Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  In Vinnytsia province a blacksmith was brought to the village committee after stealing wheat ears to feed his three children: ‘they beat him, tortured him, twisted his head completely back to front and threw him down the stairs’.36 In Dnipropetrovsk province men were held inside hot stoves until they confessed to hiding grain.37 As during collectivization, peasants found concealing food were robbed of their remaining possessions, evicted from their homes, and thrown into the snow without any clothes.38

  Imprisonment was another tool. In one village peasants who could not come up with any grain were thrown into the ‘cooler’ by the chairman of the village soviet. The ‘cooler’ was simply the back room of the village hall, with no beds or benches – and no food. Peasants simply sat there on the ground, hungry, unless their relatives could help feed them. ‘Men and women were kept there together; they all lay side by side on the straw.’39

  Some recalled that, in addition to taking the food, brigades went out of their way to spoil it. In Horodyshche – the blacklisted village subjected to so much special attention – a survivor recalled that activists spoiled grain with water so that it turned black, sprouted, and was then thrown into a local ravine. They also poured carbolic acid onto salted fish, which the peasants ate anyway.40 Another family saw that all the stolen food taken from their home was rendered useless for human consumption: ‘They had a big sack with them, and they poured everything all together – seeds, flour, wheat – into that sack. Only pigs would be able to eat it, because everything was mixed.’41 Most thought that this behaviour was simply a form of sadism: ‘When anything was discovered they scattered it on the floor and enjoyed the sight of weeping children gathering grains of lentils or beans from the dirt.’42

  To ensure that starving peasants did not ‘rob’ the fields of whatever grain was growing in them, the brigade leaders also sent guards on horseback – usually villagers bribed to assist, with promises of food – to watch the fields, or else set up watchtowers beside them, to ensure that nobody stole anything from them. Armed guards – again, many were villagers – were placed in front of barns and other places where grain was stored. Now that there was so little food left, the 7 August law against gleaners began to make a difference. In the late autumn of 1932, ‘we continued to search for food by gleaning wheat ears from harvested fields,’ one Poltava man remembered. ‘But gleaning was prohibited, and we were chased and whipped by overseers on horseback.’43 People were punished for stealing frozen beets, sprouted grain, even wheat from their own private plots.44 Outside a sugar-beet factory in Kyiv province bloody corpses lay unburied beside the piles of unprocessed beets to warn off others wanting to steal them.45

  To prevent their family from dying of hunger, some peasants sent small children into the fields to hunt for leftover grain, hoping they would escape notice. ‘We children would run to the collective farm stubble-field to gather up the stalks,’ remembered Kostiantyn Mochulsky, then aged eight. ‘Mounted patrolmen would chase after the children, slashing at them with rawhide whips. But I collected some ten kilograms of grain.’46 Some failed to evade the overseers. A girl from Kharkiv province once succeeded in quietly gathering some wheat ears, but on the way home from the fields she met three young Komsomol members. They took her wheat and beat her ‘so severely that there were bruises on my shoulders and lower legs long afterwards’.47 Perhaps she was lucky: another survivor remembered a young girl who was shot on the spot for gleaning leftover potatoes.48

  The possession and preparation of food, even the milling of grain, became suspect. In Cherkasy province activists broke all the millstones in the village of Tymoshivka. The locals assumed that this was ‘so that there would be no place to grind a handful of grain, even if there were some left somewhere’.49 They also broke the millstones in another Cherkasy village, Stari Babany. The peasants there thought their millstones had been broken in order to get more money out of them, as they would then have to take their grain to the collective farm and pay if they wanted it to be ground.50

  As the weeks dragged on, just being alive attracted suspicion: if a family was alive, that meant it had food. But if they had food, then they should have given it up – and if they had failed to give it up, then they were kulaks, Petliurites, Polish agents, enemies. A brigade searching the home of Mykhailo Balanovskyi in Cherkasy province demanded to know ‘how it is possible that no one in this family has yet died?’51 A brigade searching through the roof thatch at the home of Hryhorii Moroz in Sumy province failed to find any food and demanded to know: ‘With the help of what do you live?’52 With each passing day, demands became angrier, the language ruder: Why haven’t you disappeared yet? Why haven’t you dropped dead yet? Why are you alive at all?53

  Years and decades later, survivors found different ways of describing the groups of men and a very few women who had come to their homes and removed their food, knowing that they would starve. In oral histories the groups have sometimes been described as ‘activists’, ‘Komsomol’, ‘confiscators’ or ‘murderers’; as an ‘iron brigade,’ a ‘red team’, ‘red caravan’ or ‘red broom’ that swept the village. Sometimes they were called komnezamy, after the ‘poor peasants’ committees’ set up in 1919, and often their members were komnezamy veterans. Special brigades were called ‘tugboats’ – buksyrnyky – because they were dragging the village towards the quota. Sometimes they are remembered, simply, as ‘Russians’, ‘foreign’ or ‘Jewish’.54

  In practice, the brigades in the autumn of 1932 and winter of 1933 were almost always composites. As in 1930, they often included members from different organizations: the local party leadership and the provincial government, the Komsomol, the civil service, the secret police. This was deliberate. If all the institutions in the countryside participated, then all bore some responsibility for the results. Their membership frequently overlapped with the grain collection teams of the past, and they often included some of the same activists who had helped carry out collectivization, as well as people who had been members of the ‘poor peasants’ committees’ as far back as 1920.

  But there were some differences. Their numbers were greater: on 11 November 1932 the Ukrainian Communist Party called for the creation of no fewer than 1,100 new activist brigades by 1 December – that is, within three weeks. That was the first of what would be several attempts to increase the numbers of people dedicated to enforcing the requisitions policy. As time went on, extra manpower would be required not only to collect food but to protect fields and crops from starving peasants, to prevent people from entering train stations or crossing borders, and eventually to bury the dead.55

  Their task was also different from what it had been in 1930. These new brigades were not carrying out an agricultural reform, or even pretending to do so: they were taking food away from starving families, as well as anything valuable that could have been exchanged for food, and, in some cases, any implements that could be used to prepare it. For that reason their nature and their motivation require closer examination.

  Often, as in the past, there were at least one or two outsiders in an activist group, people not originally from the village, the province, or even the republic. A handful of these were former ‘Twenty-Five Thousanders’, about a third of whom had remained in the countryside after 1930, working on collective farms, on machine tractor stations or in the party bureaucracy.56 But fresh activists were also deliberately sent from outside the republic at this time. In December 1932, Kaganovich visited Voznesensk in southern Ukraine and told a group of party activists that they were not tough enough: ‘A Ukrainian saying has it that “you should twist, but not overtwist”.’ But they have decided ‘not to twist at all’. The goal, he explained frankly, was to put villages in such a panic ‘that the peasants themselves give away their hiding places’.57

  That same month Kaganovich also sent Stalin a telegram complaining about the ‘unreliability’ of the Ukrainian members of the grain collection brigades, and calling for Russians from the Russian Republic to help
. A month later the order was executed.58 One former activist remembers first encountering ‘young men, speaking Russian’ in the village of Krupoderentsi. They were there, he was told, because ‘the authorities did not trust the local party activists to do the job’.59

  Some of the outsiders were ‘foreign’ in a different sense. Although they were activists, students or teachers from Ukrainian universities, they seemed, as during collectivization, like foreigners to the peasants. Some were collectivization veterans, but many of them had come to the countryside for the first time in 1932 and 1933, ignorant of what they would find. Students at Kharkiv University were sent out on ‘voluntary’ stints to help with grain collection in 1933, and were shocked to discover the truth. ‘You look as if you’ve seen ghosts,’ the student Viktor Kravchenko said to a friend who had just come back from the Poltava area. ‘I have,’ the man responded, and turned his gaze away.60

  Kravchenko himself went to the countryside soon afterwards – he was told that village authorities needed an ‘injection of Bolshevik iron’ – and quickly saw the gap between propaganda and reality. The ‘kulaks’ were not rich, they were starving. The countryside was not wealthy, it was a wasteland: ‘Large quantities of implements and machinery, which had once been cared for like so many jewels by their private owners, now lay scattered under the open skies, dirty, rusting and out of repair. Emaciated cows and horses, crusted with manure, wandered through the yard. Chickens, geese and ducks were digging in flocks in the unthreshed grain.’61

  At the time Kravchenko did not protest. As he explained years later, he had, like the Twenty-Five Thousanders before him, deliberately allowed himself to succumb to a form of intellectual blindness. Kravchenko spoke for many when he described it: ‘To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes – and your mind. You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.’62 The language of the propaganda also helped mask reality:

  We communists, among ourselves, steered around the subject; or we dealt with it in the high-flown euphemisms of party lingo. We spoke of the ‘peasant front’ and ‘kulak menace’, ‘village socialism’ and ‘class resistance’. In order to live with ourselves we had to smear the reality out of recognition with verbal camouflage.63

  Like Kravchenko, Lev Kopelev also joined one of the grain confiscation brigades in December 1932. Having participated in collectivization, he was mentally prepared. At the time he was a journalist of sorts, writing articles for a Kharkiv factory newspaper. Upon arrival in Myrhorod, in Poltava province, he gave evening lectures to the peasants, ‘mustachioed men in fur jackets, in grey caftans, young lads dreamily indifferent or sullen with contempt’. Every other day he and some colleagues put out a newsletter, containing ‘statistics on the grain delivery, reproaches to the unconscientious peasants, curses to the exposed saboteurs’. But the agitation quickly failed, and the searches began.

  Teams made up of several young collective farmers, the village Soviet and Kopelev himself would ‘search the hut, barn, yard and take away all the stores of seed, lead away the cow, the horse, the pigs’. They would take anything valuable as well: icons, winter coats, carpets, money. Although the women ‘howled hysterically’ clinging to their family heirlooms, the searches continued. Hand over the grain, the activists told them, and eventually you will get it all back. Kopelev himself found the task ‘excruciating’, but he also learned that constant repetition of hateful propaganda helped him steel himself to the task at hand: ‘I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.’64

  Propaganda also helped persuade many activists to think of the peasants as second-class citizens, even second-class human beings – if they were even human beings at all. Peasants already seemed alien to most city-dwellers. Now their deep poverty and even their starvation made them unlikeable, inhuman. Bolshevik ideology implied they would soon disappear. The French writer Georges Simenon, who visited Odessa in the spring of 1933, was told by one man that the malheureux, the ‘unfortunates’ that he saw begging for food in the streets, were not to be pitied: ‘Those are kulaks, peasants who have not adapted to the regime … there is nothing for them but to die.’ There was no need for pity: they would soon be replaced by tractors, which could do the work of ten men. The brave new world would not have space for so many useless people.65

  This sentiment also found an echo in Andrey Platonov’s absurdist play about the famine, Fourteen Little Red Huts (1933). ‘What use are we to the state like this,’ one starving character says to another: ‘The State would be better off if there were sea here, not people. At least the sea has fish in it.’66 Platonov’s language reflected what he found in the official press. All through the previous two years these uncouth, illiterate, backward and ultimately redundant inhabitants of the countryside had been firmly and repeatedly accused of blocking the progress of the forward-looking proletariat. Over and over again Soviet newspapers had explained that food shortages in the cities were not caused by collectivization, but rather by greedy peasants who were keeping their produce to themselves. Years later Kopelev explained to an interviewer:

  I was among those who believed that you had to shake up the village to get it to give up the grain … That the villagers had no consciousness or awareness, that they were backward. That they care only about their property, that they don’t care for the workers. That they are not interested in the general problems of the construction of socialism and the fulfilment of the five-year plan …

  This is what I was taught in school, in the Komsomol, that’s what I read in newspapers and what I was told in meetings. All young men thought like that.67

  Like others in the party, he believed that ‘the villagers were hiding bread and meat’. All around him, others were similarly hostile. Kopelev paraphrased his generation’s views like this: ‘I am a real proletarian and I don’t have enough bread. And you, you country bumpkin, you buckwheat sower, you don’t know how to work but you’ve got pork fat in your pocket.’68

  The city party bosses who recruited activists to go into the villages relied on exactly the same sentiments. Advertisements for ‘soldiers to fight on the bread front’ appeared everywhere in towns where there were food shortages.69 Activists repeated the same language as they carried out their food collections: ‘They kept shouting that we had to make up our quota: Go off and die, but Russia will be saved!’70 In his memoir Kopelev described how this poisonous language even infected one of the villagers, a young peasant woman, herself very hungry, who voluntarily brought a kilogram and a half of wheat to feed the activist brigade. ‘That black-haired fellow said the workers were very hungry, their kids didn’t have any bread. So I brought as much as I was able. The last of my grain.’71

  But the vast majority of members of the brigades that searched villages for food in 1932–3 were not outsiders. Nor were they motivated by hatred of Ukrainian peasants, because they were Ukrainian peasants themselves. More importantly, they were the neighbours of the people whose food they stole: local collective farm bosses, members of the village council, teachers and doctors, civil servants, Komsomol leaders, former members of the ‘poor peasants’ committees’ from 1919, former participants in de-kulakization. As in other historic genocides, they were persuaded to kill people whom they knew extremely well.

  At the highest level these local activists were not considered to be entirely trustworthy. The outsiders sent to assist them were partly there in order to make sure they did their jobs. Frequently, they were told to search not in their own villages but in neighbouring ones, where they would not personally know the peasants whose food they were confiscating.72 The fear that collection brigades would become too sympathetic to their victims was often discussed by the Ukrainian leadership. ‘There is a need to change the members more often,’
Chubar observed at one point, ‘because they quickly grow accustomed to the locals and cover up for them.’73

  Both memoir and documentary evidence also shows that many local activists refused to carry out orders that they knew would kill their neighbours. Mykola Musiichuk, a Communist Party member in Vinnytsia since 1925, appointed to a grain collection committee in 1932, lost his party card for refusing to take grain from peasants’ private pots and jars. Two days later he hanged himself.74 In the village of Toporyshche, Dmytro Slyniuk, the boss of the local collective farm, actually took grain away from activists after they had already confiscated it, had it milled, and then distributed the flour to starving peasants. He lost his job for doing so.75 In the village of Bashtanka, Vira Kyrychenko’s father was asked to join a brigade but refused. He was locked up for three days, then went to the city of Mykolaiv to look unsuccessfully for work. Eventually he died of hunger. Vira’s brother was made the same offer: he too refused, was arrested and beaten so badly that he died after being released.76 Years later peasants recounted how brothers and fathers were exiled, executed or beaten for refusing to cooperate.77

  Yet many did collaborate, in different ways and at different levels, and out of a mix of motives. Some had no choice. One girl aged thirteen joined a brigade directly from her school classroom; activists arrived, ordered her to come with them, and took her to carry out searches. She had no chance to tell her parents and spent a week carrying out orders, searching for grain.78

  She and others like her believed they had no choice, or were afraid that refusal would mean arrest or even death. The majority of the thousands of long prison sentences handed out to Ukrainian communists at that time were for people who had failed, sometimes deliberately, to put pressure on their neighbours to give up all their food. By the time of the grain collections, Balytsky’s purge of the Ukrainian Communist Party had begun, and leaders at every level knew that they were at risk of arrest and execution. The party trials were discussed openly in the newspapers. The names of those arrested were printed in the party bulletins that were sent out to the village and district party offices.79 Nobody with any links to the party wanted to share their fate.