Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  The terrifying years of the artificial famine which the government planned with evil gloating against Ukraine in 1932–33 had cut deep into the people’s memory. Ten long years had been unable to erase those murderous traces and to disperse the expiring sounds of the innocent children, women and men, of the dying of young people enfeebled by famine. The sad memories still hang like a black haze over the cities and villages, and produce a mortal fear among the witnesses who escaped the starvation.28

  Ukrainians also began to speak openly about collectivization, resistance and the armed militia that had arrived to repress them in 1930. Many were clear about the political causes of the famine, explaining ‘how the peasants were robbed; how everything was confiscated, leaving nothing behind for families, even those with small children. They confiscated everything and exported it to Russia.’29 Ukrainians elsewhere in the USSR did the same. In the 1980s the writer Svetlana Aleksievich met a female Russian veteran who had served alongside a Ukrainian woman during the war. The woman, a famine survivor who had lost her entire family, told the Russian veteran that she had only survived by eating horse manure: ‘I want to defend the Motherland, but I don’t want to defend Stalin, that traitor to the revolution.’30

  Just as they would later on – and just as today – not all the listeners believed these stories. The Russian veteran worried that her comrade was an ‘enemy’ or a ‘spy’. Even the Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia found it hard to grapple with the idea of a state-sponsored famine: ‘Frankly, we found it difficult to believe that a government could do such a thing.’31 The thought that Stalin had deliberately allowed people to starve to death was too horrible, too monstrous, even for those who hated him.

  The end of the Second World War did not quite bring a return to the status quo. Inside Ukraine the war altered the language of the regime. Critics of the USSR were no longer mere enemies but ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’. Any talk of the famine was ‘Hitlerite propaganda’. Memoirs about the famine were buried even deeper in drawers and closets, and discussion of the subject became treasonous. In 1945 one of the most eloquent Holodomor diarists, Oleksandra Radchenko, was literally persecuted for her private writing. During a search of her apartment the secret police confiscated her diary. Following a six-month interrogation, she was charged with having written a ‘diary with counter-revolutionary contents’. During her trial she told the judges that ‘the main aim of my writings was to devote them to my children. I wrote because after 20 years the children won’t believe what violent methods were used to build socialism. The Ukrainian people suffered horrors during 1930–33 …’ Her appeal fell on deaf ears, and she was sent for a decade to the Gulag, returning to Ukraine only in 1955.32

  The memory of new horrors overlaid that of 1933 as well. The murder of Kyiv’s Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in 1941; the battles for Kursk, Stalingrad, Berlin, all fought with Ukrainian soldiers; the prisoner-of-war camps, the Gulag, the filtration camps for returning deportees, the massacres and the mass arrests, the burnt-out villages and destroyed fields – all of these were now part of Ukraine’s story too. In official Soviet historiography ‘the Great Fatherland War’, as the Second World War came to be called, became the central focus of research and commemoration, while the repression of the 1930s was never discussed. The year 1933 receded behind the years 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945.

  Even 1946 turned sour, as post-war chaos, a return to harsh requisitioning, a major drought – and, once again, the need for exports, this time to feed Soviet-occupied central Europe – led to further disruptions in food supply. In 1946–7 some 2.5 million tons of Soviet grain were shipped to Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even France. Ukrainians once again went hungry, both in the countryside and the cities, as did others across the USSR. Death tolls related to food deprivation were very high, with many hundreds of thousands suffering from malnutrition.33

  Outside Ukraine the situation also changed, and in a radically different direction. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians found themselves, like other Soviet citizens, outside the borders of the USSR. Many were forced labourers, sent to Germany to work in factories and farms. Some had retreated alongside the Wehrmacht, or rather fled to Germany in advance of the returning Red Army: having experienced the famine, they knew they had nothing to gain from the reimposition of Soviet power. Olexa Woropay, an agricultural specialist from Odessa who witnessed the famine, found himself in a ‘displaced persons camp’ near the German city of Munster, where he and his compatriots were living in ‘a huge barracks which was converted from a military garage’. In the winter of 1948, while they waited to be sent on to Canada or Britain, ‘there was nothing to do and the evenings were long and dull. To pass the time, people told stories of their experiences’. Woropay wrote them down.34 A few years later they appeared in London in a small volume called The Ninth Circle.

  Although it had little impact at the time, The Ninth Circle now makes fascinating reading. It reflects the views of people who had been adults during the famine, who still remembered it vividly, and who had had time to reflect on the causes and consequences. Woropay, like Sosnovyi a few years earlier, argued that the famine had been organized deliberately, that Stalin had planned it carefully, and that it was intended from the start to subdue and to ‘Sovietize’ Ukraine. He described the rebellions that had followed collectivization, and explained what they meant:

  Moscow understood that all this marked the beginning of a further Ukrainian war, and she was afraid, remembering the liberation struggle of 1918–1921. She knew, too, how great a threat an economically independent Ukraine would be to communism – especially as there still remained in the Ukrainian villages a considerable element which was both nationally conscious and morally strong enough to cherish the idea of an independent, unified Ukraine … Red Moscow therefore adopted a most ignominious plan to break the power of resistance of the thirty-five million strong Ukrainian nation. The strength of Ukraine was to be undermined by famine.35

  Other members of the diaspora concurred. Spontaneously, wherever they found themselves, they began to organize around the famine, to mark it and to commemorate it as a turning point in the history of Ukraine. In 1948, Ukrainians in Germany, many in displaced persons camps, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the famine; in Hanover they organized a demonstration as well as leaflets describing the famine as a ‘mass murder’.36 In 1950 a Ukrainian newspaper in Bavaria reprinted the Sosnovyi article first published in occupied Kharkiv, and repeated its conclusion: the famine had been ‘organized’ by the Soviet regime.37

  In 1953 a Ukrainian émigré named Semen Pidhainy went one step further. Born to a Cossack family in Kuban, Pidhainy was a veteran of the Gulag. Arrested and imprisoned in the Solovetskii Island concentration camp, he was released before the Nazi invasion and spent the war working in the city administration of Kharkiv. He wound up in Toronto in 1949, where he dedicated himself to studying and propagating the history of Ukraine. Like the Ukrainians in Germany, his goals were political as well as moral: he wanted to remember, to mourn, but also to draw the West’s attention to the brutal and repressive nature of the Soviet regime. In these early years of the Cold War there was still a strong pro-Soviet sentiment in many parts of Europe and North America. Pidhainy and the Ukrainian diaspora dedicated themselves to fighting against it.

  In Canada, Pidhainy initiated the founding of the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror. He also became a prominent émigré organizer and often spoke to émigré groups, encouraging them to write down their memories, not only of the famine but of life in the USSR. Other émigré institutions did, or had already done, the same. The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg, founded in 1944, held a memoir-writing competition in 1947. Although aimed at collecting material about the Second World War, many of the memoirs submitted concerned the famine, and the Centre eventually built up a substantial collection.38 The Ukrainian community around
the world also responded to an appeal from a diaspora newspaper in Munich for memoirs that would ‘serve as a severe accusation of Bolshevik arbitrariness in Ukraine’.39

  One of the results of these efforts was The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a book edited by Pidhainy. Eventually comprising two volumes – the first was published in 1953, on the twentieth anniversary of the famine – the Black Deeds contained dozens of memoirs as well as analysis of the famine and other repressive aspects of the Soviet regime. Among the authors was Sosnovyi. This time his arguments were shortened and translated into English. Entitled ‘The Truth about the Famine’, his essay began bluntly: ‘The famine of 1932–33 was needed by the Soviet government to break the backbone of the Ukrainian opposition to complete Russian domination. Thus, it was a political move and not the result of natural causes.’40

  Others described their own experiences. Brief, poignant memoirs were mixed with longer and more literary reminiscences as well as drawings and photographs of the dead. G. Sova, who had been an economist in Poltava, remembered that ‘Upon many occasions, I saw the last ounce of grain, flour and even peas and beans taken away from the farmers.’41 I. Kh-ko described how his father ‘managed to conceal some grain in the leggings of his boots’ during the search of their home, but eventually died anyway: ‘nobody buried him, because the dead lay scattered everywhere’.42

  The editors sent The Black Deeds of the Kremlin to libraries across the country. But like The Ninth Circle, the newspaper articles in Canada and the leaflets in Germany, it was studiously ignored by most Soviet scholars and mainstream academic journals.43 The mix of emotive peasant memoir with semi-scholarly essays did not appeal to professional American historians. Paradoxically, the Cold War did not help the Ukrainian émigré cause either. The language many of them were using – ‘black deeds’ or ‘famine as a political weapon’ – sounded too political to many scholars in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The authors were easily dismissed as ‘Cold Warriors’ telling tales.

  The active suppression of the famine story by Soviet authorities also had, inevitably, a powerful impact on Western historians and writers. The total absence of any hard information about the famine made the Ukrainian claims seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible. Surely if there had been such a famine then the Soviet government would have reacted to it? Surely no government would stand by while its own people starved?

  The Ukrainian diaspora was also undermined by the status of Ukraine itself. Even to serious scholars of Russian history, the notion of ‘Ukraine’ seemed, in the post-war era, more dubious than ever. Most outsiders knew little of Ukraine’s brief, post-revolutionary moment of independence, and even less of the peasant rebellions of 1919 and 1930. Of the arrests and repressions of 1933 they knew nothing at all. The Soviet government encouraged outsiders as well as its own citizens to think of the USSR as a single entity. The official representatives of Ukraine on the world stage were spokesmen for the Soviet Union, and in the post-war West, Ukraine was almost universally considered to be a province of Russia. People calling themselves ‘Ukrainian’ could seem somehow unserious, much in the way that campaigners for Scottish or Catalan independence once seemed unserious too.

  By the 1970s the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe, Canada and the United States was large enough to produce its own historians and journals, and wealthy enough to establish both the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. But these efforts were not significant enough to shape the mainstream historical narratives. Frank Sysyn, a leading diaspora scholar, has written that the ‘ethnicization’ of the field may even have alienated the rest of the scholarly community, because it made Ukrainian history seem a secondary, unworthy pursuit.44 The memory of the Nazi occupation, and the collaboration of some Ukrainians with the Nazis, also meant that even decades later it was easy to call any advocate of independent Ukraine ‘fascist’. The diaspora Ukrainian insistence on their identity even seemed to many North Americans and Europeans to be ‘nationalist’ and therefore suspicious.

  The émigrés could be dismissed as ‘notoriously biased’, their accounts scorned as ‘dubious atrocity tales’. The Black Deeds compilation would eventually be described by one prominent scholar of Soviet history as a Cold War ‘period piece’ with no academic value.45 But then events began to evolve in Ukraine itself.

  In 1980, as the fiftieth anniversary of the famine approached, Ukrainian diaspora groups across North America once again planned to mark the occasion. In Toronto the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee began to film interviews with famine survivors and witnesses across Europe and North America.46 In New York the Ukrainian Studies Fund commissioned James Mace, a young scholar who had written a doctoral thesis on Ukraine, to launch a major research project at the Harvard Ukrainian Institute.47 As in the past, conferences were planned, demonstrations were organized, meetings were held in Ukrainian churches and assembly halls in Chicago and Winnipeg. But this time the impact would be different. Pierre Rigoulot, the French historian of communism, has written that ‘human knowledge doesn’t accumulate like bricks of a wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social, cultural and political framework.’48 For Ukraine that framework began to shift in the 1980s, and it would go on changing throughout the decade.

  In part, the change in Western perceptions came about thanks to events within Soviet Ukraine, though these were slow in coming. Stalin’s death in 1953 had not led to an official reassessment of the famine. In his momentous ‘secret speech’ in 1956, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the ‘cult of personality’ that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, including many party leaders, in 1937–8. But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization. His refusal to speak about it meant that the fate of the peasants remained hard to discern even for dissident intellectuals in the years that followed. In 1969, Roy Medvedev, a high-ranking party insider, mentioned collectivization in Let History Judge, the first ‘dissident’ history of Stalinism. Medvedev described ‘tens of thousands’ of peasants dying from starvation, but admitted he knew little.

  Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ opened some cracks in the system. Although historians were unable to touch difficult subjects, sometimes writers could. In 1962 a Soviet literary magazine published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first honest depiction of the Soviet Gulag. In 1968 another magazine published a short novel by a much lesser known Russian author, Vladimir Tendriakov, in which he wrote of ‘Ukrainian kulaks, expropriated and exiled from their homeland’, dying in a provincial town square: ‘One got used to seeing the dead there in the morning, and the hospital groom, Abram, would come along with his cart and pile the corpses in. Not everyone died. Many of them wandered along the dusty, sordid alleyways, dragging dropsied legs, elephantine and bloodlessly blue, and plucked at every passer-by, begging with dog-like eyes.’49

  In Ukraine itself the intellectual and literary rejection of Stalinism had a distinctly national flavour. In the less repressive atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ukrainian intellectuals – in Kyiv and Kharkiv and now in Lviv, the formerly Polish territory incorporated into Soviet Ukraine in 1939 – once again began to meet, to write, and to discuss the possibility of a national reawakening. Many had been educated in primary schools that still taught children in Ukrainian, and many had grown up hearing versions of the ‘alternative history’ of their country from their parents and grandparents. Some began to speak openly about the promotion of the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature and a Ukrainian history that differed from the history of Russia.

  These muted attempts to resurrect the shadow of a national identity alarmed Moscow. In 1961 seven Ukrainian academics were arrested and tried in Lviv, a
mong them Stepan Virun, who had helped write a pamphlet criticizing ‘unjustified repressions accompanied by accusations of nationalism and the annihilation of hundreds of Party and cultural personalities’.50 Another two dozen went on trial in Kyiv in 1966. Among other ‘crimes’, one was accused of possessing a book containing an ‘anti-Soviet’ poem; because it had been printed without the author’s name, police had failed to identify the work of Taras Shevchenko (whose works were, at the time, perfectly legal).51 Shelest, the Ukrainian Communist Party leader, presided over these arrests, though after he lost his position as First Secretary, in 1973, he too came under attack on the grounds that O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land ‘devotes far too much space to Ukraine’s past, its pre-October history, while failing to adequately glorify such epochal events as the triumph of the Great October, the struggle to build socialism’. The book was banned, and Shelest remained in disgrace until 1991.52

  But by the 1970s the USSR was no longer as cut off from the world as it had once been, and this time around the arrests found an echo. Ukrainian prisoners smuggled news of their cases back to Kyiv; dissidents in Kyiv learned how to contact Radio Liberty or the BBC. By 1971 so much material had leaked out of the USSR that it was possible to publish an edited collection of testimonies from Ukraine, including passionate statements from jailed Ukrainian national activists. In 1974 dissidents published an underground journal that contained several pages on collectivization and the 1932–3 famine. An English-language translation of the journal appeared too, under the title Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the U.S.S.R.53 Soviet analysts and observers in the West slowly became aware that Ukrainian dissidents had a separate and distinct set of grievances. When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 brought an abrupt end to the era of détente, a much broader swath of the Western public also refocused on the history of Soviet repression, including repression inside Ukraine.