paid: Halyna Omelchenko remembered a local man, deployed as a spy, who watched her family closely and provided information about their behaviour to the authorities.29 Mykola Mylov remembered a neighbour who came one day and looked around his house. The following day activists arrived and confiscated his food. Mylov asked the neighbour whether he had informed on him: ‘Of course it was me, do you think I am afraid to confess? I have now received two sacks of wheat, my six children will not go hungry.’30 There were many similar examples of how starvation was used to make peasants complicit.

  The brigades also asked for money. All peasants were still subject to the 1929 law, which instructed them to pay fines of up to five times the value of grain that they could not produce. Inhabitants of blacklisted villages were meant to hand over their savings too. Collecting these sums had long been a problem: in his diary for December 1932, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s close associate in Ukraine, noted that the individual farmers in Ukraine had been fined 7.8 million rubles, but that only 1.9 million had been collected. Vlas Chubar had weakly argued that this was because they had ‘nothing to sell’.31 But in the autumn of 1932 auctions of furniture and other goods were arranged so that peasants could pay these sums: ‘When a peasant paid the tax, then another, bigger tax was put on him. Father could not pay this additional tax, so an auction was called … a storehouse, a shed were sold.’32 Sometimes these demands had little to do w
ith past payments: in one village anyone who had relatives in the United States was asked to hand over the money they were presumed to have received from abroad.33

  During searches for both food and money, violence was frequently used. One woman from Chernihiv province remembered:

  During the search, the activists asked where was our gold and our grain. Mother replied that she had neither. She was tortured. Her fingers were put in a door and the door was closed. Her fingers broke, blood ran, she lost consciousness. Water was poured over her head, and she was tortured again. They beat her, put a needle under her fingernails …34

  Two sisters from Zhytomyr province witnessed a similar attack on their father:

  Our father hid three buckets of barley in the attic and our mother stealthily made porridge in the evening to keep us alive. Then somebody must have denounced us, they took everything and brutally beat our father for not giving up that barley during the searches … they held his fingers and slammed the door to break them, they swore at him and kicked him on the floor. It left us numb to see him beaten and sworn at like that, we were a proper family, always spoke quietly in our father’s presence …35