Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

   85. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 131–6.

   86. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 213, 281.

   87. Ibid., 282–5.

   88. Matthew Pauly, Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 66–7.

   89. Smolii et al., ‘Ukraïnizatsiia’ 1920–1930-kh rokiv, 7–8.

   90. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 4.

   91. Petro G. Grigorenko, Memoirs, trans. Thomas R. Whitney (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 14.

   92. Ibid., 15–16.

   93. Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 108–9.

   94. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 60–1.

   95. Ibid., 259–63.

   96. Ibid., 146.

   97. Ibid., 229–30.

   98. The sources for this section are Shapoval, ‘Vsevolod Balickij, bourreau et victime’, and Iurii Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko and Vadym Zolotar’ov, ChK-GPU-NKVD v Ukraïni: osoby, fakty, dokumenty (Kyiv: Abrys, 1997), 25–43.

   99. Shapoval, ‘Vsevolod Balickij, bourreau et victime’, 373.

  100. Ibid., 376.

  101. In fact, GPU (the State Political Directorate) was the name for the secret police forces starting from February 1922 when it was part of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. From November 1923 it became the OGPU (the Joint, or All-Union, State Political Directorate) under the direct control of the Council of People’s Commissars. But the two names were and still are often used interchangeably to describe the police in this era, before they were again renamed in 1934. For purposes of simplicity and ease of understanding, this book will simply use OGPU.

  4. THE DOUBLE CRISIS, 1927–9

    1. Quoted in Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii and Denis Kozlov, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, trans. Steven Shabad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 22–3.

    2. Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941, trans. Kate Transchel and Greta Bucher (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 16.

    3. TsDAVOU 337/1/8085 (1929), 61–76.

    4. E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, A History of Soviet Russia: Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1978), 943, table 7; Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 662.

    5. TsA FSB RF 2/5/386 (1928), 1–3, 15–45, reproduced in Viola et al., eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 34–44.

    6. Paul Scheffer, Seven Years in Soviet Russia, trans. Arthur Livingstone (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 64.

    7. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 97.

    8. TsA FSB RF 66/1/174 (1927), 162, in Viola et al., eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 22–3.

    9. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 48–9, citing Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Sceptre, 1991), 126, and Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, As-tu vu Crémet? (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

   10. Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 45–8.

   11. James Harris, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 106–7.

   12. Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 75.

   13. Liudmyla Hrynevych, ‘The Price of Stalin’s “Revolution from Above”: Anticipation of War among the Ukrainian Peasantry’, trans. Marta Olynyk, Key Articles on the Holodomor Translated from Ukrainian into English, Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, http://holodomor.ca/translated-articles-on-the-holodomor.

   14. TsA FSB RF 2/6/567 (1927), 1–5, in Viola et al., eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 32.

   15. RGASPI, 17/3/666 (1927), 10–12, in ibid., 32–4.

   16. RTsKhIDNI, 17/3/667 (1928), 10–12, reproduced in V. Danilov, R. Manning and L. Viola, eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–193, vol. 1 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia polit. Entsiklopediia, 1999), 136–7.

   17. V. M. Lytvyn et al., Ekonomichna istoriia Ukraïny: Istoryko-ekonomichne doslidzhennia, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2011), 223–4.

   18. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 5 (1928), 195–6, in Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 147.

   19. TsA FSB RF 2/6/53 (1928), 87–94, in A. Berelovich and V. Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 1918–1939: Dokumenty i materialy v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: ROSSP’EN, 1998–2005), 655–6.

   20. TsA FSB RF 2/6/567 (1928), 109–13, in ibid., vol. 2, 653–4.

   21. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 5 (1928), 201–2, in Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 156–7.

   22. TsA FSB RF 2/6/596 (1928), 150–1, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK—OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, 661–3.

   23. Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 60.

   24. Ibid., 159.

   25. Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, trans. Stephen Garry (London: W. & J. Mackay, 1977), 23.

   26. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 672, citing Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 6, 203–5, and RGASPI, 558/11/118, 23–6.

   27. R. W. Davies, The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 71.

   28. Harris, The Great Fear, 86.

   29. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, 103.

   30. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 7 (1928), 179, in Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 158.

   31. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 41.

   32. RTsKhIDNI 17/2/375 chast’ II (1928), 50 ob.–66 ob., in Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 272–355, esp. 319–54.

   33. V. P. Danilov, ‘Bukharin and the Countryside’, in A. Kemp-Welch, ed., The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 76.

   34. This is Martin’s point in The Affirmative Action Empire, 23, 75–124.

   35. Mykola Khvylovyi, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926, trans. and ed. Myroslav Shkandrij (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 222; also quoted in Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 215.

   36. Bertelsen, ‘The House of Writers in Ukraine’, 4.

   37. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 288; TsA FSB RF 2/7/525 (1928), 126–7, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, 817.

   38. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 212, 215–16, 224.

   39. Stalin, Works, vol. 8, 162.

   40. Shapoval, ‘Vsevolod Balickij, bourreau et victime’, 379–80, 392.

   41. Vasyl’ Danylenko, ed., Ukraïns’ka intelihentsiia i vlada: zvedennia sektrenoho viddilu DPU USRR 1927–1929 rr. (Kyiv: Tempora, 2012), 25–8.

   42. Iurii Shapoval, ‘Zhyttia ta smert’ Mykoly Khvyl’ovoho: u svitli rozsekrechenykh dokumentiv HPU’, in Z arkhiviv VUChK, HPU, NKVD, KHB 2, nos. 30/31 (2008): 316–17.

   43. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 224.

   44. Ibid., 225.

   45. Shapoval, ‘Vsevolod Balickij, bourreau et victime’, 383, citing HDA SBU, Kiev, FPI, 1.2.

   46. Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 262–3.

   47. Shapoval, �
�The Mechanisms of the Informational Activity of the GPU-NKVD’, 207–8.

   48. Danylenko, Ukraïns’ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 61, 63, 68–9, 97.

   49. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 114.

   50. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 115.

   51. Ibid., 116–17.

   52. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power has a very good summary of the Shakhty show trial, 687–704.

   53. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 2002), 113.

   54. All the victims were rehabilitated in 1989 after a court concluded that the case had been fabricated. See Iurii Shapoval, ‘The Case of the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine”: A Prelude to the Holodomor’, Holodomor Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer–Autumn 2010), 163; on the first ‘SVU’ see Alexander Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 10–11.

   55. Olga Bertelsen and Myroslav Shkandrij, ‘The Secret Police and the Campaign against Galicians in Soviet Ukraine, 1929–1934’, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 42, no. 1 (2014), 37–62.

   56. Shapoval, ‘The Case of the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” ’, 158–60.

   57. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 275.

   58. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 261–3.

   59. HDA SBU 13/370/9/142–55, reproduced in Danylenko, Ukraïns’ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 470–1.

   60. I. M. Prelovs’ka, Dzherela z istoriï Ukraïns’koi Aftokefal’noï Pravoslavnoï Tserkvy, 1921–1930 – Ukraïns’koï Pravoslavnoï Tserkvy, 1930–1939 (Kyiv: Instytut Ukraïns’koï Arkheohrafiï ta Dzhereloznavstva im. M. C. Hrushevs’koho, 2013), 498–9.

   61. Shapoval, ‘The Case of the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” ’, 157–8.

   62. Ibid., 172.

   63. Ibid., 166–7.

   64. Kost Turkalo, ‘The SVU Trial’, in S. O. Pidhainy, ed., The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, vol. 1 (Toronto: Basilian Press, 1953), 309–14.

   65. Myroslav Shkandrij and Olga Bertelsen, ‘The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine, 1929–1934’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 55, nos. 3/4 (September–December 2013), 420.

   66. A. H. Korolev, ‘Institut nauchnoi i prakticheskoi veterinarii narkomzema USSR v gody repressii’, Istoriia nauky i biohrafistyka: Elektronne naukove fakhove vydannia – mizhvidomchyi tematychnyi zbirnyk: Natsional’na Akademiia Ahrarnykh Nauk, Natsional’na Naukova Sil’s’kohospodars’ka Biblioteka 3 (2007), http://inb.dnsgb.com.ua.

   67. Shkandrij and Bertelsen, ‘The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine’, 437–47.

   68. Stalin, ‘Concerning the National Question in Yugoslavia’, speech delivered in the Yugoslav Commission of the ECCI, 30 March 1925, in Stalin, Works, vol. 7, 71–2.

   69. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 147.

   70. Andrea Graziosi, ‘Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales (à travers les rapports du GPU d’Ukraine de février–mars 1930)’, Cahiers du monde russe 35, no. 3 (July–September 1994), 439–40.

   71. HDA SBU 13/370/1 (1927), 15–26, in Danylenko, Ukraïns’ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 46.

   72. HDA SBU 13/370/2 (1927), 106–18, in ibid., 119–20.

   73. HDA SBU 13/370/1 (1927), 107–21, in ibid., 78–9.

   74. HDA SBU 13/370/4 (1927), 55–74, in ibid., 213–14.

   75. Hrynevych, ‘The Price of Stalin’s “Revolution from Above” ’, 4.

   76. Ibid., 4–5.

   77. TsA FSB RF 2/6/25 (1928), 1–66, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, p. 816; see also all of vol. 2, 780–817.

   78. Quoted in V. M. Danylenko et al., eds., Pavlohrads’ke povstannia, 1930: dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: Ukraïns’kyi Pys’mennyk, 2009), 14–15.

   79. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 99.

   80. TsA FSB RF 2/6/597 (1928), 22–7, in Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 195–200.

   81. Hrynevych, Holod 1928–1929 rr. u radians’kii Ukraïni, 238–9.

   82. Ibid., 90, 232–6, 238–40.

   83. TsA FSB RF 2/6/597 (1928), 6–20, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, 666.

   84. Hrynevych, ‘The Price of Stalin’s “Revolution from Above” ’, 5.

   85. Ibid., 6.

   86. Shkandrij and Bertelsen, ‘The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine’, 425.

   87. RTsKhIDNI 82/2/136 (1928), 1–55, in Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 172–92.

   88. TsA FSB RF 2/6/599 (1928), 292–9, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, 723–31.

   89. Quoted in Danylenko, Pavlohrads’ke povstannia, 14–15.

   90. Ibid., 318.

   91. TsA FSB RF 2/6/597 (1928), 126–35, in Berelovich and Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, vol. 2, 672–82.

  5. COLLECTIVIZATION: REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, 1930

    1. P. V., ‘Collective Farming’, in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 213.

    2. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 283.

    3. Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 1–2. Dolot is a pseudonym: the writer’s real name was Simon Starow.

    4. ‘Schedule A, vol. 37, Case 622/(NY)1719 (interviewer W. T., type A4). Female, 53, Ukrainian, Kolkhoznik’, July 1951, Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Slavic Division, Widener Library, Harvard University, 52.

    5. ‘Schedule B, vol. 7, Case 67 (interviewer J. R.)’, Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Slavic Division, Widener Library, Harvard University, 12.

    6. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia radians’koi Ukraïny v dobu NEPu (1921–1928 rr.) kolektyvna monohrafiia v 2-kh chastynakh, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2010), 183.

    7. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 672, citing Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 6, 203–5, and RGASPI, 558/11/118, 23–6.

    8. There were three basic types of collective farm (kolkhoz): the commune, the artel and the association for joint cultivation of land (TOZ or SOZ). In addition, there were state-owned farms (sovkhoz). R. W. Davies, The Soviet Collective Farm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 68.

    9. For a general description of collective farm life, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 128–51.

   10. Stalin, ‘God velikogo pereloma’, Pravda (7 November 1929), in Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 1, 741–2.

   11. RtsKhIDNI 17/2/441, vols. 1 and 2; summarized in Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 112–14; and Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24–6.

   12. Dolot, Execution by Hunger, 6.

   13. Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 31, 62.

   14. Ibid., 64.

   15. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, trans. Anthony Austin (New York: Lippincott, 1977), 11.

   16. Hindus, Red Bread, 1.

   17. Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, 84.

   18. Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 76.

   19. Antonina Solovieva, ‘Sent by the Komsomol’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Pr
inceton University Press, 2000), 237.

   20. Tracy McDonald, ‘A Peasant Rebellion in Stalin’s Russia: The Pitelinskii Uprising, Riazan 1930’, Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (Fall 2001), 125–46.

   21. Noll, Transformatsiia hromadians’koho suspil’stva, 180.

   22. ‘Case History LH38: Oleksandr Honcharenko, Cherkasy oblast’’, in U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–1933, Report to Congress/Commission on the Ukraine Famine, adopted by the Commission 19 April 1988, submitted to Congress 22 April 1988, James E. Mace, ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1988), 317.

   23. TsA FSB RF 2/9/21 (1930), 393–4, in Lynne Viola and V. P. Danilov, eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, trans. Steven Shabad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 219.

   24. Solovieva, ‘Sent by the Komsomol’, in Fitzpatrick and Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution, 236–7.

   25. Pasha Angelina, ‘The Most Important Thing’, in Fitzpatrick and Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution, 310.

   26. RTsKhIDNI 85/1/118 (1930), 1–13, reproduced in Graziosi, ‘Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales’, 476.

   27. DAZhO (Zhytomyr) 1520/4828 (1931), 9–16.

   28. Graziosi, ‘Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales’, 450. This use of ‘criminal elements’ not only had precedents in 1919–20, it remained part of the Soviet tactical arsenal: the NKVD would rely on criminal networks when creating new secret police forces in occupied Central Europe after 1945.

   29. Ibid., 449, citing ‘Sergo Ordzhonikidze, “Stenogramma” (Sténogramme) du rapport au noyau militant restraint (aktiv) du parti du district de Herson, 24 mars 1930’; and R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Agriculture 1929–30 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 225.

   30. Noll, Transformatsiia hromadians’koho suspil’stva, 126.

   31. TsA FSB RF 2/8/344 (1930), 344–56, in Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 2, 336–42.

   32. Testimony of Stepanyda Melentiïivna Khyria, in Mytsyk et al., eds., Ukraïns’kyi holokost, vol. 1, 87.