Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  With publication of the 1939 census the great famine vanished not only from the newspapers but from Soviet demography, politics and bureaucracy. The Soviet state never kept any record of the victims, their lives or their deaths. For as long as it existed, it never accepted that they had died at all.

  Violence, repression and the census falsification successfully quelled discussion of the famine inside the USSR. But the cover-up of the famine abroad required different tactics. Information was not so easily controlled outside the Soviet Union. Information did cross borders, as did people. In May 1933 a Ukrainian newspaper in Lviv (then a Polish city) published an article denouncing the famine as an attack on the Ukrainian national movement:

  The eastern side of the Zbruch River [the border] now looks like a real military camp that is difficult for a citizen to cross even at night, as in wartime. We are informed of this by refugees who recently managed to wade across the Zbruch … they arrived as living skeletons because the famine there is terrible. Even dogs are being killed, and today’s slaves of the collective farms are being fed dog meat, for in fertile Ukraine neither bread nor potatoes are to be had.29

  Other news came from officials and consuls who crossed the border legally as well as from letters mailed from ports, sent via travellers or missed by censors. Ethnic Germans wrote to individuals in the United States and Germany, sometimes to relatives and sometimes to unknown leaders of their religious communities: ‘Dear Fathers and Brothers in faraway Germany, a plea from Russia from me of German name … I call to you for advice and help and to tell you what is in my grief-stricken heart.’30 Letters also managed to reach Canada.

  These missives had an impact, as did the few refugees. Even as the famine was unfolding, Ukrainians abroad began to protest against it, both peacefully and otherwise. Ethnic Ukrainian politicians brought up the famine at sessions of the Polish parliament, and described it in the Ukrainian-language press.31 In October 1933, Mykola Lemyk, a member of a Ukrainian nationalist organization in Poland, murdered the secretary of the Soviet consul in Lviv. During his trial in a Polish court, Lemyk, who had been hoping to kill the consul himself, described the murder as revenge for the famine.32 At the end of that month the Ukrainian community in Poland tried to organize a mass demonstration in protest against the famine, but they were stopped by the Polish government, which feared further violence.33

  At about the same time, on the other side of the world, the Ukrainian National Council, an organization formed in May 1933, staged street protests in Winnipeg, Canada, and sent a letter to President Roosevelt, enclosing an eyewitness account of the famine.34 At a meeting held at the Ukrainian church in Winnipeg, diaspora leaders read aloud letters from Ukraine exhorting the public to help Ukraine ‘break away’ from the USSR.35 Ukrainians in Brussels, Prague, Bucharest, Geneva, Paris, London and Sofia, among other cities, created action committees that sought, without much luck, to publicize the famine and deliver aid to the starving.36

  News also filtered out via the Catholic Church. In Poland, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priests took up collections for victims of the famine in 1933, held a day of mourning and hung black flags on the facades of Ukrainian churches and the local offices of Prosvita, the Ukrainian cultural institute.37 Polish and Italian diplomats as well as priests with contacts inside the USSR also alerted the Church hierarchy. The Vatican first received a written description of the famine in April 1933, via an anonymous letter smuggled out through the Russian port of Novorossiisk. A second anonymous letter made its way to Rome from the North Caucasus in August. Pope Pius XI ordered both letters published in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.38 In that same month the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer, issued an alarmed appeal. He denounced famine conditions in Russia, and in the ‘Ukraine districts of the Soviet Union’:

  [they are] accompanied by such cruel phenomena of mass starvation as infanticide and cannibalism … It is already established that that catastrophe still obtains, even at the time of the new harvest. It will in four months reach a new peak. Once again millions of lives will be lost … Merely to look on such a situation would be to increase the responsibility of the whole civilized world for mass deaths in Russia. It would mean to bear the guilt of the fact that, at a time when whole sections of the world are almost choked with a surplus of wheat and food, men are starving in Russia.39

  Later, Innitzer would be the recipient of an unusual form of evidence: a collection of two dozen photographs taken by Alexander Wienerberger, an Austrian engineer who worked at a factory in Kharkiv and smuggled the pictures out over the border. Preserved in the church diocese archive in Vienna, these are still the only verified photographs taken in Ukraine of famine victims in 1933. They show starving people by the sides of roads, empty houses and mass graves. They leave no doubt about the scale of the tragedy.40 But in 1933 the problem for the Church was not evidence, but politics. A debate broke out inside the Vatican – one faction wanted to send a famine relief mission to the USSR, another preached diplomatic caution. The argument for caution won. Although the Vatican continued to receive information about the famine, the Holy See mostly kept silent in public. Among other things, Hitler’s January 1933 electoral victory created a political trap: the hierarchy feared that strong language about the Soviet famine would make it seem as if the Pope favoured Nazi Germany.41

  Similar arguments took hold elsewhere, shaped by similar political constraints. Many European foreign ministries had superb information about the famine, as it was happening, in real time. Indeed, in 1933, Ukraine was blessed with several extraordinarily observant resident foreigners. Gradenigo, the Italian consul who lived in Kharkiv between 1930 and 1934, understood both the scale of the famine and the impact it had on the Ukrainian national movement. He did not doubt that ‘the hunger is principally the result of a famine organized in order to teach a lesson to the peasants’:

  … The current disaster will lead to the colonization of Ukraine by Russians. It will transform Ukraine’s character. In the near future there will be no reason to speak of Ukraine or Ukrainian people, simply because there will be no more ‘Ukrainian problem’ when Ukraine becomes an indistinguishable part of Russia …42

  The German consul in Odessa in 1933 was no less emphatic about the origins of the famine:

  The communist rulers do not let the peasants remember their hardships for too long, achieving this by having one hardship follow the other immediately, and thus, whether one wants to or not, the old fears are forgotten. In the past, if someone in a village was struck by misfortune, entire generations remembered.43

  Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat in Moscow, later an important adviser on Soviet policy to Hitler (and after that to the CIA), also believed at the time that the famine was artificial:

  It was our impression then that the authorities deliberately refrained from aiding the stricken population, except those organized in collective farms, in order to demonstrate to the recalcitrant peasant that death by starvation was the only alternative to collectivization.44

  Yet in both Italy and Germany – one already a fascist state, the latter in the course of becoming one – the famine had no impact on official policy. Benito Mussolini personally read and marked up some of the reports from Ukraine, but never said anything in public, perhaps because it was not in the nature of his regime to show pity, or perhaps because the Italians, who concluded a non-aggression treaty with the USSR in September 1933, were more interested in trade.45 But other than the deliberately discreet effort to help ethnic Germans, and, later, use of the famine in Nazi propaganda, the Germans made no attempt at the time either to protest or to offer aid.

  Not all of the reports were believed. Polish diplomats were deeply shocked by the famine – so much so that their accounts were dismissed. Stanislaw Kosnicki, the head of the Kyiv consulate, was rebuked in January 1934 for including too much ‘information about famine, misery, persecution of the population, the fight against Ukrainianness etc.’. Polish diplomats, like their
colleagues, nevertheless had no doubt that the famine and the repressions were part of a plan: ‘Mass arrests and persecutions cannot be explained or justified by peril on the part of the Ukrainian national movement … the real cause of the action lies in the planned, far-sighted, long-term policy of the Moscow leaders, who are more and more becoming imperialists, strengthening the political system and borders of the state’.46

  British diplomats, on the other hand, had no trouble believing the worst stories they heard. They had a whole network of informants, including the Canadian agricultural expert Andrew Cairns, who travelled through Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932 on behalf of the Empire Marketing Board. Cairns reported seeing ‘rag-clad hungry peasants, some begging for bread, mostly waiting, mostly in vain, for tickets, many climbing on to the steps or joining the crowds on the roof of each car, all filthy and miserable and not a trace of a smile anywhere’.47 He also concluded that the government’s grain export plan was ‘ridiculous’ and could not be fulfilled.48

  But the British government not only did not offer aid, it actively discouraged several independent efforts to get food to the starving in 1933, on the grounds that the Soviet government was opposed to such efforts and therefore it was naive to make them. Laurence Collier, head of the Foreign Office Northern Department at the time, also objected to the presence of diaspora Ukrainians in several of the charities: ‘anything to do with Ukrainian nationalism was like a red rag to a bull to the Soviet authorities’. Collier understood what was happening – of Cairns’ report, he wrote: ‘I have seldom read a more convincing document’ – but preferred not to ruffle feathers.49

  Diplomatic silence suited the Soviet leadership, which had good reasons to stop stories about the famine from spreading. Although the Bolshevik goal of world revolution had been pushed into the far distance, it had never been abandoned completely. By 1933 radical political change in Europe once again seemed plausible. The continent was gripped by economic crisis; Hitler had just become Chancellor of Germany. The worsening international situation meant, to the Marxist-Leninist mind, that the final crisis of capitalism must be approaching. In this context, perceptions of the USSR abroad mattered a great deal to Soviet leaders, who hoped to use the crisis to promote the Soviet Union as a superior civilization.

  The Soviet leadership also cared about foreign public opinion for domestic reasons. Since 1917, foreigners, from the American communist John Reed to the French writer Anatole France, had been deployed inside the USSR as ballast for propaganda. The writings of foreigners who lauded the achievements of the revolution were published and publicized inside the country, as were the remarks of enthusiastic visitors – communists, writers, intellectuals – who were taken to see Soviet schools, farms and factories. In the wake of the famine, the Soviet leadership encouraged these fellow travellers to dismiss any talk of food shortages – and some of them did.

  Their motives were mixed. Some, like the British socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were ‘true believers’ who wanted some form of socialist revolution in their own countries and sought to use the example of the USSR for their own ends. The Webbs were aware of the famine but downplayed it in order to laud collectivization: ‘The experience of the last three harvests seems to justify the claim of the Soviet government that the initial difficulties of this giant transformation have been overcome,’ they wrote in 1936. ‘There is, indeed, little reason to doubt that the aggregate output of foodstuffs is being increased at a great rate.’50

  Other visitors seem to have been motivated by vanity, as well as the immense pomp and favour that the USSR could shower upon celebrities. The writer George Bernard Shaw, accompanied by the MP Nancy Astor, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at a banquet in Moscow – vegetarian, to accommodate his tastes – in 1931. Having been greeted by welcoming parties and serenaded by brass bands, Shaw was in an expansive mood when he spoke to the audience of Soviet officials and distinguished foreigners.51 Thanking his hosts, he declared himself the enemy of anti-Soviet rumour-mongers. When friends had heard he was going to Russia, he told the crowd, they had given him tins of food to take on the journey: ‘They thought Russia was starving. But I threw all of the food out the window in Poland before I reached the Soviet frontier.’

  His audience ‘gasped’, recalled a journalist in attendance: ‘One felt the convulsive reaction in their bellies. A tin of English beef would provide a memorable holiday in the home of any of the workers and intellectuals at the gathering.’52 A flavour of the cynical weariness with which at least some of the Soviet intelligentsia received these pompous outsiders can be deduced from Andrey Platonov’s play, Fourteen Little Red Huts. Platonov’s play features a visiting foreign intellectual who demands, ‘Where can I see socialism? Show it to me at once. Capitalism irritates me.’53

  In the summer of the famine, the most important real-life version of Platonov’s anti-hero was Édouard Herriot, a French Radical politician and former prime minister who was invited to Ukraine at the end of August 1933 specifically to repudiate growing rumours of famine. Herriot’s own motivation seems to have been political. Like other ‘realist’ statesmen in many Western capitals, he wanted to encourage his country’s trade relations with the USSR, and he wasn’t particularly bothered by the nature of its government. During his two-week trip he visited a model children’s colony, saw shops whose shelves had been hastily stocked in advance, rode down the Dnieper River on a boat and met enthusiastic peasants and workers coached especially for the occasion. Before his arrival, Herriot’s hotel was hastily refurbished and the staff were given new uniforms.

  The highlight of the Frenchman’s trip was a visit to a collective farm. Afterwards, he remembered their ‘admirably irrigated and cultivated’ vegetable gardens. ‘I’ve travelled across Ukraine,’ declared Herriot, ‘I assure you that I have seen a garden in full bloom’.54 According to OGPU reports filed afterwards, Herriot did ask about famine, but was assured that any past difficulties were now over.55 Pravda made immediate use of the visit for purposes of domestic propaganda, and proudly stated that Herriot ‘categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeois press in connection with a famine in the USSR’, just in case any Soviet citizens had somehow managed to hear them.56

  The diplomats and one-off visitors did not present a difficult challenge for the Soviet authorities. The Foreign Ministry mandarins were too discreet to voice their opinions. Men like Herriot and Shaw could not speak the language or control their itineraries; it was relatively easy to monitor what they saw and whom they met. By contrast, the manipulation of the foreign press corps in Moscow required a good deal more sophistication. Their movements and conversations could not be completely controlled – and they could not be ordered what to write.

  By 1933 the regime already had bad experiences with the more independent-minded members of the press corps. One of these was Rhea Clyman, an extraordinary Canadian who spent four years in Moscow before deciding to drive across the USSR in the company of two American women from Atlanta, arguing with officials at every turn. Clyman was finally stopped in Tbilisi in the summer of 1932 and forcibly deported (the other two women made it to Tashkent before they met the same fate).57 The result was an enormous headline in the Toronto Evening Telegram:

  Telegram Writer Driven from Russia

  Rhea Clyman Exposes Prison Camp Conditions

  Angers Soviet Dictators58

  Once she knew that she could never return to the USSR, Clyman published a series of luridly written but accurate stories, describing kulak families sent to the far north, the growing food shortages in Ukraine, and the early Gulag camps in Karelia near the Finnish border. She also described the after-effects of collectivization in Ukraine:

  The villages were strangely forlorn and deserted. I could not understand at first. The houses were empty, the doors flung wide open, the roofs were caving in. I felt that we were following in the wake of some hungry horde that was sweeping on ahead of us and laying all these homes bare … When we had pas
sed ten, fifteen of these villages I began to understand. These were the homes of those thousands of expropriated peasants – the kulaks – I had seen working in the mines and cutting timber in the North. We sped on and on, raising a thick cloud of dust in front and behind, but still those empty houses staring out with unseeing eyes raced on ahead of us.59

  Although Clyman’s writing was embarrassing to the Soviet government, neither she nor her newspaper were sufficiently prestigious to create any stir at a higher level. Her expulsion helped the Soviet state maintain order. It sent a message: the more established, more influential Moscow-based journalists had to be careful if they wanted to keep their jobs.

  Indeed, they had to be careful if they wanted to be able to do their jobs at all. At the time, Moscow correspondents needed the state’s permission not only to remain in residence but also to file their articles. Without a signature and the official stamp of the press department, the central telegraph office would not send any dispatches abroad. To win that permission, journalists regularly bargained with Foreign Ministry censors over which words they could use, and they kept on good terms with Konstantin Umanskii, the Soviet official responsible for the foreign press corps.60 William Henry Chamberlin, then the Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that the foreign correspondent who refused to soften his commentary ‘works under a Sword of Damocles – the threat of expulsion from the country or of the refusal of permission to re-enter it, which of course amounts to the same thing’.61

  Extra rewards were available to those who played the game particularly well, as the case of Walter Duranty famously illustrates. Duranty was the correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow between 1922 and 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. Duranty, British by birth, had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and sceptical ‘realist’ trying to listen to both sides of a story. ‘It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,’ he wrote in 1935. But ‘in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose’.62