Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Loud applause followed. Duranty’s name, the New Yorker later reported, provoked ‘the only really prolonged pandemonium’ of the evening. ‘Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.’89 With that, the cover-up seemed complete.

  15

  The Holodomor in History and Memory

  Dear God, calamity again! …

  It was so peaceful, so serene;

  We but began to break the chains

  That bind our folk in slavery …

  When halt! … Again the people’s blood

  Is streaming!

  Taras Shevchenko, ‘Calamity Again’, 18591

  In the years that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened. They were afraid to mourn publicly. Even if they had dared to do so, there were no churches to pray in, no tombstones to decorate with flowers. When the state destroyed the institutions of the Ukrainian countryside, it struck a blow against public memory as well.

  Privately, however, the survivors did remember. They made real or mental notes about what had happened. Some kept diaries, ‘locked up in wooden boxes’ as one recalled, and hid them beneath floorboards or buried them in the ground.2 In their villages, within their families, people also told their children what had happened. Volodymyr Chepur was five years old when his mother explained to him that she and his father would give him everything that they had to eat. Even if they did not survive, they wanted him to live so that he could bear witness: ‘I must not die, and when I grow up I must tell people how we and our Ukraine died in torment.’3 Elida Zolotoverkha, the daughter of the diarist Oleksandra Radchenko, also told her children, her grandchildren and then her great-grandchildren to read it and to remember ‘the horror that Ukraine had passed through’.4

  Those words, repeated by so many people in private, left their mark. The official silence gave them almost a secret power. From 1933 onwards such stories became an alternative narrative, an emotionally powerful ‘true history’ of the famine, an oral tradition that grew and developed alongside the official denials.

  Although they lived in a propaganda state where the party controlled public discussion, millions of Ukrainians inside Ukraine knew this alternative narrative. The sense of disjunction, the gap between private and public memory, the gaping hole where the national mourning should have been – these things distressed Ukrainians for decades. After his parents died of starvation in Dnipropetrovsk province, Havrylo Prokopenko could not stop thinking about the famine. He wrote a story about it for school, with an illustration to match. His teacher praised his work but told him to destroy it, for fear it would get him, and her, into trouble. That left him with the feeling that something was wrong. Why could the famine not be mentioned? What was the Soviet state trying to hide? Three decades later, Prokopenko managed to read a poem on a local television station, including a line about ‘people black with hunger’. A threatening visit from local authorities followed, but that left him even more convinced that the USSR was responsible for the tragedy.5

  The absence of commemoration also bothered Volodymyr Samoiliuk. Although he later survived Nazi occupation and fought in the Second World War, nothing ever seemed more tragic to him than the experience of the famine. The memory stayed with him for decades, and he kept waiting for the famine to appear in official history. In 1967 he watched a Soviet television programme about 1933. He stared at the screen, waiting to see a reflection of the horror he remembered. But although he saw clips of the enthusiastic heroes of the first Five Year Plan, the May Day parade, even football matches from that year, ‘there was not a word about the horrific famine’.6

  From 1933 until the late 1980s the silence inside Ukraine was total – with one glaring, painful and complicated exception.

  Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By November the Wehrmacht had occupied most of Soviet Ukraine. Not knowing what was to come next, many Ukrainians, even Jewish Ukrainians, at first welcomed the German troops. ‘Girls would offer the soldiers flowers and people would offer bread,’ one woman recalled. ‘We were all so happy to see them. They were going to save us from the Communists who had taken everything and starved us.’7

  A similar welcome initially greeted the German army in the Baltic states, which had been occupied by the USSR from 1939 until 1941. The Caucasus and Crimea welcomed German troops with enthusiasm as well, though not because the inhabitants were Nazis. De-kulakization, collectivization, mass terror and the Bolshevik attacks on the Church encouraged a naively optimistic view of what the Wehrmacht might bring.8 In many parts of Ukraine the arrival of the Germans inspired spontaneous de-collectivization. Peasants not only took back land, they destroyed tractors and combine harvesters in a Luddite rage.9

  The uproar ended quickly – and anyone who hoped for a better life under German occupation had their expectations swiftly dashed. A full account of what happened next is beyond the scope of this book, for the catastrophe inflicted by the Nazis on Ukraine was widespread, violent and brutal on an almost incomprehensible scale. By the time they reached the USSR, the Germans had a lot of experience in destroying other states, and in Ukraine they knew what they wanted to do. The Holocaust began immediately, unfolding not in distant camps but in public. Instead of deportation, the Wehrmacht staged mass executions of Jews as well as Roma in front of their neighbours, at the edge of villages and in forests. Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war – between 800,000 and a million people – a substantial part of the millions more who died all across the continent.

  Hitler’s Soviet victims also included more than 2 million Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom died of disease or starvation, many of them on Ukrainian territory. Cannibalism haunted Ukraine once again: at Stalag 306 in Kirovohrad guards reported prisoners eating dead comrades. A witness at Stalag 365 in Volodymyr Volynskyi reported the same.10 Nazi soldiers and police robbed, beat and arbitrarily murdered other Ukrainians, especially public officials. Slavs, in the Nazi hierarchy, were subhuman untermenschen, perhaps one level above the Jews but slated for eventual elimination. Many who had welcomed the Wehrmacht quickly realized that they had exchanged one dictatorship for another, especially when the Germans launched a new wave of deportations. During the course of the war Nazi troops sent more than 2 million Ukrainians to do forced labour in Germany.11

  Like every occupying power in Ukraine, the Nazis ultimately had only one real interest: grain. Hitler had long claimed that ‘the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry’, and that Ukrainian territory would ensure ‘no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war’. Since the late 1930s his government had been planning to transform that aspiration into reality. Herbert Backe, the sinister Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture, conceived a ‘Hunger Plan’ whose goals were straightforward: ‘the war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war’. But he also concluded that the entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food. As Backe explained in his ‘Economic Policy Guidelines’ issued in May, as well as in a memorandum circulated to a thousand German officials in June 1941, ‘unbelievable hunger’ would soon grip Russia, Belarus and the industrial cities of the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad as well as Kyiv and Kharkiv. This famine would not be accidental: the goal was for some 30 million people to ‘die out’.12 The guidelines for the Economics Staff East, which was to be responsible for exploiting conquered territory, put it starkly:

  Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone can only be at the expense of supplying Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out in the war; they prevent Germany and Europe resisting the blockade. With regard to this, absolut
e clarity must reign.13 [emphasis in original]

  This was Stalin’s policy, multiplied many times: the elimination of whole nations through starvation.

  The Nazis never had time to fully implement the ‘Hunger Plan’ in Ukraine. But its influence could be felt in their occupation policy. Spontaneous de-collectivization was quickly halted, on the grounds that it would be easier to requisition grain from collective farms. Backe reportedly explained that ‘the Germans would have had to introduce the collective farm if the Soviets had not already arranged it’.14 In 1941 the farms were meant to be turned into ‘co-operatives’, but that never happened.15

  Hunger returned too. Stalin’s ‘scorched earth’ policy meant that many of Ukraine’s economic assets had already been destroyed by the retreating Red Army. The occupation made the situation worse for those who remained. Just before Kyiv was captured in September, Hermann Göring, the Reich Minister of the Economy, held a meeting with Backe. The two agreed that the city’s population should not be allowed to ‘devour’ food: ‘Even if one wanted to feed all the inhabitants of the newly conquered territory, one would be unable to do so.’ A few days later Heinrich Himmler of the SS told Hitler that the inhabitants of Kyiv were racially inferior and could be discarded: ‘One could easily do without eighty to ninety percent of them.’16

  In the winter of 1941 the Germans cut off food supplies to the city. Contrary to stereotype, the German authorities were less efficient than their Soviet counterparts: peasant traders did get through the makeshift cordons – they had found it difficult to do so in 1933 – and thousands of people took to the roads and railroads again in search of food. Shortages nevertheless multiplied throughout the occupation zone. Once again, people began to swell, slow down, stare into the distance and die. At least 50,000 people died from starvation in Kyiv that winter. In Kharkiv, which was cordoned off by a Nazi commander, 1,202 people died of hunger in the first two weeks of May 1942; the total deaths from starvation during the occupation amounted to about 20,000.17

  It was in this context – in hardship and chaos, under brutal occupation, and with a new famine looming – that it became possible, for the first time, to speak openly about the 1933 famine in Ukraine. Circumstances shaped the way the story was told. During the occupation the purpose of the discussion was not to help survivors mourn, recover, create an honest record or learn lessons for the future. Those who hoped for some kind of reckoning with the past were disappointed: many of the peasants who had kept secret diaries of the famine unearthed them and brought them to the offices of provincial newspapers. But ‘unfortunately, most of the editors were by now uninterested in those past years, and these valuable chronicles received no publicity’.18 Instead, those editors – who now owed their jobs, and their lives, to the new dictatorship – mostly published articles in the service of Nazi propaganda. The purpose of the discussion was to justify the new regime.

  The Nazis actually knew a good deal about the Soviet famine. German diplomats had described it in their reports to Berlin in great detail while it was taking place; Joseph Goebbels had referred to the famine in a speech at the Nazi Party congress in 1935, where he spoke of 5 million dead.19 From the moment they arrived, the German occupiers of Ukraine used the famine in their ‘ideological work’. They hoped to increase hatred towards Moscow, to remind people of the consequences of Bolshevik rule. They were especially keen to reach rural Ukrainians, whose efforts were required to produce the food needed for the Wehrmacht. Propaganda posters, wall newspapers and cartoons showed unhappy, half-starved peasants. In one an emaciated mother and child stand against a ruined city above the slogan ‘This is what Stalin gave Ukraine’. In another an impoverished family sit at a table with no food beneath another slogan: ‘Life has become better, comrades, Life has become merrier’ – a famous quote from Stalin.20

  To mark the tenth anniversary of the famine, in 1942–3 – coincidentally the high-water mark of Nazi power in Ukraine – many newspapers published material aimed at winning peasant support. In July 1942, Ukraïnskiy Khliborob, an agricultural weekly that reached 250,000 people, published a major article on a ‘year of work without the Jew-Bolsheviks’:

  All peasants remember well the year of 1933 when hunger mowed people down like grass. In two decades the Soviets turned the land of plenty into the land of hunger where millions perished. The German soldier halted this assault, the peasants greeted the German army with bread and salt, the army that fought for the Ukrainian peasants to work freely.21

  Other articles followed, and got some traction. A diarist at the time wrote that the Nazi propaganda had a strong impact because some of it was true:

  … the very look of our people, our houses, our yards, our floors, our toilets, our village councils, the ruins of our churches, the flies, the dirt. In one word – everything that fills Europeans with horror but is ignored by our leaders and their sidekicks who have distanced themselves from ordinary people and the contemporary European standard of living.22

  A refugee from Poltava told an interviewer immediately after the war that there had been a good deal of discussion of the famine under the occupation. He also remembered that at one point, when it looked as if the Red Army might return, people asked ‘And what will those “Reds” of ours bring? A new famine of 1933?’23

  Like everything else in the Nazi press, these wartime accounts were suffused with anti-semitism. The famine – as well as poverty and repression – was repeatedly blamed on the Jews, an idea that had of course had currency before, but was now enshrined in the occupiers’ ideology. One newspaper wrote that the Jews were the only part of the population that did not feel the famine because they bought everything they needed in the Torgsin shops: ‘Jews lacked neither gold nor dollars.’ Others spoke of Bolshevism itself as a ‘Jewish product’.24 One memoirist recalled that he was shown an anti-semitic propaganda film about the famine in Kyiv during the war. It contained photographs of unearthed corpses, and ended with the murder of a Jewish secret policeman.25

  The wartime press did manage to publish a tiny number of articles on the famine that had not been specifically designed to fit into the framework of Nazi propaganda. In November 1942, S. Sosnovyi, an agricultural economist, published what may have been the very first quasi-scholarly study of the famine in a Kharkiv newspaper, Nova Ukraïna. Sosnovyi’s article was free of Nazi jargon, offering a straightforward account of what had happened. The famine, he wrote, had been designed to destroy the Ukrainian peasant opposition to Soviet power. It was not the result of ‘natural causes’: ‘In fact, weather conditions in 1932 were not extraordinary like those, for instance, in 1921.’ Sosnovyi also produced the first serious estimate of casualties. Referring to the 1926 and 1939 censuses and other Soviet statistical publications (not the suppressed 1937 census, though he probably knew about it), he concluded that 1.5 million people had died from starvation in Ukraine in 1932, and that 3.3 million died in 1933 – numbers slightly higher than those now widely accepted, but not far off.

  Sosnovyi also described, accurately, how the famine had come about, proving that the true story, the ‘alternative narrative’, was still very much alive a decade after the fact:

  First, they took everything from the collective farm storehouses – everything that farmers earned for their ‘work days’ (trudodni). Then they took forage, seeds, and then they went to the huts and took the last grain from the peasants that they received in advance … They knew that the area sown was smaller, the amount of grain harvested was lower in 1932 in Ukraine. However, the grain procurement plan was extremely high. Isn’t this the first step towards the organization of a famine? During the procurement, Bolsheviks saw there was extremely little grain remaining, yet they carried on and took everything away – this is indeed the way to organize a famine.26

  Later, similar ideas would form the basis of the argument that the famine had been a genocide, an intentional plan to destroy the Ukrainians as a nation. But in 1942 that term was not yet in use, and even the co
ncept was of no interest to anybody in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

  Sosnovyi’s article was dry and analytic, but a poem that accompanied it is evidence that mourning, though suppressed in public, was still taking place. Composed by Oleksa Veretenchenko, ‘Somewhere in the Distant Wild North’ was part of the 1933 cycle, a series of poems that appeared in Nova Ukraïna throughout 1943. Each one struck a different note of pain or nostalgia:

  What has happened to the laughter,

  To the bonfires girls used to light on Midsummer’s Eve?

  Where are the Ukrainian villages

  And the cherry orchards by the houses?

  Everything has vanished in a ravenous fire

  Mothers are devouring their children,

  Madmen are selling human flesh

  At the markets.27

  An echo of those emotions could also be heard in the privacy of people’s homes. Because the Soviet and German invasions had effectively united western Ukraine (Galicia, Bukovyna and western Volhynia) with the rest of the country, many western Ukrainians managed to travel east for the first time, recording what they saw and heard. Although the famine had been widely discussed in 1933, it was still a surprise to Bohdan Liubomyrenko, a visitor to central Ukraine during the war, to hear famine stories told over and over again: ‘Wherever we visited people, everyone in conversation could not fail to mention, as something very terrible, the days of famine they had lived through.’ Sometimes his hosts spoke ‘all night long about their horrific experiences’: