Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

   70. Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, 224.

   71. Ibid., 260 and 308.

   72. Gennadii Bordyugov, ‘The Policy and Regime of Extraordinary Measures in Russia under Lenin and Stalin’, in Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 4 (June 1995), 617.

   73. Vasyl’ev, Politychne kerivnytstvo URSR i SRSR, 64–9. Vasyl’ev also underlines the significance of Tsaritsyn for Stalin’s later policies.

   74. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 55–7.

   75. Ibid., 57–9.

   76. Deutscher, Stalin, 204.

   77. Pavlo Khrystiuk, Ukraïns’ka Revoliutsiia: zamitky i materialy do istoriï Ukraïnskoï revoliutsiï, 1917–1920, vol. 2 (Vienna: n.p., 1921), 136.

   78. V. M. Lytvyn et al., Istoriia ukraïns’koho selianstva: Narysy v 2-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 2006), 57.

   79. O. S. Rubl’ov and O. P. Reient, Ukraïns’ki vyzvol’ni zmahannia, 1917–1921 rr., vol. 10 (Kyiv: Al’ternatyvy, 1999), 199–205.

   80. Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine, 235.

   81. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 131–2.

   82. Volodymyr Serhiichuk et al., Ukraïns’kyi khlib na eksport, 1932–1933 (Kyiv: PP Serhiichuk M.I., 2006), 3.

   83. Shlikhter, ‘Bor’ba za khleb na Ukraine’, 135.

   84. Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921), 58.

   85. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols., trans. Max Eastman (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008), 229.

   86. Vil’iam Noll (William Noll), Transformatsiia hromadians’koho suspil’stva: Usna istoriia ukraïns’koï selans’koï kul’tury, 1920–30 rokiv (Kyiv: Rodovid, 1999), 115.

   87. Ibid.

   88. James Mace, ‘The Komitety Nezamozhnykh Selyan and the Structure of Soviet Rule in the Ukrainian Countryside, 1920–1933’, Soviet Studies 35, no. 4 (October 1983), 487–503.

   89. Iosyp Nyzhnyk, ‘Poka Reserv’, COIM Al-1726/2.

   90. Shlikhter, ‘Bor’ba za khleb na Ukraine’, 98.

   91. Graziosi, Bol’sheviki i krest’iane, 135.

   92. Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, 309–10.

   93. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 187.

   94. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 125–7; Rubl’ov and Reient, Ukraïns’ki vyzvol’ni zmahannia, 199–205.

   95. Shlikhter, ‘Bor’ba za khleb na Ukraine’, 135.

   96. Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 175–80.

   97. Ibid., 185.

   98. Holquist, ‘ “Conduct Merciless Mass Terror”: Decossackization on the Don, 1919’, Cahiers du monde russe 38, nos. 1–2 (January–June 1997), 127–62.

   99. Shlikhter, ‘Bor’ba za khleb na Ukraine’, 135.

  2. REBELLION, 1919

    1. Quoted in Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 299–300.

    2. Bulgakov, The White Guard, 301.

    3. N. Sukhogorskaya, ‘Gulyai-Polye in 1918’, Nestor Makhno Archive, accessed 2016, http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/personal/personal2.htm.

    4. Leon Trotsky, ‘Report to the Plenum of the Kharkov Soviet of Workers’, Cossacks’ and Peasants’ Deputies, 14 June 1919’, in How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, vol. 2 (London: New Park Publications, 1979), 278.

    5. Peter Arshinov, The History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918–1921), trans. Fredy and Lorraine Perlman (London: Freedom Press, 1974), 87–8.

    6. Ibid., 273, quoting the pamphlet, ‘Comrades in the Red Army!’, from June 1920.

    7. Stephen Velychenko, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 177, citing TsDAHOU 57/2/398/12.

    8. Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine, 59.

    9. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 149–51.

   10. M. Kubanin, Makhnovshchina: Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v stepnoi Ukraine v gody grazhdanskoi voiny (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 65–6; see also Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 151–2.

   11. Kubanin, Makhnovshchina, 68–9.

   12. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, 299–300.

   13. Graziosi, Bol’sheviki i krest’iane, 148.

   14. Shlikhter, ‘Bor’ba za khleb na Ukraine’, 106.

   15. Rubl’ov and Reient, Ukraïns’ki vyzvol’ni zmahannia, 199–210; Graziosi, Stalinism, Collectivization and the Great Famine, 21–4.

   16. Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 137.

   17. Heinrich Epp, ‘The Day the World Ended: December 7, 1919, Steinbach, Russia’, trans. D. F. Plett, Preservings: Newsletter of the Hanover Steinbach Historical Society, no. 8, part 2 (June 1996), 5–7. Available at http://www.plettfoundation.org/preservings/past-issues, accessed 2017.

   18. Michael Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1976), 187; Rubl’ov and Reint, Ukraïns’ki vyzvol’ni zmahannia, 211–12.

   19. Graziosi, Bol’sheviki i krest’iane, 147.

   20. John Ernest Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies, Being a Description of the Cossack Counter-Revolution in South Russia, 1918–1920 (London: Temple Bar, 1932), 54–5.

   21. Rubl’ov and Reient, Ukraïns’ki vyzvol’ni zmahannia, 214–18.

   22. Epp, ‘The Day the World Ended’, 5–7.

   23. Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies, 54–5.

   24. Nizhnik, ‘Poka Reserv’.

   25. Ibid.

   26. Graziosi, Stalinism, Collectivization and the Great Famine, 24.

   27. Volodymyr Serhііchuk et al., Pohromy v Ukraïni 1914–1920: vid shtuchnykh stereotypiv do hirkoï pravdy, prykhovuvanoï v radians’kykh arkhivakh (Kyiv: Vyd-vo im. Oleny Telihy, 1998), 62–3, citing TsDIAUK 1439/1/1552/226.

   28. Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016), 530.

   29. Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 225.

   30. Serhiichuk, Pohromy v Ukraïni, 20–1.

   31. Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies, 54–5.

   32. Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 157.

   33. Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine, 37.

   34. Ibid., 49; for an analysis of the attitudes of the Central Rada and the Directorate towards the Jews, see T. P. Makarenko, ‘Evreis’ki pohromy v dobu Ukraïns’koï Revoliutsiï’, Naukovi Pratsi Istorychnoho fakul’tetu Zaporiz’koho Natsional’noho Universytetu XXXV (2013), 116–19.

   35. Serhiichuk, Pohromy v Ukraïni, 26–30; Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 117.

   36. Nahum Gergel, ‘The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1918–1921’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 6 (1951), 245.

   37. Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine, 235–6.

   38. Sergei Ivanovich Gusev-Orenburgskii, Kniga o Evreiskikh pogromakh na Ukraine v 1919 g. (Petrograd: Z. I. Grzhebina, 1920), 118–21.

   39. Ibid., 119–20.

   40. Serhiichuk, Pohromy v Ukraïni, 118–19.

   41. Le Comité Commémoratif Simon Petliura, Documents sur les Pogroms en Ukraine et l’assassinat de Simon Petliura à Paris (Paris: Librairie du Trident, 1927); Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 157.

   42. Jan Bor
kowski, ed., Rok 1920: Wojna Polsko-Radziecka we wspomnieniach i innych dokumentach (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1990), 128–9.

   43. Jozef Piłsudski and Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevskii, Year 1920 and its Climax: Battle of Warsaw During the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1920 (London: Piłsudski Institute of London, 1972), 13.

   44. For a full account, see Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe (London: Harper Perennial, 2009).

   45. Borys, The Sovietization of Soviet Ukraine, 293–5.

   46. Graziosi, Stalinism, Collectivization and the Great Famine, 22–3.

   47. The words of Grigorii Petrovskii, quoted in Terry Martin’s Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 78.

  3. FAMINE AND TRUCE: THE 1920S

    1. ‘Letter to Molotov’, 19 March 1922, in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 152–3.

    2. Quoted in George Luckyj, ‘Mykola Khvylovy, a Defiant Ukrainian Communist’, in Katherine Bliss Eaton, ed., Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Literary, Theater, and Film Arts in the 1930s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 170.

    3. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. iak henotsyd: trudnoshchi usvidomlennia (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 2008), 51.

    4. Vladyslav Verstiuk, ‘Novyi etap revoliutsiino-viis’kovoho protyborstva v Ukraïni’, in Volodymyr Lytvyn, ed., Ukraïna: Politychna Istoria XX-pochatok-XXI stolitia (Kyiv: Parlaments’ke vydavnytstvo, 2007), 392–430; Iurii Shapoval, ‘Vsevolod Balickij, bourreau et victime’, Cahiers du monde russe, vol. 44, nos. 2–3 (2003), 375.

    5. Lyudmyla Hrynevych, Holod 1928–1929 rr. v radians’kii Ukraïni (Kyiv: Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2013), 307–8, citing TsDAVOU 2/2/40 (1921), 33, and RDVA 40442/3/2 (1920), 16, 25.

    6. H. H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919–1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 497.

    7. Andrea Graziosi, A New, Peculiar State: Explorations in Soviet History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 75.

    8. Stalin, Works, vol. 4, 311.

    9. S. V. Iarov, ‘Krest’ianskie volneniia na Severo-Zapade Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1919 gg.’, in V. P. Danilov and T. Shanin, eds., Krest’ianovedenie. Teoriia. Istoriia. Sovremennost’, Ezhegodnik 1996 (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 1996), 134–59.

   10. Both quotes in Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 67.

   11. Graziosi, A New, Peculiar State, 78, citing V. Danilov and T. Shanin, eds., Krest’ianskoe vosstanie v Tambovskoi gubernii v 1919–1921 gg. Antonovshchina: Dokumenty i materialy (Tambov: Aspekt Press, 1994), 52–5.

   12. DAZhO (Zhytomyr) F. R-1520/4828 (1931), 9–16.

   13. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 390.

   14. TsDAVOU 337/1/8085 (1929), 26.

   15. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 497.

   16. Vitalii Petrovych Kyrylenko, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv u pivdennii Ukraïni’ (dissertation, Mykolaivs’kyi Natsional’nyi Universytet imeni V. O. Sukhomlyns’koho, 2015), 158–60.

   17. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 411.

   18. Ibid., 412.

   19. R. G. Tukudzh’ian, T. V. Pankova-Kozochkina, ‘Golod 1921–1922 gg. i 1932–1933 gg. na iuge Rossii: sravnitel’no-istoricheskii analiz’, in N. I. Bondar and O. V. Matveev, eds., Istoricheskaia pamiat’ naseleniia juga Rossii o golode 1932–33: materialy nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Krasnodar: Isd-vo Traditsiia, 2009), 84.

   20. TsDAVOU 337/1/8085 (1929), 27–8.

   21. T. O. Hryhorenko, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv na Cherkashchyni’, in Holod v Ukraïni u pershii polovyni XX stolittia: prychyny ta naslidky (1921–1923, 1932–1933, 1946–1947) Materialy mizhnarodnoï naukovoï konferentsiï (Kyiv: 20–21 November 2013), 38–9; Kyrylenko, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv u pivdennii Ukraïni’, 101.

   22. TsDAVOU 337/1/8085 (1929), 38–40.

   23. Donald S. Day, ‘Woman Reveals Vast Horror of Russian Famine’, Chicago Tribune (15 August 1921), 5.

   24. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand, 55.

   25. Ibid., 59.

   26. In the North Caucasus, for example, see Tukudzh’ian, Pankova-Kozochkina, ‘Golod 1921–1922 gg. i 1932–1933 gg. na iuge Rossii’, 85.

   27. This is the observation of Bertrand Patenaude in The Big Show in Bololand, 27.

   28. TsDAHOU 1/6/29 (1922), 30.

   29. Ibid., 27–30.

   30. Ibid., 39–41.

   31. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 416.

   32. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand, 55.

   33. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 417.

   34. Ibid., 418–19.

   35. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 535.

   36. In fact, there were two Ukrainian famine committees. The first, set up in the spring of 1921, contained several prominent non-Bolshevik politicians. It was quickly dissolved and replaced with a more reliably pro-Soviet famine committee. See O. M. Movchan, ‘Komisii ta komitety dopomohy holuduiuchym v USRR’, in Entsyklopediia istoriï Ukraïny, V. A. Smolii et al., eds., vol. 4 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 2003–13), 471–3.

   37. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi and O. M. Movchan, Nevidomi storinky holodu 1921–1923 rr. v Ukraïni (Kyiv: Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 1993), 26.

   38. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 45, 302–3.

   39. TsDAHOU 1/20/397 (1929), 1–2.

   40. G. V. Zhurbelyuk, ‘Metodyka istoryko-pravovykh doslidzhen problemy holodu 1921–23 rr. v Ukraïni: Rozvinchannia Mifiv’, in Hryhorenko, Holod v Ukraïni u pershii polovyni XX stolittia, 53.

   41. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 263.

   42. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand, 96–9; Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 250.

   43. TsDAHOU 1/6/29/ (1929), 56.

   44. O. I. Syrota, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv v Ukraïni ta ioho ruinivni naslidky dlia ukraïns’koho narodu’, in Holod v Ukraïni u pershii polovyni XX stolittia: prychyny ta naslidky (1921–1923, 1932–1933, 1946–1947), 146.

   45. TsDAHOU 1/6/29 (1929), 6; see also Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand, 101.

   46. The American Joint Distribution Committee online archives, Records of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee of the Years 1921–1932, Folder 76, file NY_AR2132_00855, Minutes of the Meeting of the European Executive Council, 12 November 1921.

   47. Ibid., Folder 49, File NY_AR2132_04249, Letter on behalf of J. H. Cohen.

   48. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 271–5.

   49. Ibid., 266.

   50. See, for example, Zhurbeliuk, ‘Metodyka istoryko-pravovykh doslidzhen’ problemy holodu 1921–1923 rr. v Ukraïni’, 51–8; also Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. iak henotsyd, 140–70.

   51. Kyrylenko, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv u pivdennii Ukraïni’, 118–29.

   52. TsDAHOU 1/6/29 (1929), 36–9.

   53. Ibid., 16–17.

   54. Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin, 152–3.

   55. Ibid.

   56. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 411.

   57. Kyrylenko, ‘Holod 1921–1923 rokiv u pivdennii Ukraïni’, 130–9.

   58. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand, 197–8.

   59. Iurii Mytsyk et al., eds., Ukraïns’kyi holokost 1932–1933: svidchennia tykh, khto vyzhyv, vol. 6 (Kyiv: Kyievo-Mohylians’ka Akademiia, 2008), 599.

   60. V. A. Smolii et al., ‘Ukraïnizatsiia’ 1920–1930-kh rokiv: peredumovy, zdobutky, uroky (Kyiv: Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2003), 15.

   61. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 369.

   62. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 33, 62.

   63. Martin, The Affirmative A
ction Empire, 78–9.

   64. Hennadii Yefimenko, ‘Bolshevik Language Policy as a Reflection of the Ideas and Practice of Communist Construction, 1919–1933’, The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective, eds. Michael S. Flier and Andrea Graziosi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017), 173.

   65. Yefimenko, ‘Bolshevik Language Policy’, 170.

   66. Ibid.

   67. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists, 45–8.

   68. Borys, The Sovietization of Soviet Ukraine, 249–50.

   69. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 86.

   70. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 197–8.

   71. Smolii, ‘Ukraïnizatsiia’ 1920–1930-kh rokiv, 28, citing Desiatyi s’ezd RKP(b): Stenog. Ochtet. – M. (1963), 202–3.

   72. The Borotbysty, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, joined the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, the CP(B)U. The remaining Social Democrats joined another group, the Communist Party, which existed until 1924.

   73. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 89, citing A. I. Bychkova et al., eds., Kulturne budivnytstvo v Ukraïnskii RSR, cherven 1941–1950: zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv, vol. 1 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1989), 229–32, 242–7.

   74. Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 225.

   75. Ibid., 216–31; Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, 208–12.

   76. Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 234; Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, 208–12.

   77. Iurii I. Shapoval, ‘The Mechanisms of the Informational Activity of the GPU-NKVD’, Cahiers du monde russe 22 (April–December 2001), 207–30.

   78. Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 266.

   79. Ibid., 233; Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, 208–12.

   80. Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, 212.

   81. Natella Voiskounski, ‘A Renaissance Assassinated’, Galeriya 2 (2012) (35), accessed 23 April 2017, http://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/articles/2-2012-35/renaissance-assassinated.

   82. George S. Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 47–9.

   83. Ibid., 46.

   84. Olga Bertelsen, ‘The House of Writers in Ukraine, the 1930s: Conceived, Lived, Perceived’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2302 (2013), 13–14.