Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Still, countless families survived thanks to what they were able to sell. ‘We sold gold to get corn,’ one survivor remembered.78 Pavlo Chornyi’s family sold a great-grandfather’s silver medals, earned during the Russian imperial war in the Caucasus in the 1830s.79 Another woman remembered that her mother had ‘some golden things from pre-revolutionary times: She had my father’s golden watch, several rings, and so on. Thus, from time to time she went to the Torgsin .. … For silver and gold my mother received porridge, potatoes or flour. All those products she mixed with different grasses and gave us to eat once a day. In such a way we survived.’80 Yet another recalled her mother exchanging earrings and her wedding ring for flour, skirts and blouses for beetroot and grain, as well as her dowry – ‘fabric, embroidered towels, linen’ – for bran or millet.81

  Those women survived – but they lost a part of themselves in the process. Objects they might have received from their mothers, things that would have connected them to their past, rings and jewellery they might have used or invested in another way – all of these were gone. History, culture, family and identity were destroyed by the famine too, sacrificed in the name of survival.

  13

  Aftermath

  The rye is beginning to ripen

  But – and his hair stands on end –

  Not many have survived

  To see the new harvest.

  He won’t fall asleep till dawn …

  Then his mother approaches

  And says with sorrow

  ‘My son, it’s time to get up,

  The sun has risen over the field

  We cannot lie peacefully in our graves,

  We, the dead, are unable to rest.

  Who will care for the precious ears of grain

  In the fields, my dear son?’

  Mykola Rudenko, ‘The Cross’, 19761

  In the springtime, the Ukrainian countryside is a riot of cherry blossoms, tulip petals, sprouting grass and black mud. Only an hour’s drive from Kyiv the villages seem too provincial to have witnessed important historical events. Roads are pockmarked by puddles; some of the rickety cottages still have thatched roofs. Every house has a kitchen garden and many have beehives, chicken coops, and garden sheds filled with tools.

  Yet it was in springtime, in this same provincial Ukrainian countryside, that the famine in 1933 reached its peak. Today, that history is there if one looks for it, in the wide fields that once belonged to collective farms, in the overgrown cemeteries, and in the monuments put up since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Just on the edge of the village of Kodaky, at the point where houses give way to broad fields, local people have erected a piece of black stone. It has a cross-shaped hole cut in the centre and a dedication, ‘In memory of the victims of the Holodomor’. In Hrebinky an abandoned mound at the edge of town – a mass grave where famine victims were buried in 1933, then forgotten, then rediscovered – is now encircled by a brick wall and marked, since 1990, with a simple cross.

  In Barakhty the famine memorial is hard to miss: a larger-than-life statue of a mourning mother, kneeling beside a cross, at a prominent crossroads in the centre of the village. A list of victims carved into the black granite behind the statue both reveals and conceals. Surnames repeat themselves, showing that the famine wiped out whole families, but Christian names are often missing because records were badly kept:

  Bondar, Overko

  Bondar, Iosyp

  Bondar, Mariia

  Bondar, Two Children

  The missing names point to a deeper problem. Even in better circumstances, it would have been difficult to keep precise records of the vast numbers of men and women who died on the road, or in train stations, or on the streets of Kyiv. District registrars would have had trouble accounting for everyone who migrated or escaped, or even for every child who survived, by some miracle, in a distant orphanage. But the regime made these problems worse. Although mortality statistics were recorded as accurately as possible in 1933, the authorities, as the next chapter will explain, later altered death registries across Ukraine to hide the numbers of deaths from starvation, and in 1937 scrapped an entire census because of what it revealed.

  For all of these reasons, estimates of the numbers of dead have in the past ranged widely, from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, 7 million or even 10 million. But in recent years a team of Ukrainian demographers have looked again at the numbers that were tabulated at the district and provincial level, then passed on to Kharkiv and Moscow, and have come up with better answers.2 Arguing that ‘there was some falsification of cause of death in death certificates, but the number of registered deaths was not tampered with’, they have sought to establish reliable numbers of ‘excess deaths’, meaning the number of people who died above an expected average. They have also looked at ‘lost births’, or the numbers of births that did not occur, by comparison to what would have been expected, because of the famine.3 Thanks to their work, agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million. These figures include all victims, wherever they died – by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages – and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards.

  The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number.4 The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per cent of the deaths took place in 1933, and most of those in the first half of the year, with the highest numbers of casualties in May, June and July.5

  But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932–4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years.

  By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.6 These extreme statistics reflect, simply, the very high death rates in that year of children.

  The new statistical methods are also revealing when applied to Russia. They show that overall the famine touched Russia far less than Ukraine, with an overall 3 per cent ‘excess deaths’ in rural Russia, as against 14.9 per cent in rural Ukraine. Only a very few regions of Russia were affected by the same patterns of famine as Ukraine: the Volga German region, the Saratov region, Krasnodar and the North Caucasus all had very high death rates in the first half of 1933, corresponding to the political decisions taken that winter. But even in those cases the overall numbers of ‘excess deaths’ were lower than those in the worst regions of Ukraine.7

  The general statistics cannot reveal everything. For example, they conceal the story of particular groups within Ukraine, for whom separate accounts were not kept. Anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, that while the ethnic German community suffered greatly, in Ukraine as well as the Volga region, some of its members did get food aid and other forms of help from German sources. Andor Hencke, the German consul in Kyiv from 1933 to 1936, spent much of his first months in Ukraine trying to get food to the German minority community, despite the fact that ‘the party authorities and Soviet institutions are essentially unfavorably inclined towards the aid campaign’. He advised ethnic Germans to be discreet and to avoid personal visits to the consulate, so as not to attract attention, but he did communicate with them by post.8 Equally, as we have seen, there is anecdotal evidence that rural Jews also survived at higher rates because the majority were not farmers and so were not subject to
either de-kulakization or collectivization. Jews, Germans and Poles had another advantage too: they were not perceived to be part of the Ukrainian national movement, and thus were not particular targets of the repressive wave of 1932–3, though those groups would become targets later on.

  The statistics have also turned up some unexpected stories about the famine in different regions of Ukraine. In the past – going back to the nineteenth century if not further – drought and famine had always hit the southern and eastern steppe regions of the country hardest, as these were most dependent on grain. That was certainly the case in 1921–3 as well as during the smaller famine of 1928. It was also the case during the post-war famine of 1946–7. But in 1932–3 the highest mortality rate was in the Kyiv and Kharkiv provinces, where peasants traditionally grew a wider range of crops, including beets, potatoes and other vegetables, and where historically famine was rare. In Kyiv province death levels in 1932–3 were about 23 per cent higher than they would have been without the Holodomor; in Kharkiv province they were 24 per cent higher. In Vinnytsia and the Moldovan ‘autonomous’ province the percentage was 13 per cent; in Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa 13 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. In Donetsk province, by contrast, the death rate was only 9 per cent higher in the famine years.9

  Demographers have offered a range of hypotheses to explain these regional variations, and in at least three exceptional cases good explanations have been found. In theory, for example, peasants living in forested areas should have had greater access to mushrooms, small animals and other sources of food. This environmental factor might explain why Chernihiv province, in northern Ukraine, suffered less than many other parts of the republic. But it cannot explain the high death rates in Kharkiv and Kyiv provinces, which were in mixed forest-steppe regions and which did contain some areas covered by trees or swamp.10

  Proximity to international borders may also have affected death rates, which were indeed lower in Vinnytsia and Moldova, the two provinces bordering on Poland and Romania, as well as in the westernmost districts of the Kyiv region. Local authorities in these areas, worried about smuggling, discontent and sedition coming from abroad, seem to have hesitated to apply policies with the same degree of cruelty. Peasants who lived in these regions may also have been able to get food through barter, cross-border contacts, and from relatives who lived just on the other side.11

  The Donetsk region similarly appears to have been a special case. Because, as we have seen, this region was one of the few in Ukraine designated as an industrial ‘priority’ by the regime, more food was allocated to workers there. More food – relatively speaking – appears to have reached the rural areas too, probably through family connections to the cities. Proximity also meant that peasants in the region found it easier to escape the starving countryside, and to join the proletariat in the mines and factories.

  The most intriguing difference, though, is the one remaining between Kyiv and Kharkiv, with very high direct losses, and Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa, where the level of such losses was relatively low. The best explanation appears to be political: both in 1918–20 and 1930–1 the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions witnessed the greatest political resistance, first to the Bolsheviks and then to collectivization. The greatest number of ‘terrorist incidents’ took place in those regions, as did the largest number of secret police interventions. Andrea Graziosi has argued that the ‘impressive geographical, ideological and even personal and “family” continuity between the peasant-based social and national revolts of 1918–20 and those against dekulakization requisitions and collectivization in 1930–1 was strongest in territories where famine reached its harshest peaks’.12 Although this correlation is not exact – among other things, Makhno’s men were very active in southeast Ukraine – it is true that these two provinces, with their proximity to Ukraine’s two most culturally important cities, had many links to the nationalist movement. That may explain why repression was cruellest, food aid was scarcest, and death rates were highest.13

  In other words, the regions ‘normally’ most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not ‘normal’. It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity. And in this, it succeeded.

  The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. Death rates went up in January, and then kept increasing through the spring. But instead of ending abruptly that summer, the tragedy slowly dwindled. ‘Excess deaths’ continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934.

  In May the regime finally approved significant food aid for Ukraine – food originally taken, of course, from the peasants themselves – though it was especially targeted at border regions (where fear of outside influence was highest) and in areas where there were not enough healthy people to bring in the harvest.14 When it finally arrived, the harvest made a difference too. Students, workers and others were rushed to the countryside to make up for lost manpower, and more food became generally available in the countryside as well as the city. Theoretically, the grain collectors had also stopped requisitioning, in accordance with the decree that the Council of Ministers had issued in January. As of that spring, they were supposed to demand a tax – a percentage of the harvest – rather than a fixed amount of grain based on a plan produced in Moscow. In practice, this rule was applied unevenly. In some places peasants were taxed, but in others confiscations continued.15

  The Central Committee and the Ukrainian government also issued a joint directive in May, on ‘halting the mass exile of peasants, reducing the number of arrests and decreasing the number of prisons’. This secret decree, which went out to all party officials as well as the OGPU, courts and prosecutors’ offices, reflected a decision to ‘stop, as a rule, the use of mass exile and sharp forms of repression in the countryside’ and to introduce a less harsh rural regime. There were pragmatic reasons for the change: at the time of the decree 800,000 people were under arrest all across the USSR, prisons and camps were overflowing, and the state could barely cope. In addition, the regime recognized that it would need people to bring in the harvest. But the decree also signalled an end to the harsh treatment of villagers, and thus an end to the policy of food confiscation as well.16

  As in previous years, there was a procurement campaign in the late summer of 1933. Also as in previous years, there were shortfalls, although in 1933 the conversation about them was far more muted than it had been in the past. In October 1933, Stanislav Kosior, General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, wrote to Stalin, praising that autumn’s harvest, which he noted was an ‘improvement’ over the previous harvests. However, he admitted that there were still ‘problems’. Predicted yields had still not materialized.17 He also asked for a reduction in the grain procurement plan for Ukraine.

  On 18 October 1933 the Soviet Politburo approved this request. Ukraine’s required contribution for 1934 was reduced by 415,000 tonnes. A few weeks later Kosior and Pavlo Postyshev, the former Kharkiv party boss and Stalin’s envoy in Ukraine, met the Soviet leader – this time in the luxurious setting of his personal train carriage – and he confirmed a further reduction of Ukraine’s contribution by 500,000 tonnes. Although the republic was still required to produce a huge quantity of grain to the state, this was an important change.

  In acknowledgement of these concessions, the Ukrainian communists also changed their tone. They ceased to criticize the harsh requisitions policy. Instead, in multiple speeches and articles they rallied around the Soviet war against ‘nationalism’, the scourge that the leadership now blamed for all ‘errors’ in rural policy. Kosior told a November plenum that ‘in some republics of the USSR, in particular in Ukraine, the kulaks’ desperate resistance to our victorious socialist offensive led to a growth of nationalism’.

  That allusion to ‘errors’ wasn’t strong enough for the leader, however. Stalin personally edited that speech in order to strengthen it: ‘in some republics of the USSR, in particular
in Ukraine, the main threat is now Ukrainian nationalism that allies with imperialist interventionists’.18 Stalin drove the point home himself in January 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress, remembered as the Congress of Victors. In a long and much-applauded speech he marked the end of the worst famine in Soviet history with a vicious attack on nationalism:

  … It should be observed that the survivals of capitalism in people’s minds are much more tenacious in the sphere of the national question than in any other sphere. They are more tenacious because they are able to disguise themselves well in national costume …

  The deviation towards nationalism reflects the attempts of ‘one’s own’, ‘national’ bourgeoisie to undermine the Soviet system and to restore capitalism … It is a departure from Leninist internationalism … [Stormy applause]19

  At the same Congress, Postyshev, as the senior Ukrainian communist, took upon himself full responsibility for the ‘gross errors and blunders’ in Ukrainian agriculture – without mentioning the famine – which he explicitly blamed on nationalism, counter-revolutionaries and invisible foreign forces:

  The CP(B)U [Ukrainian Communist Party] did not take into account all the distinctive characteristics of the class struggle in Ukraine and the peculiarities of the internal situation in the CP(B)U.

  What are those characteristics? …