Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  The real cause of this ‘mental illness’, or these sudden attacks of ‘socially dangerous’ emotions, was perfectly obvious to the police as well: people were starving. In Penkivka, the Vinnytsia OGPU reported, a collective farmer had killed two of his daughters and used their flesh for food: ‘K. blamed the murder of his children on a long period of starvation. No foodstuffs were found during the search.’ In the village of Dubyny another farmer killed both of his daughters too, and ‘blamed the famine for committing the murders’. There were, the policemen stated, ‘other analogous incidents’.115

  Throughout the spring of 1933 the numbers of such cases grew. In Kharkiv province the OGPU reported multiple incidents where parents had eaten the flesh of children who had died from starvation, as well as cases where ‘starving family members had killed weaker ones, usually children, and used their flesh as food’. Nine such cases were reported in March, fifty-eight in April, 132 in May and 221 in June.116 In Donetsk province multiple incidents were also observed, again starting in March. ‘Iryna Khrypunova strangled her nine-year-old granddaughter and cooked her internal organs. Anton Khrypunov removed his dead eight-year-old sister’s internal organs and ate them.’ That report concluded almost politely: ‘By bringing this to your attention I request you provide appropriate instructions.’117

  In March the OGPU in Kyiv province were receiving ten or more reports of cannibalism every day.118 In that month their counterparts in Vinnytsia province reported six incidents in the previous month of ‘cannibalism caused by famine, in which parents killed their children and used their flesh for food’. But these may have been serious underestimates. In one report the OGPU boss of Kyiv province wrote that there were sixty-nine cases of cannibalism between 9 January and 12 March. However, ‘these numbers are, obviously, not exact, because in reality there are many more such incidents’.119

  Certainly, the authorities treated this as a crime, sometimes giving cannibals ‘enemy’ labels as well. Hanna Bilorus was convicted both of cannibalism and of spreading Polish propaganda, for example; she died in prison in 1933.120 Secret police files contain multiple records of cannibals who were subsequently imprisoned, executed, or lynched. One very unusual Gulag memoirist has even described an encounter in 1935 with cannibals at the Solovetsky Island prison camp, in the White Sea. Olga Mane was a young Polish woman, arrested crossing the border into the Soviet Union in 1935 (she wanted to study medicine in Moscow) and sentenced for spying. After some time in the camp, she was sent to Muksalma, one of the islands in the Solovetsky archipelago. She resisted, because she had heard there were ‘Ukrainian cannibals’, some three hundred of them, on the island. But when she finally met them, she felt differently:

  Shock and horror of the cannibals quickly passed; it was enough to see these unhappy, barefoot, half-naked Ukrainians. They were kept in old monastery buildings: many of them had stomachs swollen from hunger, and most of them were mentally ill. I took care of them, listened to their reminiscences and confidences. They described how their children died of hunger, and how they themselves, very close to starvation, cooked the corpses of their own children and ate them. This happened when they were in a state of shock caused by hunger. Later, when they came to understand what had happened, they lost their minds.

  I felt sympathy for them, I tried to be kind, I found warm words for them when they were overcome by attacks of remorse. This helped for some time. They calmed down, started to cry and I cried along with them …121

  Stories of cannibalism were known to the Ukrainian leadership, and to the Moscow leadership too. Kaganovich was, as noted, certainly informed; a Ukrainian Central Committee working group responsible for the spring sowing campaign in 1933 reported back to the party that their work was especially difficult in regions with ‘cannibalism’ and ‘homeless children’.122 The OGPU continued to report cases of cannibalism well into 1934.123

  But if either Kharkiv or Moscow ever provided instructions on how to deal with cannibalism, or ever reflected more deeply on its causes, they haven’t yet been uncovered. There is no evidence that any action was taken at all. The reports were made, the officials received them, and then they were filed away and forgotten.

  12

  Survival: Spring and Summer, 1933

  I would go to the church up the hill and tear the bark off the linden tree. At home we had buckwheat husks. Mother would sift them, add ground-up linden leaves and bark, and bake biscuits. That’s how we ate.

  Hryhorii Mazurenko, Kyiv province, 19331

  As the gooseberries got bigger, we picked them, even though they weren’t ripe. We ate wild geraniums. The acacia tree bloomed. We shook the blossoms off and ate them.

  Vira Tyshchenko, Kyiv province, 19332

  We grazed on grass and pigweed, like cattle.

  Todos Hodun, Cherkasy province, 19333

  Even in the face of these physical and psychological changes, even despite hunger, thirst, exhaustion and emaciation, people did their utmost to survive. To do so sometimes required an enormous capacity for evil – many survived in the activist brigades – or an ability to break some of the most fundamental human taboos. But others discovered huge reserves of talent and willpower – or else had the astonishing good luck to be saved by someone who possessed those qualities.

  A ten-year-old girl from the Poltava region, observing the disintegration of the adults around her, had the extraordinary idea of abandoning her family. She wrote to her uncle in Kharkiv province:

  Dear Uncle! We do not have bread and anything to eat. My parents are exhausted by hunger, they have lain down and do not get up. My mother is blind from hunger and cannot see, I have carried her outside. I want bread very much. Take me, uncle, to Kharkiv to you, because I will die of hunger. Take me, I am small and want to live, and here I will die, because everybody dies …4

  She did not survive. But the same will to live saved others.

  To survive, people ate anything. They ate whatever rotten food or scraps that the brigades had overlooked. They ate horses, dogs, cats, rats, ants, turtles. They boiled frogs and toads. They ate squirrels. They cooked hedgehogs over fires, and fried birds’ eggs.5 They ate the bark of oak trees. They ate moss and acorns.6 They ate leaves and dandelions, as well as marigolds and orach, a kind of wild spinach. They killed crows, pigeons and sparrows.7 Nadiia Lutsyshyna remembered that ‘frogs didn’t last long. People caught them all. All the cats were eaten, the pigeons, the frogs; people ate everything. I imagined the scent of delicious food as we ate weeds and beets.’8

  Women made soup from nettles, and baked pigweed into bread. They pounded acorns, made ersatz flour, and then used the flour to make pancakes.9 They cooked the buds from linden trees: ‘They were good, soft, not bitter,’ recalled one survivor.10 They ate snowdrops, a weed whose roots took the form of an onion and ‘seemed sweeter than sugar’.11 People also made pancakes from leaves and grass.12 Others mixed acacia leaves and rotten potatoes – often overlooked by the collection brigades – and baked them together to make ersatz perepichky, a traditional form of sausage wrapped in bread.13 The starch inside rotten potatoes could also be scooped out and fried.14 Nadiia Ovcharuk’s aunt made biscuits out of the leaves of linden trees: ‘she dried the leaves in the oven, pulled out the veins, and baked biscuits’.15

  Children ate hemp seeds.16 People ate the bottom part of river reeds, ‘which when young, and close to the root, was sweet like cucumber’, though they were denied even those when the authorities trampled and burned the reeds down.17 In one village people ate the waste products from a slaughterhouse, until those running it poured carbolic acid over the bones and skin. Oksana Zhyhadno and her mother both ate some of the offal anyway, and became ill. Although her mother died, Oksana survived.18 Many peasants remembered pouring water into the burrows made by field mice in order to wash out the grain stored by the rodents. Others boiled belts and shoes so as to eat the leather.

  Just as they knew about the cases of cannibalism, the authorities were also well aw
are of the extraordinary things that people were trying to eat. A secret police report from March 1933 declared, in a matter-of-fact way, that starving families were eating ‘corn cobs and stalks, millet pods, dried straw, herbs, rotten watermelons and beetroots, potato peelings and acacia pods’, as well as cats, dogs and horses.19 Much of this food made sick people even sicker.

  Some survived with less extraordinary types of food consumption, especially if they happened to reside near lakes or rivers. Kateryna Butko, who lived in a village near a river, reckoned that ‘without fish, nobody would have survived’.20 Those who could also used nets to find periwinkles. They boiled them and took the tiny bits of meat out of their shells.21 Peasants who lived near forests could forage for mushrooms and berries, or trap birds and small animals.

  Uncounted numbers of people were saved due to a far more pedestrian reason: they managed to hold on to the family cow. Even in good times cows were important for peasant families, which often had four or more children. But during the famine, possession of a cow, either by individual farmers who had avoided collectivization and confiscation, or by collective farmers who were allowed, as some were, to keep one for private use, was literally a matter of life or death. In hundreds of oral testimonies peasants explain their survival with a single sentence: ‘We were saved by our cow.’ Most lived off the milk; many, like one family in Kyiv province, used their cow’s milk as a form of barter, exchanging it for grain or bread.22

  Emotions about the cow ran high. Petro Mostovyi in Poltava province remembered that the family cow was so precious that his father and older brother guarded it with a gun and pitchforks.23 After a thief stole a cow from another peasant in Cherkasy province, the owner learned that it had been slaughtered and that the meat had been stored by one of her neighbours. She marched over to the storehouse and ‘put out the eyes of her exhausted enemy with a rake’.24 To feed their cow, Mariia Pata’s family had to take the roof thatch off their house, rip it into small pieces, and soften it with boiling water so that the animal could eat.25

  Those who did not have a cow often had to rely on others. Random acts of kindness saved some people, as did ties of love and kinship that persisted despite the hunger. In Poltava province Sofiia Zalyvcha and two of her siblings hired themselves out to a collective farm as day labourers. As payment, they received thin soup and 200 grams of bread per day. They ate the soup and saved the bread. Every weekend one of them went home to the family – they had seven additional siblings – and shared the stale bread with their brothers and sisters. Three of the ten children died during the famine, but thanks to the bread or soup the rest survived.26

  Other children lived because they were adopted by neighbours or relatives. ‘My parents’ cousin and her husband were leaving for Kharkiv, and they took me and my little sister along … because of this we survived,’ one girl remembered. ‘Even today I remember my aunt Marfa with gratitude and warmth as she saved my life in those years of famine,’ said another.27

  Relatives outside Ukraine could help too. Anatolii Bakai’s sister, who had moved to the Urals, sent home five kilograms of flour. In an accompanying letter she wrote that there was no famine in the Urals, and that not everybody there even believed there was famine in Ukraine. The flour was not enough to save Anatolii’s mother, but it helped keep him alive.28 Ihor Buhaievych and his grandmother survived in Chernihiv province on dried bread crusts that his mother mailed in packages from Leningrad, where she had managed to find a job. That helped keep them alive until the local post office informed the activist brigade, which began confiscating some of the crusts. Later, Ihor’s mother came home and managed to take him to Leningrad herself.29

  There is anecdotal evidence that some Ukrainian peasants had help from their Jewish neighbours: again, most Jews were not farmers and were therefore not subjected to the deadly requisitions, unless they lived in a blacklisted village. Mariia Havrysh in Vinnytsia province remembered being visited by a Jewish neighbour – ‘they were spared because they had no land’ – at a time when she was ill, swollen and expecting to die. The woman came over, prepared a meal and fed the whole family, leaving them with some bread and vodka as well, ‘thus saving the whole family’.30 At a time when hatred and suspicion of all kinds were rising, the gesture was a powerful one.

  Despite the bans on travel and trade, Ukrainian peasants, as noted, tried both. They crept through cordons and crawled under fences to get into the cities to beg for food. They tried to enter factory towns and industrial worksites. They slipped into the mining towns in Donbas where workers were needed and the foreman might turn a blind eye. They searched near factories for waste that might be edible, for example the debris tossed out by distilleries or packaging plants. They also picked up whatever scraps they could find and tried to sell them. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-German writer who was at that time a faithful communist, has left a memorable portrait of a market he saw in Kharkiv in 1933:

  Those who had something to sell squatted in the dust with their goods spread out before them on a handkerchief or scarf. The goods ranged from a handful of rusty nails to a tattered quilt or a pot of sour milk sold by the spoon, flies included. You could see an old woman sitting for hours with one painted Easter egg or one small piece of dried-up goat’s cheese before her. Or an old man, his bare feet covered with sores, trying to barter his torn boots for a kilo of black bread and a packet of makhorka tobacco. Hemp slippers, and even soles and heels torn off from boots and replaced by a bandage of rags, were frequent items for barter. Some old men had nothing to sell; they sang Ukrainian ballads and were rewarded by an occasional kopeck. Some of the women had babies lying beside them on the pavement or in their laps; the fly-ridden infant’s lips were fastened to the leathery udder from which it seemed to suck bile instead of milk.31

  The fact that a bazaar – even the barest bazaar – was allowed to exist in urban Ukraine meant that there was, for some people, a lifeline. But the real reason why the cities were less desperate was rationing: workers and bureaucrats received food coupons. These were not available to everybody. According to a 1931 law, all Soviet citizens who worked for the state sector received ration cards. That left out peasants; it also omitted others without formal jobs. In addition, the size of rations was based not only on the importance of the worker, but also of his workplace. Priority went to key industrial regions, and the only one in Ukraine was Donbas. In practice, some 40 per cent of the Ukrainian population therefore received about 80 per cent of the food supplies.32

  For those not ranked high on the list, rations could be paltry. Visiting Kyiv in 1932, Andrew Cairns, a Canadian agricultural expert, saw two women picking grass in a city park to make soup. They told him that they had rations, but not enough: ‘I pointed to the river and remarked that it was very beautiful; they agreed but said they were hungry.’ In fact, the women were ‘third category’ workers who received 125 rubles per month, plus 200 grams of bread a day – about four slices.33

  The manager of a cooperative store in Kyiv, another ‘third category’ worker, also told Cairns that he received 200 grams of bread per day and 200 grams for his son, as well as 100 rubles every month. A ‘second category’ worker got 525 grams of bread each day, and 180 rubles per month. None of that went very far in the municipal bazaars, which sold very little beyond bread, tomatoes and sometimes chicken or dairy products, and all of those at very high prices. Bread could cost five or six rubles a kilo, an egg could cost half a ruble or more, milk two rubles a litre.34 Peter Egides, a student in Kyiv at the time, received a stipend that was less than the price of a single loaf of bread: ‘the situation reached the point where at the age of seventeen I was walking with a cane because I didn’t even have the strength to walk’. Egides’ grandmother eventually did die of starvation, though she lived in Kyiv as well.35

  Theoretically, state-run shops should have sold food at lower, more accessible prices. But those shops were empty. Heorhii Sambros, a teacher and state official who kept a diary in those yea
rs, has left a memorable description of the shops of Kharkiv. In all of them ‘great spaces’, once filled from floor to ceiling with products, were either totally empty or filled with nothing but pure alcohol (‘bottles of vodka, as if a rainfall, came down to flood the entire city’). Very occasionally they sold food, but it was almost too revolting to contemplate:

  Only in some stores, and on the counter, were [there] the usual ‘products’, five or six trays or platters of hurriedly prepared dishes. Cold salad, looking like silage, from a rotten, disgusting sauerkraut; a paté from fish remains with soaked cabbage and salty, cut pickles; rarely, pieces of frozen meat with a sauce that looked like shoe paste, soaked green tomatoes with the smell of a rotten barrel; frozen, sour, filled baked tomatoes with overly peppered, so as not to stink, meat filling, prepared from the remains of some uncertain meat; finally, rarely, such delicacies as boiled eggs or some small fruits, etc. All those dishes (I remember them vividly!) would be put on the counter and were immediately bought out by the buyers.36

  Andrew Cairns also managed to get into a queue at a shop where he saw ‘heavy, warm, soggy bread being sold for 10 rubles per loaf, and a little pork fat at 12 rubles per pound’.37

  Better-quality food was available in the government canteens attached to every workplace: soups, kasha, occasionally meat. But special certification – a party card or a trade union card – was needed to use them. Sambros, who had neither of these things, befriended a secretary at the educational institute where he worked, and she gave him meal coupons without asking for his membership card: ‘at the time I lived, breathed and ate meals “as an outlaw”, illegally’. When food shortages grew worse and the institute began to verify who could get meal coupons, he went through an acquaintance to get access to the Ukrainian Writers’ House:

  I was aware of the risks: they could have come up to my table, asked for the writer’s membership card and shamed me by pulling me out from the table. But there was no other way, I had to take the risk, and thus started frequenting the writers’ canteen. I was lucky: I ate there for about 1 1/2 to 2 months and no one asked who I was, not once …38