Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Sambros later wangled his way into the Agricultural Academy canteen, and ate there for a few weeks too. As a result, he stayed alive. But he spent most of his waking hours thinking about food: his ‘entire salary, almost without exception, went to food’.39 And he, of course, was far better off than so many others.

  Although he was not a peasant, Sambros’s experience was in a certain sense typical: paradoxically, the most important source of help for the starving came from Soviet bureaucrats and Soviet bureaucracies. The historian Timothy Snyder has described how state institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, when they were still functioning, could rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and a parallel story can be told about Stalin’s Soviet Union.40 While the Bolsheviks had systematically destroyed independent institutions, including churches, charities and private companies, state institutions remained – schools, hospitals, orphanages – and some of them were in a position to help. Some of them, theoretically, even had a mandate to do so.

  Those best able to help the starving were relatives, parents or children who had jobs inside the system. Petro Shelest, who much later became First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, wrote a memoir of those years – it began as a diary – which was finally published by his family in 2004. The tragedy of 1933 was clear to him at the time: ‘Entire families, even entire villages were starving to death. There were numerous cases of cannibalism … It was obviously a crime committed by our government, yet this fact is kept shamefully secret.’ In that period Shelest was studying and working as an engineer at an armaments factory. But he was also a Communist Party member in good standing, and that enabled him to send food to his mother. His aid rescued her from starvation in Kharkiv province.41

  Contacts and friends helped too: one young girl in Poltava province survived the famine because her father had studied on an agricultural course with a man who wound up working in the local government. Surreptitiously, this friend arranged for her family to receive a replacement for their confiscated cow – and thus they lived.42 Another girl was fortunate enough to have an aunt married to the collective farm chairman: ‘I came to her because she had bread, lard and milk. She gave them to me by stealth so that nobody knew.’43 Often a single person with a job inside the system could save an entire family. Nadiia Malyshko’s mother got a job as a cleaner in a school in Dnipropetrovsk province, where the director helped her get a food ration: a quarter-litre of oil and eight kilograms of corn flour every month.44 Four of seven children in Varvara Horban’s family, also in Dnipropetrovsk province, survived because she went to work at a grain elevator and received a small loaf of bread every day.45

  Those who could not find employment with the state sometimes tried to save their children by turning them over to the state. One mother took her four children to the head office of the local collective farm, declared she could not feed them, renounced responsibility and told the farm chairmen they were now in charge.46 Halyna Tymoshchuk’s mother in Vinnytsia province made the same decision:

  My mother went to the head of the collective … and said, ‘At least take my two girls. And we’ll die, if that’s how it has to be.’ He was kind and I know he liked mother. And so he said, ‘Bring your two children.’ And he took us in. His wife was in charge of the nursery, and my sister became her helper. Later, my mother worked at the nursery canteen as a dishwasher. I was still young at the time, only eight. The head of the collective took me into his home. So we survived while others died, all of them, it seems – many, many.47

  Orphanages were a more common destination. During a three-week period in February 1933, some 105 children were left at the doors of orphanages in the province of Vinnytsia alone.48 Sometimes it worked: one boy lived through the famine because his mother brought him secretly to an orphanage in the village of Dryzhyna. She told him not to tell anybody that she was alive, as he might not be given food if he wasn’t a ‘real’ orphan. A woman at the orphanage, understanding the situation, also told him not to mention his mother. She protected him, helped him survive the famine and eventually he was reunited with his family.49 A woman from Poltava province also remained grateful to the end of her life because a teacher in the village school risked her own status and quietly fed her and her siblings, although they were ‘children of kulaks’. It wasn’t much – broth with no bread, and tiny buckwheat dumplings ‘the size of a kidney bean’ – but it was enough to keep them all alive.50

  Across the republic, the sight of starving children wandering the streets did spur the employees of some Soviet institutions into more systematic action. Those who were truly motivated were sometimes able to help, and especially to assist children. Proof that it was possible, at least at a local level, to advocate on behalf of starving orphans comes from a series of letters sent from the party committee boss in Pavlohrad to his superiors in Dnipropetrovsk. In the first, dated 30 March, he described, among other things, the impact of the famine on children:

  Masses of homeless children appeared in our village who have been abandoned by their parents or left behind after their deaths. According to approximate numbers, there are at least 800 such children. There is a need for two to three special orphanages that will require funds that we do not have in our budget. In the meantime, we are beginning to organize special food supplies for them. For this we need extra stocks of food. I would ask you to please take this into account and direct us according to the correct Soviet policy.51

  A month later, on 30 April, the Pavlohrad party committee secretary sent in another report. ‘By comparison to what I have written to you in previous reports, we have every day a larger and larger increase in homelessness.’ In the past two days alone, sixty-five children had been picked up on the streets of the town; local authorities, he explained, had now organized feeding stations in seven places for 710 children. But these measures were insufficient: the district needed extra resources, for all they had was the absolute minimum. Instead, they proposed the creation of orphanages for 1,500 children: ‘This matter has now become so urgent, right now, and for so many children, that the sooner we solve it the better results we will achieve towards the goal of liquidating the mass phenomenon of swelling among children, since to leave children in such condition for longer will result in their deaths.’52 The letter ended with a plea: ‘there has been no reaction until now, although this question is extremely serious and demands urgent settlement’.53 The town did do what it could, and perhaps some children were saved that way.

  The situation was far worse in Kharkiv, one of the cities that the starving tried hard to enter. At least where children were concerned, the city authorities did in theory try to help – or at least they acknowledged the scale of the problem. On 30 May the Kharkiv health department reported to the Ukrainian republican authorities a ‘large, persistent, ongoing flow of orphans, homeless and starving children into Kharkiv and other large towns in Kharkiv province’. The 1933 budget had provided spaces for 10,000 children in orphanages; the real number was now more than double that, 24,475. A week later over 9,000 more children were picked up off the streets, 700 of them during one night, 27–28 May. Kharkiv province asked for 6.4 million rubles from the state to take care of them, as well as another 450,000 for starving adults.

  In practice, these kinds of measures rarely succeeded. A special report filed by the head of the secret police in Vinnytsia, describing the conditions in one of the city’s orphanages in May 1933, makes for stark reading:

  The home services picked up children on the street. It is meant to contain 40 children, but more than 100 are now there. The lack of beds and sheets means that two children now share each bed. There are only 67 sheets and 69 blankets. Some blankets are no longer usable. There is also a lack of spoons, plates and other implements. Infants are often left dirty, with crusted eyes and no fresh air. Sometimes children who arrive in satisfactory condition die within two or three months of arrival in the home. The level of mortality is increasing: In March, 32 children died (out of 115), in April, 38 died (ou
t of 134), during the first half of May, 16 (out of 135). Sick children lie beside healthy children, spreading diseases. Employees steal food. The electricity has been cut off, and there is no running water.54

  In the more distant provinces the situation could be even worse. In the town of Velyka Lepetykha conditions inside the orphanage were so bad that children escaped during the day and wandered into the market to beg and steal food.55 In Kherson the city’s four orphanages were overwhelmed after the number of children nearly doubled in the first three weeks of March, from 480 to 750, mostly because of homeless children picked up off the streets.56 In Kharkiv the petitions for food and aid meant they failed to come fast enough. The city health department reported in May that most children in the city’s overflowing orphanages were weak with hunger. Many had measles and other contagious diseases – and the mortality rate was 30 per cent.57

  There were also ‘orphanages’ that hardly deserved that name at all. In 1933, Liubov Drazhevska, at the time a geology student in Kharkiv, went in to her institute to discover that classes were cancelled. The following day she and about forty others were taken by streetcar to the railway station and shown railway carriages filled with children. ‘A man wearing a [secret police] uniform, I think, came up to us and said: “For the next few weeks you will be working with these children; you will supervise and feed them.” ’

  Drazhevska entered one of the carriages. ‘Some children were in a normal state, more or less, but most of them were very pale and very thin, and many children were swollen from hunger.’ She and the others began to serve gruel to the children, though not too much as they were so famished that they could become ill from overeating. Most of them could not explain how they had arrived at the carriages: parents had dropped them off, they had been picked up off the street, they couldn’t remember. On the very first day several children died, Drazhevska remembered: ‘For the first time in my life I saw people dying, and, of course, this was very difficult.’ Others were unbalanced. One girl began screaming: ‘Don’t cut me up, don’t cut me up!’ She hallucinated as well, crying out that ‘My aunt is weeding beets over there!’ Eventually she had to be removed from the car so as not to upset the others.

  Drazhevska found the experience unbearable: ‘On the whole, I was quite a self-controlled person, but after I came back home that day, I had a fit of hysterics. Before this I did not know what it meant to be a hysteric, but I experienced that then.’ Soon she became accustomed to the oddity of the situation, and to the children themselves. She was able to bring them books and paper. She tried to teach them to read. Every day some of them died – but others survived. Eventually, a place was found for them:

  We went by streetcar to a district of Kharkiv, then we had to go very far on foot. It was already dark. The children were five or six years old. They were tired and kept asking me: ‘Aunt, where are we going?’ But I didn’t know. The only thing that I knew was that I was supposed to bring them to the barracks and leave them there. That’s all. I don’t know what happened to them.58

  Even with all the deaths and suffering, Drazhevska’s story demonstrates a brutal truth: without policemen to organize ‘volunteers’, without the dirty, underfunded orphanages – even those with dishonest employees and appalling conditions – even more children would have died. The orphanages were terrible. But their very existence saved lives.

  The same paradoxical point can be made about another less popular Soviet institution: the Torgsin hard currency shops. As we saw earlier, these shops, first opened in 1930, were originally meant for foreigners who could not legally own rubles. In 1931 they were opened to Soviet citizens, to enable them to exchange whatever foreign money or gold objects they might possess. During the famine years of 1932–3 they expanded in numbers, activity and significance, achieving record sales and creating what some remembered as ‘Torgsin gold fever’. In November 1932 the Soviet Politburo decreed that the shops could purchase silver as well as gold, a fact that seemed important enough for the Italian consul to mention in his January 1933 report: ‘Now it is said that soon jewellery will be accepted.’59 At their peak, in 1933, there were 1,500 Torgsin shops, often in prominent places: in Kyiv, there was one on Khreshchatyk street, the most important shopping area in the city.

  The expansion was not accidental: the regime knew that famine would bring gold into the state coffers. Following the Torgsin’s high turnover in 1932 – in that year the shops brought in 21 tonnes of gold, one and a half times the amount mined by Soviet industry – the state greedily set the 1933 target at more than double that number.60 The Torgsin income briefly became a crucial factor in Soviet international trade: during the years 1932–5 the gold and other valuable objects that the state obtained through the Torgsins would pay for a fifth of Soviet hard currency expenditure on machinery, raw materials and technology.61

  For hungry people, the Torgsin shops – often the only place in town where food was readily available – became the focus of dreams and obsession. They attracted stares, curious onlookers and beggars. In 1933 the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones visited one in Moscow. ‘Plenty of everything,’ he recorded in his notebook’.62 Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of the ‘wistful groups’ of people who hung around outside the same shop, staring at the ‘tempting pyramids of fruit’.63 In Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, two demons make a memorable appearance in front of the ‘glass doors of the Torgsin Store in Smolensk Market’, before entering rooms full of ‘hundreds of different bolts of richly coloured poplins’ where ‘racks full of shoes stretched into the distance’.64

  Away from the capital, most of the Torgsin shops were dark and dirty like other Soviet shops, and operated by rude and angry staff.65 Still, many peasants, misled by their consumer goods and by the presence of hard currency, thought that the shops were ‘American’.66 Rumours of what the Torgsin might provide drew one man back from Rostov, in Russia, where he had fled to escape collectivization. Having heard that in Ukraine it was possible to exchange gold for bread, he decided, his son remembered, that it was worth the risk to come home just in order to take his tsarist-era gold coins out of their hiding place and trade them for several kilos of buckwheat and a few loaves of bread.67

  This long trip was not unusual. Although there were a few mobile Torgsin shops that toured the countryside, hoping to purchase gold, peasants without access to these made major expeditions to reach them in cities and towns. Nadiia Babenko’s father gathered the family wedding rings, baptismal crosses and earrings, and walked 200 kilometres from his village, Pylypovychi, to the Torgsin in Kyiv. But it was worth it: he received a pood of flour – 16 kilograms – a litre of oil and two kilograms of buckwheat, which along with frozen potatoes, sorrel, mushrooms, berries and acorns, helped the family survive for the next few weeks.68

  Not all such journeys ended happily. Thieves hung around Torgsin shops, and robbed or even murdered people as they entered and left. Torgsin staff cheated or mistreated peasants too. Ivan Klymenko and his mother travelled from Krasna Slobidka, a village in Kyiv province, to Khreshchatyk street to sell his grandmother’s wedding ring for several scoops of flour. No one had bothered to weigh the ring, so they didn’t know if they received a fair deal; once they got home his mother discovered that the flour was mixed with lime. They ate it anyway.69 Hryhorii Simia went to a Torgsin with his stepfather, who wanted to sell his army medal, a silver Georgian Cross. The seller wouldn’t accept it: this particular medal was, the clerk said, only given to ‘servants of the tsar’ with high positions in the officer corps. Simia’s stepfather protested in vain that he’d been an army doctor who treated the wounded regardless of rank. The seller replied: ‘So, you treated officers! Upper class! Enemies of the revolution! Yes? Get out of here or I call the police!’70

  As the famine deepened, some looked for gold wherever they could find it. For centuries Ukrainians had been buried along with their most prized possessions, including jewellery, weapons and crosses. Hunger removed any remaining feeling of resp
ect, and more than one ancient cemetery was robbed, at first only at night but eventually during the daytime too. Since cemeteries were ‘Christian’, Soviet authorities did not always object to the looting – and in some places they organized it themselves.71

  At the same time the Soviet regime also began to use the Torgsin shops as a way to encourage friends and relatives of Soviet citizens to contribute hard currency from abroad. In later years all such foreign contacts were forbidden and would be dangerous, even lethal, to maintain. But in 1932–3 the regime’s desire for hard currency was such that it allowed people outside the USSR to send ‘food transfers’ to starving relatives via the shops.72 Those lucky enough to receive something would have to give the state 25 per cent of the total, and sometimes as much as 50 per cent. But they would then receive coupons that allowed them to buy food at the Torgsin. Transfers arrived from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, the United Kingdom and above all the United States.73 The ethnic German community in Ukraine as well as the Volga region launched letter-writing campaigns aimed at their foreign brethren – Mennonite, Baptist and Catholic – begging for food. Tiny amounts of help could have an enormous impact. The diarist Oleksandra Radchenko, a teacher in the Kharkiv region, received a transfer of three dollars. With that, she obtained ‘6 kg of wheat flour, 2 kg of sugar, 3 or 4 of rice and 1 kilo of wheat groats at the Torgsin. What a great help to us.’74

  Although the Torgsin trade saved lives, it also created great bitterness. Many understood the shops in stark terms: they existed to rob starving peasants of what was left of their household wealth. In Odessa an informer told the OGPU he had heard two teachers speculating that peasant wealth might even be the purpose of the famine: ‘They have created hunger in order to get more gold and silver to the Torgsin.’75 In Poltava peasants joked bleakly that the acronym TORGSIN really stood for Tovarishchi, Revoliutsiia Gibnet, Stalin Istrebliaet Narod! (‘Comrades, the Revolution is Dying, Stalin Exterminates the People!’).76 There was no way to protest against the exploitation of the Torgsin system, except anonymously. The employees of one Torgsin arrived at work one morning to find a placard on the shop door: ‘Stalin is an executioner.’77