Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  By the early 1980s the Ukrainian diaspora had also changed. Better established and now better funded – its members no longer poor refugees, but established members of the North American and European middle classes – diaspora organizations could afford to support more substantive projects, and to turn scattered material into books and films. The Canadian interview project evolved into a major documentary: Harvest of Despair won awards at film festivals and appeared on Canadian public television in the spring of 1985.

  In the United States the public broadcaster’s initial reluctance to show the film – it was feared to be too ‘right wing’ – became controversial. PBS finally broadcast the film in September 1986 as a special episode of ‘Firing Line’, the programme produced by the conservative columnist and National Review editor William Buckley, and followed the broadcast with a debate between Buckley, the historian Robert Conquest, and the journalists Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times and Christopher Hitchens, then of The Nation. Much of the debate had nothing to do with the famine itself. Hitchens brought up the topic of Ukrainian anti-semitism. Salisbury focused most of his remarks on Duranty.54 But a cascade of reviews and articles followed.

  An even greater wave of interest accompanied the publication of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, the most visible fruit of the Harvard documentation project, a few months later. The book (like this one) was written in collaboration with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Conquest did not have the archives available today. But he worked with Mace to pull together the existing sources: official Soviet documents, memoirs, oral testimony of survivors in the diaspora. Harvest of Sorrow finally appeared in 1986 and was reviewed in all major British and American newspapers and in many academic journals – unprecedented, at the time, for a book about Ukraine. Many reviewers expressed astonishment that they knew so little about such a deadly tragedy. In The Times Literary Supplement the Soviet scholar Geoffrey Hosking was shocked to discover ‘just how much material has accumulated over the years, most of it perfectly accessible in British libraries’: ‘almost unbelievably, Dr. Conquest’s book is the first historical study of what must count as one of the greatest man-made horrors in a century full of them’. Frank Sysyn put it simply: ‘No book dealing with Ukraine had ever received such wide notice.’55

  Not all of the notice was positive: a wide range of professional journals did not review Conquest’s book at all, while some North American historians, who saw Conquest both as the representative of a more traditional school of Soviet history as well as a member of the political right, denounced the book in no uncertain terms. J. Arch Getty complained in the London Review of Books that Conquest’s views had been promoted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and dismissed his sources as ‘partisan’ because they were linked to ‘Ukrainian émigrés in the West’. Getty concluded that ‘in today’s conservative political climate, with its “evil empire” discourse, I am sure the book will be very popular’. Then, as now, the historical argument about Ukraine was shaped by domestic American politics. Although there is no objective reason why the study of the famine should have been considered either ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’ at all, the politics of Cold War academia meant that any scholars who wrote about Soviet atrocities were easily pigeonholed.56

  Harvest of Sorrow would eventually find an echo inside Ukraine itself, although the authorities tried to block it. Just as the Harvard research project was launching in 1981, a delegation from the UN Mission of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic visited the university and asked the Ukrainian Research Institute to abandon the project. In exchange, the Institute was offered access to Soviet archives, a great rarity at the time. Harvard refused. After excerpts from Conquest’s book appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the first secretary to the Soviet Embassy wrote an angry letter to the editor: Yes, some had starved, he claimed, but they were the victims of drought and kulak sabotage.57 Once the book was published, it proved impossible to keep it away from Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1986 it was read aloud on Radio Liberty, the American-backed, Munich-based radio station, to its listeners inside the USSR.

  A more elaborate Soviet response arrived in 1987, with the publication of Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. The ostensible author, Douglas Tottle, was a Canadian labour activist. His book described the famine as a hoax invented and propagated by Ukrainian fascists and anti-Soviet groups in the West. Although Tottle acknowledged that poor weather and post-collectivization chaos caused food shortages in those years, he refused to concede that a malevolent state had played any role in spreading starvation. Not only did his book describe the Ukrainian famine as a ‘myth’, it argued that any accounts of it constituted, by definition, Nazi propaganda. Tottle’s book posited, among other things, that the Ukrainian diaspora were all ‘Nazis’; that the famine books and monographs constituted an anti-Soviet, Nazi propaganda drive that also had links to Western intelligence; that Harvard University had ‘long been a center of anti-communist research, studies and programs’ and was linked to the CIA; that Malcolm Muggeridge’s writing on the famine was tainted because the Nazis had made use of it; and that Muggeridge himself was a British agent.58

  The Institute of Party History in both Moscow and Kyiv contributed to Tottle’s manuscript; unsigned versions were sent back and forth between their offices and those of the two party Central Committees for corrections and commentary. Soviet diplomats followed the book’s publication and progress, and they promoted it where they could.59 The book eventually attracted a small following: in January 1988 the Village Voice published an article, ‘In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right’, which used Tottle’s work uncritically.60

  In retrospect, Tottle’s book is significant mostly as a harbinger of what was to come, nearly three decades later. Its central argument was built around the supposed link between Ukrainian ‘nationalism’ – defined as any discussion of Soviet repression in Ukraine, or any discussion of Ukrainian independence or sovereignty – and fascism, as well as American and British intelligence. Much later this same set of links – Ukraine, fascism, the CIA – would be used in the Russian information campaign against the Ukrainian independence and anti-corruption movement of 2014. In a very real sense the groundwork for that campaign was laid in 1987.

  Fraud, Famine and Fascism, like other Soviet apologies at the time, conceded that there had been some hunger in Ukraine and Russia in 1932–3, but it attributed mass starvation to the demands of ‘modernization’, kulak sabotage and alleged bad weather. As with all of the most sophisticated smear campaigns, elements of truth were combined with falsehood and exaggeration. Tottle’s book correctly pointed out that some of the photographs which were at that time widely identified with 1933 were actually taken during the famine of 1921. The author correctly identified some bad or misleading reporting from the 1930s as well. Finally, Tottle wrote, correctly, that some Ukrainians had collaborated with the Nazis, and that Nazis had, during their occupation of Ukraine, written and spoken a great deal about the famine.

  Although these facts neither diminished the tragedy of 1932–3 nor altered its causes, the ‘Nazi’ and ‘nationalist’ associations were intended, simply, to smear anyone who wrote about the famine at all. To some extent the strategy worked: this Soviet campaign against the Ukrainian memory of the famine, and against the historians of the famine, left a taint of uncertainty. Even Hitchens had felt obligated to mention Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in his discussion of Harvest of Despair, and part of the scholarly community would always approach Conquest’s book with caution.61 Without access to archives it was still impossible, in the 1980s, to describe the series of deliberate decisions that had led to the famine in the spring of 1933. It was also impossible to describe the aftermath, the cover-up, or the suppressed census of 1937 in detail.

  The research projects that led to both Harvest of Despair and Harvest of Sorrow nevertheless had a further echo. I
n 1985 the United States Congress set up a bipartisan commission to investigate the Ukrainian famine, appointing Mace as chief investigator. Its purpose was ‘to conduct a study of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine in order to expand the world’s knowledge of the famine and provide the American public with a better understanding of the Soviet system by revealing the Soviet role’ in it.62 The commission took three years to compile its report, a collection of oral and written testimony from survivors in the diaspora, which remains one of the largest ever published in English. When the commission presented its work in 1988, the conclusion was in direct contradiction to the Soviet line: ‘There is no doubt,’ the commission concluded, that ‘large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukraine SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932–33, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities’.

  In addition, the commission found that ‘Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage”, upon which all difficulties were blamed during the Famine, are false’; that the ‘Famine was not, as alleged, related to drought’; and that ‘attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available’. The commission concluded that ‘the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was caused by the extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population’ and not, in other words, by ‘bad weather’ or ‘kulak sabotage’.63

  The findings echoed those of Conquest. They also confirmed the authority of Mace, and provided a mountain of new material for other scholars to use in the years that followed. But by the time the commission made its final statement in 1988, the most important debates about the Ukrainian famine were finally beginning to take place not in Europe or North America, but inside Ukraine itself.

  On 26 April 1986 some odd, off-the-charts measurements began showing up on radiation-monitoring equipment in Scandinavia. Nuclear scientists across Europe, at first suspecting equipment malfunction, raised the alarm. But the numbers were not a fluke. Within a few days satellite photographs pinpointed the source of the radiation: a nuclear power plant in the city of Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine. Inquiries were made but the Soviet government offered no explanation or guidance. Five days after the explosion a May Day march went ahead in Kyiv, less than eighty miles away. Thousands of people walked through the streets of the Ukrainian capital, oblivious to the invisible radiation in the city’s air. The government was well aware of the danger. The Ukrainian Communist Party leader, Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, arrived late to the march, obviously distressed: the Soviet General Secretary had personally ordered him not to cancel the parade. ‘You will put your party card on the table,’ Mikhail Gorbachev had told Shcherbytskyi, ‘if you bungle the parade.’64

  Eighteen days after the accident, Gorbachev abruptly reversed his policy. He appeared on Soviet television and announced that the public had a right to know what had happened. Soviet camera crews went to the site, filmed interviews with doctors and local people, and explained what had happened. A bad decision had been made; a turbine test had gone wrong; a nuclear reactor had melted down. Soldiers from all over the Soviet Union had poured concrete over the smouldering remains. Everyone who lived within twenty miles of Chernobyl had abandoned their homes and farms, indefinitely. The death toll, officially listed as thirty-one, actually soared into the thousands, as the men who had shovelled concrete and flown helicopters over the reactor began to die of radiation sickness in other parts of the USSR.

  The psychological impact of the accident was no less profound. Chernobyl destroyed the myth of Soviet technical competence – one of the few that many still believed. If the USSR had promised its citizens that communism would guide them into the high-tech future, Chernobyl led them to question whether the USSR could be trusted at all. More importantly, Chernobyl reminded the USSR, and the world, of the stark consequences of Soviet secrecy, even causing Gorbachev himself to reconsider his party’s refusal to discuss its past as well as its present. Shaken by the accident, the Soviet leader launched the policy of glasnost. Literally translated as ‘openness’ or ‘transparency’, glasnost encouraged public officials and private individuals to reveal the truth about Soviet institutions and Soviet history, including the history of 1932–3. As a result of this decision, the web of lies woven to hide the famine – the manipulation of statistics, the destruction of death registries, the imprisonment of diarists – would finally unravel.65

  Inside Ukraine the accident stirred memories of past betrayals and historic catastrophes, leading Ukrainians to challenge their secretive state. On 5 June, just six weeks after the Chernobyl explosion, the poet Ivan Drach rose to speak at a meeting of the official Writers’ Union of Ukraine. His words had an unusually emotional edge: Drach’s son was one of the young soldiers who had been sent to the accident without proper protective clothing, and he was now suffering from radiation poisoning. Drach himself had been an advocate of nuclear power, on the grounds that it would help modernize Ukraine.66 Now he blamed the Soviet system both for the nuclear meltdown, the cloak of secrecy that had concealed the explosions, and the chaos that followed. Drach was the first person openly to compare Chernobyl to the famine. Speaking at length, he declared that a ‘nuclear lightning bolt had struck at the genotype of the nation’:

  Why has the young generation turned away from us? Because we didn’t learn to talk openly, to speak the truth about how we lived, and about how we are living now. We have got so used to falsehood … When we see Reagan as the head of a commission on the famine of 1933, I wonder, where is the Institute of History when it comes to the truth about 1933?67

  Party authorities later dismissed Drach’s words as an ‘emotional outburst’, and censored even the internal transcript of the speech. The reference to a ‘nuclear lightning bolt’ striking at the ‘genotype of the nation’ – a phrase that was widely misremembered as a direct reference to genocide – was replaced with ‘it struck painfully’.68

  But there was no turning back: Drach’s comments had struck a chord among those who heard them at the time, and those who repeated them afterwards. Events gathered pace; very quickly, glasnost became real. Gorbachev had intended the policy to reveal the workings of flawed Soviet institutions, with the hope that this would make them function better. Others interpreted glasnost more broadly. True stories and factual history began to appear in the Soviet press. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other chroniclers of the Gulag appeared for the first time in print. Gorbachev became the second Soviet leader, after Khrushchev, to speak openly about ‘blank spots’ in Soviet history. And unlike his predecessor, Gorbachev made his remarks on television:

  … the lack of proper democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness and repressions of the 1930s – to be blunt, crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth.69

  Equally quickly, glasnost began to seem insufficient to Ukrainians. In August 1987, Vyacheslav Chornovil, a leading dissident intellectual, wrote a thirty-page open letter to Gorbachev, accusing him of having launched a ‘superficial’ glasnost, one that preserved the ‘fictitious sovereignty’ of Ukraine and the other non-Russian republics but suppressed their languages, their memories, their true history. Chornovil provided his own list of ‘blank spots’ in Ukrainian history, naming the people and incidents still left out of official accounts: Hrushevsky, Skrypnyk, Khvylovyi, the mass arrests of intellectuals, the destruction of national culture, the suppression of the Ukrainian language and, of course, the ‘genocidal’ great famine of 1932–3.70

  Others followed suit. The Ukrainian chapter of Memorial, the Soviet society for the commemoration of Stalin’s victims, began openly collecting testimony and memoirs for the first time. In June 1988 another poet, Borys Oliinyk, stood up at the infamous Nineteenth Party Congress in Moscow – the most open and argumentative ever to take place in history, an
d the first to be televised live. He raised three issues: the status of the Ukrainian language, the dangers of nuclear power and the famine: ‘The reasons for the famine of 1933, which extinguished the lives of millions of Ukrainians, need to be made public, and those responsible for this tragedy [should] be identified by name.’71

  In that context the Ukrainian Communist Party prepared to respond to the U.S. Congressional Report. Finding itself in a quandary the party decided, as it had so often done in the final, stultifying years of the USSR, to create a committee. Shcherbytskyi tasked scholars at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Party History – the organizations behind the publication of Fraud, Famine and Fascism – with refuting the general accusations, and in particular with countering the conclusions drawn by the U.S. Congressional Report. Committee members were meant, once again, to produce an official denial. To ensure their success, the historians were given access to archival sources.72

  The result was unexpected. For many of the scholars the documents were a revelation. They contained precise accounts of the policy decisions, the grain confiscations, the protests of activists, the corpses on city streets, the tragedy of orphans, the terror and the cannibalism. There had been no fraud, the committee concluded. Nor was the ‘famine myth’ a fascist plot. The famine had been real, it had happened, and it could no longer be denied.

  The sixtieth anniversary of the famine, in the autumn of 1993, was like no other that had preceded it. Two years earlier, Ukraine had elected its first president and voted overwhelmingly for independence; the government’s subsequent refusal to sign a new union treaty had precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Ukraine, in one of its last memorable acts before giving up power, had passed a resolution blaming the 1932–3 famine on the ‘criminal course pursued by Stalin and his closest entourage’.73 Drach and Oliinyk had joined other intellectuals to found Rukh, an independent political party and the first legal manifestation of the national movement since the repressions of the early 1930s. For the first time in history, Ukraine was a sovereign state and acknowledged as such by most of the world.