Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  Kondrashin’s argument was partly correct. President Yushchenko is one of many prominent figures who sometimes cite casualty figures for the Holodomor that are too high. Although the Ukrainian scholarly community is now coalescing, with some exceptions, around a number just below 4 million deaths, it is still possible to hear numbers as high as 10 million deaths.17 Kondrashin may also have been right that Penza province – like Ukraine, a region famous for a civil war-era peasant rebellion that infuriated Lenin in 1918 – was a special target of the Soviet state.18

  Clearly there is a case for a close examination of the ‘special’ famine in Penza. There is an even more urgent case for a closer examination of the famine in Kazakhstan, where the very high mortality rate also indicates something much more sinister than negligence. But that should not negate the need for a recognition of the special circumstances of the famine in Ukraine. As this book has shown, the historical record includes decrees directed solely at Ukraine, such as the one closing the Ukrainian border, blacklisting dozens of Ukrainian collective farms and villages, and implicitly linking the grain collection failure to Ukrainization. The demographic record also shows that Ukraine had a higher death toll in those years than any other part of the Soviet Union.

  In a public debate with the Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky, Kondrashin himself wrote that Stalin saw the food crisis of 1932 as an ‘opportunity’:

  the famine of 1932–33 and the general economic crisis in Ukraine gave the Stalinist regime an excuse to adopt preventive measures against the Ukrainian national movement and also, in the distant perspective, its possible social base (the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the peasants).19

  Since this, more or less, is the argument of most mainstream Ukrainian historians – and of this book – it seems that the gap between the ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ scholarly interpretations of the famine is not as great as has sometimes been presented.

  Nevertheless, politicization of the famine debate has meant that the differences between the public Ukrainian and Russian understandings of the famine have become significant, both in the Russian-Ukrainian context and also within Ukraine itself. Yushchenko spoke often about the famine, and thought carefully about how to commemorate it. But his opponent and successor, Viktor Yanukovych – a ‘pro-Russian’ president, who had been elected with open Russian financial and political support – abruptly reversed that policy. Yanukovych removed references to the Holodomor from the presidential website, replaced the head of the National Memory Institute with an ex-communist historian, and stopped using the word ‘genocide’ to describe the famine.

  Yanukovych continued to speak of the famine as a ‘tragedy’ and even as an ‘Armageddon’, and he frequently used the word ‘Holodomor’, which implies an artificially created famine. He also continued to hold annual commemoration ceremonies and he did not stop or harass archival researchers, as President Vladimir Putin did in Russia at about the same time, although many had feared that he would.20 Nevertheless, the president’s change of tone and emphasis enraged his political opponents. In particular, his refusal to use the word ‘genocide’ was widely dismissed as a gesture of deference to Russia (it is notable that President Medvedev did finally visit a Holodomor memorial in Kyiv in 2010, during the Yanukovych presidency, perhaps as a ‘reward’ for the toned-down language). One group of citizens even tried to take Yanukovych to court for ‘genocide denial’.21 His disastrous presidency further discredited all of his policies, including his downplaying of the famine. He systematically undermined Ukrainian political institutions and engaged in corruption on an extraordinary scale. He fled the country in February 2014 after his police shot more than one hundred protesters dead in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, during an extended protest against his rule.

  Inevitably, Yanukovych’s disgrace left its mark on the public historical debate. Thanks to the politics that swirled around the word ‘genocide’, it became a kind of identity tag in Ukrainian politics, a term that could mark those who used it as partisans of one political party and those who did not as partisans of another. The problem worsened in the spring of 2014, when the Russian government produced a caricature ‘genocide’ argument to justify its own behaviour. During the Russian invasions of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists and Russian politicians both said that their illegal interventions were a ‘defence against genocide’ – meaning the ‘cultural genocide’ that ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ were supposedly carrying out against Russian speakers in Ukraine.

  As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensified, attacks on the history and historiography also worsened. In August 2015, Russian-backed separatists deliberately destroyed a monument to the victims of the famine in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne – the same place from which separatists had launched the BUK missile a year earlier that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight 17, killing everyone on board.22 Also in August 2015, Sputnik News, a Russian government propaganda website, published an article in English entitled ‘Holodomor Hoax’. The article presented views reminiscent of the old era of denial, called the famine ‘one of the 20th century’s most famous myths and vitriolic pieces of anti-Soviet Propaganda’ and even cited Douglas Tottle’s long-discredited book, Fraud, Famine and Fascism.23 The links that Tottle claimed between historians of the famine, alleged Ukrainian Nazis and alleged anti-Soviet forces in the West proved useful again to a Russia that once again sought to discredit Ukrainians as ‘Nazis’.24

  By 2016 the arguments had come full circle. The post-Soviet Russian state was once again in full denial: the Holodomor did not happen, and only ‘Nazis’ would claim that it did. All these arguments muddied the application of the word ‘genocide’ so successfully that to use it in any Russian or Ukrainian context has become wearyingly controversial. People feel exhausted by the debate – which was, perhaps, the point of the Russian assault on the historiography of the famine in the first place.

  But the genocide debate, so fierce a decade ago, has subsided for other reasons too. The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people. It was one of several such assaults in the twentieth century, not all of which fit into neat legal definitions. That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.

  Slowly, the debate is also becoming less important to Ukrainians. In truth, the legal arguments about the famine and genocide were often proxies for arguments about Ukraine, Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukraine’s right to exist. The discussion of the famine was a way of insisting on Ukraine’s right to a separate national history and to its own national memory. But now – after more than a quarter-century of independence, two street revolutions and a Russian invasion that was finally halted by a Ukrainian army – sovereignty is a fact, not a theory that requires historical justification, or indeed any justification at all.

  Because it was so devastating, because it was so thoroughly silenced, and because it had such a profound impact on the demography, psychology and politics of Ukraine, the Ukrainian famine continues to shape the thinking of Ukrainians and Russians, both about themselves and about one another, in ways both obvious and subtle. The generation that experienced and survived the famine carried the memories with them for ever. But even the children and grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators continue to be shaped by the tragedy.

  Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s – the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers – continues to matter. Even three generations later, many of contemporary Ukraine’s political problems, including widespread distrust of the state, weak national institutions and a corrupt political cl
ass, can be traced directly back to the loss of that first, post-revolutionary, patriotic elite. In 1933 the men and women who could have led the country, the people whom they would have influenced and who would have influenced others in turn, were abruptly removed from the scene. Those who replaced them were frightened into silence and obedience, taught to be wary, careful, cowed. In subsequent years the state became a thing to be feared, not admired; politicians and bureaucrats were never again seen as benign public servants. The political passivity in Ukraine, the tolerance of corruption, and the general wariness of state institutions, even democratic ones – all of these contemporary Ukrainian political pathologies date back to 1933.

  The Russification that followed the famine has also left its mark. Thanks to the USSR’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory, many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation with a separate history. Many Europeans are only dimly aware that Ukraine exists at all. Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties. That ambiguity can translate into cynicism and apathy. Those who do not care much or know much about their nation are not likely to work to make it a better place. Those who do not feel any sense of civic responsibility are less interested in stopping corruption.

  Ukraine’s contemporary linguistic battles date from the 1930s too. Paradoxically, Stalin reinforced the link between the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity when he tried to destroy them both. As a result linguistic controversies continue to reflect deeper arguments about identity even today. Ukraine is a thoroughly bilingual country – most people speak both Ukrainian and Russian – yet those who prefer one language or the other still regularly complain of discrimination. Riots broke out in 2012 when the Ukrainian state recognized Russian as an ‘official’ language in several provinces, meaning that it could be used in courts and government offices. In 2014 the post-Maidan Ukrainian government tried to repeal that law, and though the repeal was quickly reversed, Russian-backed ‘separatists’ used this proposed change to justify their invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s challenge, both to the language and to Ukrainian sovereignty, has also created a different kind of popular backlash. In 2005, less than half of Ukrainians used the language as their main form of communication. Ten years later two-thirds preferred Ukrainian to Russian.25 Thanks to Russian pressure, the nation is unifying behind the Ukrainian language as it has not done since the 1920s.

  If the study of the famine helps explain contemporary Ukraine, it also offers a guide to some of the attitudes of contemporary Russia, many of which form part of older patterns. From the time of the revolution, the Bolsheviks knew that they were a minority in Ukraine. To subjugate the majority, they used not only extreme violence, but also virulent and angry forms of propaganda. The Holodomor was preceded by a decade of what we would now call polarizing ‘hate speech’, language designating some people as ‘loyal’ Soviet citizens and others as ‘enemy’ kulaks, a privileged class that would have to be destroyed to make way for the people’s revolution. That ideological language justified the behaviour of the men and women who facilitated the famine, the people who confiscated food from starving families, the policemen who arrested and killed their fellow citizens. It also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification. Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were ‘enemies of the people’, dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.

  Eighty years later, the Russian FSB, the institutional successor of the KGB (itself the successor of the OGPU), continues to demonize its opponents using propaganda and disinformation. The nature and form of hate speech in Ukraine has changed, but the intentions of those who employ it have not. As in the past, the Kremlin uses language to set people against one another, to create first- and second-class citizens, to divide and distract. In 1932–3, Soviet state media described the OGPU troops working with local collaborators as ‘Soviet patriots’ fighting ‘Petliurists’, ‘kulaks’, ‘traitors’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In 2014, Russian state media described Russian special forces carrying out the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine as ‘separatist patriots’ fighting ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ from Kyiv. An extraordinary disinformation campaign, complete with fake stories – that Ukrainian nationalists had crucified a baby, for example – and fake photographs followed, not only inside Russia but on Russian state-sponsored media around the world. Although far more sophisticated than anything Stalin could have devised in an era before electronic media, the spirit of that disinformation campaign was much the same.

  Eighty years later, it is possible to hear the echo of Stalin’s fear of Ukraine – or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia – in the present too. Stalin spoke obsessively about loss of control in Ukraine, and about Polish or other foreign plots to subvert the country. He knew that Ukrainians were suspicious of centralized rule, that collectivization would be unpopular among peasants deeply attached to their land and their traditions, and that Ukrainian nationalism was a galvanizing force, capable of challenging Bolshevism and even destroying it. A sovereign Ukraine could thwart the Soviet project, not only by depriving the USSR of its grain, but also by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries, Ukrainian and Russian culture remained closely intertwined, the Russian and Ukrainian languages were closely related. If Ukraine rejected both the Soviet system and its ideology, that rejection could cast doubt upon the whole Soviet project. In 1991 that is precisely what it did.

  Russia’s current leadership is all too familiar with this history. As in 1932, when Stalin told Kaganovich that ‘losing’ Ukraine was his greatest worry, the current Russian government also believes that a sovereign, democratic, stable Ukraine, tied to the rest of Europe by links of culture and trade, is a threat to the interests of Russia’s leaders. After all, if Ukraine becomes too European – if it achieves anything resembling successful integration into the West – then Russians might ask, why not us? The Ukrainian street revolution of 2014 represented the Russian leadership’s worst nightmare: young people calling for the rule of law, denouncing corruption and waving European flags. Such a movement could have been contagious – and so it had to be stopped by whatever means possible. Today’s Russian government uses disinformation, corruption and military force to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty just as Soviet governments did in the past. As in 1932, the constant talk of ‘war’ and ‘enemies’ also remains useful to Russian leaders who cannot explain stagnant living standards or justify their own privileges, wealth and power.

  History offers hope as well as tragedy. In the end, Ukraine was not destroyed. The Ukrainian language did not disappear. The desire for independence did not disappear either – and neither did the desire for democracy, or for a more just society, or for a Ukrainian state that truly represented Ukrainians. When it became possible, Ukrainians expressed these desires. When they were allowed to do so, in 1991, they voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine, as the national anthem proclaims, did not die.

  In the end, Stalin failed too. A generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians was murdered in the 1930s, but their legacy lived on. The national aspiration, linked, as in the past, to the aspiration for freedom, was revived in the 1960s; it continued underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it became open again in the 1990s. A new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists reappeared in the 2000s.

  The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending. But the history of Ukraine is not a tragedy. Millions of people were murdered, but the nation remains on the map. Memory was suppressed, but Ukrainians today discuss and debate their past. Census records were destroyed, but today the archives are accessible.

  The famine and its aftermath left a terrible mark. But although the wounds are still there, millions of Ukrainians are, for the first time since 1933, finally trying to heal them. As a nation, Ukrainians know what happened in the twentieth century, and
that knowledge can help shape their future.

  1. ‘From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes independent, subject to no one, a Free, Sovereign State of the Ukrainian People.’ The Central Rada declares independence, Fourth Universal, 9 January 1918.

  NATIONAL REVIVAL

  2. Heorhiy Narbut designed the Ukrainian coat-of-arms, stamps and banknotes as well as this cover of the cultural journal Nashe Mynule, which means ‘Our Past’.

  3. An independence rally in 1917 on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street – also the site of the Maidan demonstrations in 2014.

  4-5. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of the leading figures in the Ukrainian national revival, and the cover of his landmark History of Ukraine, published in 1917.

  NATIONALISTS AND ANARCHISTS

  6. Symon Petliura (centre right), commander of the Ukrainian Directory, with Polish leader Józef Piłsudski (centre left), Stanislaviv, 1920. Memories of this Ukrainian–Polish alliance haunted Stalin for many years.

  7. Nestor Makhno, whose anarchist Black Army fought Ukrainian, Bolshevik and White armies alike.