The uses of hunger Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 9 The uses of hunger Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933 Andrea Graziosi Introduction In 1931 to 1934 approximately six million people perished from hunger in the Soviet Union: some four million of that number died in Ukraine, with another 1.3 to 1.5 million in Kazakhstan, and several hundred thousand in the northern Caucasus and Volga region. Suffering and starvation affected the entire USSR, save for a few key cities, but even in those major urban centres life became grim and miserable. Until 1986, when Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow was published, research on the Ukrainian famine was almost non-existent.1 While survivor and witness testimonies were not wanting, the few Western historians who did mention a Soviet ‘man-made famine’ did not analyse its Ukrainian or Kazakh peculiarities. Indeed, an overwhelming majority of scholars ignored this issue entirely, resulting either in books that made no reference to it at all and even a few that questioned if it had actually occurred. It was not until 1956 that historians in the USSR were permitted to use the term ‘food difficulties’ in reference to this period and, even then, there was a prohibition against using the word ‘famine’. In fact, it was not until 1987 that the word ‘famine’ was voiced officially in reference to the early 1930s.2 The impact of Conquest’s book, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the possibility of gathering more testimonies, and a substantial if only partial opening of former Soviet archives have subsequently altered radically our understanding of what occurred in 1931 to 1934. The accumulation of evidence, and the collective effort of scores of scholars from many countries, have furthered greatly an appreciation of the causes, the dimensions, the dynamics, the responsibilities and the geopolitical variations of what we now know to have been the Soviet famines of 1931 to 1934, among which the 1932 to 1933 Holodomor – a term coined early in 1988 by the Ukrainian writer Oleksa Musiyenko, who fused the words holod (hunger, famine) and moryty (to destroy by starvation) – and the 1931 to 1933 Kazakh tragedy, stand out.3 There is now a growing consensus over the number of victims and an appreciation of the fact that the Holodomor and the Kazakh famine were two quite distinct phenomena rather than just regional variations of a pan-USSR famine, 395 09 Famines 09.indd 223 13/2/15 09:58:54 224 A. Graziosi even if they share a common background.4 Increasingly, there is also agreement over the fact that to understand the uniqueness of the Holodomor it is necessary to treat both the social (that is, the peasant) and the national (that is, the Ukrainian) factors together, bridging the divide between those scholars who offer an interpretation based largely on one or the other perspective. Certainly, in Stalin’s mind, the two were linked: the crucial December 1932 decree that reversed proUkrainian national, linguistic and educational policies was entitled ‘On Grain Procurements in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and the Western region’.5 This chapter, which draws on some of my previous work, attempts to reconstruct what happened in Soviet Ukraine between 1928 and 1933 and to do so from a comparative perspective, making reference both to the overall Soviet situation and to these ‘regional’ or, more precisely, to these national tragedies.6 Since appreciating the importance of the ‘Ukrainian Question’, particularly for the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, requires reference to the events of 1917 to 1927, the chapter begins with that period, concluding with a discussion about whether the Holodomor was an act of genocide and about the need for widening the focus of future research to include the Holodomor’s consequences for Ukraine, both in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Prologue, 1917 to 1927 The Ukrainian national movement – headed principally by social democratic parties – demonstrated its strength during the revolutionary upheavals, struggle for independence and Civil War of 1917 to 1922, as evidenced by great peasant insurrections and repeated occupations of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities by forces mainly raised, sustained and sallying forth from Ukraine’s countryside.7 Grasping this fact, the Bolsheviks, who for tactical reasons supported peasant demands for land, peace and bread, were able to briefly harness the Ukrainian national movement to their own ends, in 1918. The advantage they so gained was, however, squandered by 1919, undone by Bolshevik requisitioning and their pro-Russian policies, provoking an often-violent reaction against Soviet rule. This setback had a telling effect upon Lenin. He responded by resuscitating his initial support for national movements and adopting an anti-imperial, and implicitly, therefore, an anti-Great Russian chauvinist stance, especially, if not solely, in Ukraine.8 This shift laid the basis for the adoption, in 1923, of a policy known as korenizatsiya (indigenisation, from koren, meaning root). It was supposed to shape how the Party and Soviet state would behave when dealing with the component nationalities of the newly established USSR. So extensive were the rights and privileges conceded to the formerly oppressed nationalities of the Tsarist Russian Empire that Terry Martin would describe the USSR of the 1920s as ‘an affirmative action empire’. Unsurprisingly, republican communist elites eagerly seized upon and attempted to expand the entitlements they were granted, trying to forge societies simultaneously socialist and national in nature rather than ‘national in form and socialist in content’, the latter remaining Moscow’s preferred prescription. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 224 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 225 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 For a time, ‘the Centre’ allowed these republican leaderships significant leeway, hoping to cast the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and those being set up in Central Asia, as models for the anti-Polish (and thus anti-Versailles) movements of the West and for the anti-imperialist ones of the East. Furthermore Iosif Stalin’s wish to secure the support of republican-level cadres during his struggle against Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev also played a crucial role, the more so since they, collectively known as the ‘Left Opposition’, often took a centralist stand, disparaging the national leaderships. As the Party’s main expert on the national minorities, furthered by his experience as Commissar for Nationalities during the Civil War, Stalin actually had a rather sophisticated grasp of the ‘nationalities question’ and of its importance for the new Soviet state. In 1923, reflecting upon the features of the newly ‘developed’ national republics, he recognised the importance of Turkestan (soon to be divided into separate union republics) and of Ukraine as templates for the oppressed nationalities of East and West. However, he also stressed the dangerous weaknesses of these two Soviet republics, noting that their Party cadres were ‘remote from the language and manner of life of the people’. Originally, he seems to have intended to rectify this failing through indigenisation. Eventually he would choose a very different and far more brutal course.9 By 1925 Stalin had also explicitly linked the peasant question with the national one, showing a clear understanding of both the opportunities and the dangers this combination represented for communists and their agenda. As he wrote: [T]he national question [is], in essence, a peasant question. Not an agrarian but a peasant question, for these are two different things. It is quite true that the national question must not be identified with the peasant question, for, in addition to peasant questions, the national question includes such questions as national culture, national statehood, etc. But it is also beyond doubt that, after all, the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be. That is what is meant when it is said that, in essence, the national question is a peasant question.10 Opportunities, however, seemed more immediate than perils, and – also because of the internal fight against the ‘Left Opposition’ – Moscow continued to support Ukrainisation, as shown by Stalin’s 1925 decision to dispatch to Ukraine, as general secretary of the Soviet Ukrainian Party, one of his most trusted henchmen Lazar Kaganovich, charged with speeding up korenizatsiya (Stalin would deploy Kaganovich in Soviet Ukraine again, in 1932, but in this latter instance it would be for the purpose of imposing ferociously anti-Ukrainian policies). The same Party that, in 1919, had shut down many of the Ukrainian publishing houses founded in 1917/1918, and that had up until 1923 rejoiced over the ‘convergence’ of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, now began to strongly favour 395 09 Famines 09.indd 225 13/2/15 09:58:54 226 A. Graziosi publications and education in Ukrainian: by 1927 a majority of the children in Soviet Ukraine’s primary schools were taught in Ukrainian, as were 40 per cent of city students. Meanwhile, because of what was being done with dictionaries, the alphabet and the lexicon, the Ukrainian language began to further diverge from the Russian one, while some Ukrainian communist intellectuals went so far as to denounce the ‘colonial’ situation of their country vis-à-vis Moscow: the Centre, they said, absorbed local revenues, but invested them elsewhere, preferring the Urals or western Siberia to the Donbas. Senior republican officials even began discussing the need for creating the economic basis for ‘true statehood’.11 Attitudes towards Ukrainian indigenisation began to change by 1926. Ukrainian functionaries dispatched to set up soviets in Ukrainian-speaking areas located in Soviet Russia (often along the Russian side of the border) were accused of trying to create khokholands (the stereotypical Ukrainian Cossack style of haircut, khokhol, is a Russian pejorative for ethnic Ukrainians). In April, Yury Larin, a top Bolshevik leader who, in 1917, had sung the praises of the war economy and hyper-centralisation, formally raised ‘the Russian Question in Ukraine’ during a meeting of the USSR’s Central Executive Committee, maintaining that Ukrainisation in the cities was nothing but a ‘Petlyurite policy’ (Symon Petlyura had headed a Ukrainian national movement that politically and militarily contested the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine from 1918 to 1922). Attending Soviet Ukrainian leaders protested Larin’s charges. Hryhoriy Petrovsky, who served as People’s Commissar for Interior Affairs between November 1917 and March 1919, and so knew how the political police operated, rejected Larin’s claims, saying they were based on dubious secret police sources. In addition, Mykola Skrypnyk, Commissar of Education, tellingly reminded his audience that Larin had opposed Lenin’s desire to form a federation of nationalities, instead advocating a unitary state organised around Russia.12 Confirmed as the Party’s general secretary, Stalin, who in 1922 also opposed the establishment of a federal structure for the USSR, only to eventually give way to Lenin’s preferences, was more worried about what was happening in the countries bordering the Soviet Union, and over what Soviet Ukraine’s communist leaders were up to, than about the specific fate of the Russian minority in Ukraine. But he noticed how, in the spring of 1926, the Soviet Ukrainian national-communist elite, after having first successfully removed some of Moscow’s most faithful representatives from the governing organs of Soviet Ukraine, had even begun agitating for Kaganovich’s replacement, accusing him of opposing the request, advanced in March by Oleksander Shumsky, that Ukrainisation be extended into the country’s mostly Russian-speaking main cities. Shumsky also doggedly supported Mykola Khvylovy, Ukraine’s most important communist writer, who railed against those whom he felt were denigrating Ukrainian culture. Ukraine, Khvylovy insisted, must turn to the West, towards Europe, instead of orienting itself on Moscow and the culture of Russia. Simultaneously, the success of Marshall Józef Piłsudski’s May 1926 coup brought into power a Polish leader whom Moscow regarded as a dangerous enemy, especially given Piłsudski’s vision of a federal Poland, a state potentially 395 09 Famines 09.indd 226 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 227 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 capable of extending its frontiers eastward, which could only happen at the expense of the Soviet Union’s western borderlands. Now it was Moscow’s turn to see ‘its’ Ukraine threatened by a hostile and potentially expansionist neighbour. Not surprisingly, Petlyura, whose forces had temporarily allied in 1919 with Piłsudski’s forces, was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Paris on 25 May 1926, ostensibly in retaliation for pogroms perpetrated by some of his troops, but more likely because of the potential for a renewed alliance between the Polish state and an anti-Soviet and pro-independence Ukrainian national movement. When, in this new situation, the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (that is, of Polish-controlled Galicia and Volyn) endorsed Shumsky’s position, Stalin understood that the mechanism of korenizatsiya, crafted in the hope of attracting supporters in the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories lost to Poland after 1920, had begun to malfunction, that indeed the compromises reached with the nationalities and the peasantry that lay at the heart of the New Economic Policy (NEP), were now becoming increasingly counterproductive. At the beginning of 1927 he therefore ordered Shumsky’s removal from Ukraine. To avoid alienating his still-powerful Ukrainian comrades, however, particularly during the final stage in his fight against Trotsky, Stalin remained cautious and appointed Mykola Skrypnyk as Soviet Ukraine’s new Commissar for Education, a post the latter would hold until 1933, using his authority during those years to further Ukrainisation, at times vigorously. The assault upon the peasants and the move against nationalities, 1928 to 1931 Stalin launched his attack on the countryside, utterly undoing the NEP in January 1928, just two weeks after Trotsky’s final defeat. It was decided that a ‘tribute’ would be imposed upon the countryside, the bounty so collected to be used for speeding up heavy industrialisation and the rearmament of the Soviet state.13 This wealth was to be extracted forcibly from more than 20 million peasant households, subjecting them to cruelties reminiscent of the Civil War period. These requisitions immediately provoked both passive and active resistance. Many peasants fled to the cities or reduced the areas of arable land they cultivated, laying the foundations for future problems; on occasion, peasants even physically resisted the requisitioning of their grain reserves by the special detachments deployed for that purpose. According to the intelligence reports compiled at the time, rural acts of mass opposition increased from 63 in the first eight months of 1927, to 564 in the corresponding period of 1928. ‘Terrorist acts’ and political killings also grew in number, while Red Army conscripts were reportedly deluged with demoralising letters from their home communities complaining about the hardships brought about by these new measures. Reportedly, the 5,000 soldiers of the Novocherkassk garrison received thousands of such letters in a single day.14 Stalin’s initiative even met with resistance within the Party, leading to a temporary halt to the requisitioning, in the late spring of 1928.15 This brief respite did not, however, substantially alter the course of events. In a matter of months 395 09 Famines 09.indd 227 13/2/15 09:58:54 228 A. Graziosi the ‘Right Opposition’ was defeated, leaving Stalin free to again pursue his former policies, which he did with a renewed vigour. Stalin thus consciously decided to reopen the conflict with the peasantry that the NEP had quelled. The exclusion of peasant households from rationing, reintroduced in 1928/1929, was by itself an indirect declaration of his intentions, which the Soviet leadership likely understood, even if they could not then foresee how the struggle would develop, nor be decided.16 For instance, when at the Central Committee plenum of July 1928, Nikolai Bukharin (the leader of the ‘Right Opposition’), challenged those present to imagine ‘a proletarian state in a petit-bourgeois country that forcibly drives the peasants into communes’, Kliment Voroshilov interrupted him with ‘as in 1918–1919’, only, in turn, to have Bukharin retort: ‘Then you shall get a peasant insurrection.’17 Tellingly, Stalin knew that excessive requisitions combined with large industrial investments financed by massive exports of grain could, in short order, provoke an ‘artificial’ famine. He seems to have even said so in December 1925, during a polemical exchange at the Fourteenth Party Congress in which he accused the hyper-industrialising policies promoted by the Opposition of possibly resulting in just such an outcome.18 In 1929 a more concerted wave of requisitions met with a more active, if desperate, resistance (reported peasant disturbances grew in number to 1,300 that year), while the needs of industrialisation – in the spring of 1929 the Party approved the most extreme variant of the first Five-Year Plan – made it imperative to seize as much grain and other products as possible. This led Stalin, now free to act as he pleased, to officially launch his ‘revolution from above’, based on the speedy and mass collectivisation of peasant households, preceded by the ‘liquidation’ of the Party’s enemies in the countryside, the latter branded as kulaks. The guiding idea was the neutralisation of the peasantry through the annihilation of its elite (dekulakisation) accompanied by the gathering of the greatest possible number of families into relatively few and large collective units that could more easily be controlled and exploited by the state (collectivisation). Furthermore, kulak properties made for attractive booty in a land that, at the end of 1929, was otherwise being stripped bare: the State seized 22.4 per cent of the crop, as against the 12 to 14 per cent in the NEP years, and according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘everything that could be exported or sold abroad’ had already disappeared from Soviet Ukraine.19 At first, the national-communist leaderships, including the Soviet Ukrainian cadres, supported Stalin’s anti-peasant about-face, somehow blind to its centralist and anti-national implications. No doubt the disillusionment these elites had experienced with their own peasantry during the Civil War played a role in this. Many hoped that an accelerated programme of industrialisation and urbanisation would build a much firmer basis for the national effort while solving, once and for all, the ‘accursed’ problem of the colonial character of the republic. It was anticipated that ‘ethnic’ (that is, Ukrainian) peasants moving into the cities from the surrounding countryside would transform the still dominantly Russian character of Ukraine’s urban centres. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 228 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 229 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Ukrainian national communists were also reassured by the fact that while indigenisation policies did change, they were not discontinued completely. The assault launched in 1929 against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, often of bourgeois origin, seemed balanced by the extension of Ukrainisation even to Ukrainian communities in the Volga region, the Soviet Far East, Kazakhstan, and above all in the Kuban, in the northern Caucasus. Here districts, including hundreds and thousands of inhabitants, were being organised along Ukrainian lines; Stalin himself had sung the praises of Ukrainisation during a grandiose festival held in Moscow celebrating Ukrainian culture.20 However the Centre continued to ever more thoroughly extend its power throughout society. In 1929, for example, control over institutions of higher learning was transferred from the republican to Moscow-based commissariats. While Mykola Skrypnyk was assured that this would not result in Russification, and even though the percentage of students of Ukrainian origin continued to grow, the longer term trend was unmistakable. Above all, the attack on Ukraine’s top intellectuals, and the challenge to their pro-European orientation, did not abate. In July 1929 Serhii Efremov, an important literary critic, was charged with membership in the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’ (SVU), a nonexistent group concocted by the political police to provide a convenient catch-all for perceived enemies. In September the GPU ‘uncovered’ a similar organisation in Soviet Belarus. By the end of the year more than 700 alleged SVU members had been arrested. Even the great historian, Professor Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, who had been the first president of the Ukrainian National Republic, and whom Soviet Ukraine’s national communist leaders had convinced to return to Kyiv from abroad, was subjected to increased harassment, finally being forced to emigrate to Moscow. In January 1930 Stalin wrote personally to the Ukrainian Politburo demanding a prompt trial of the SVU’s members and detailing the grounds upon which the proceedings were to unfold: the accused were to be charged with preparing an insurrection aimed at exposing Soviet Ukraine to foreign invasion, of committing acts of terrorism, and with scheming to poison senior communist leaders, with doctors to be implicated in this supposed plot. Stalin also insisted that the trial be afforded maximum publicity, and not just in Soviet Ukraine. The pressure put on the arrested – forced to confess to imaginary crimes and to incriminate others – was intense, and as it grew so too did the number of arrests. At about the same time the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was forced to disband, and many members of the Ukrainian Academy, historians, scientists, doctors, former leaders of the Ukrainian socialist parties and other influential members of Ukrainian society were jailed. Over the following two years the Ukrainian national-communist leadership slowly, but decidedly, recoiled against this new wave of centralism and the resulting havoc wrought upon the countryside, particularly as it became evident that the Ukrainian ‘ethnic’ element was bearing the brunt of dekulakisation and collectivisation. Dekulakisation would come to involve the arrest and sometimes even the ‘liquidation’ of all men included in the first of the three categories into 395 09 Famines 09.indd 229 13/2/15 09:58:54 230 A. Graziosi which the approximately one million kulak families of the Soviet Union were divided. Remaining family members in this ‘first category’ would be deported to Siberia and other frontier regions. All members of families in the ‘second category’ were also exiled. Those in the third category were also removed from their home villages but were at least allowed to remain within their region of origin. Dekulakisation was executed with great determination and rapidity between November 1929 and February 1930. The official balance sheets list thousands of people repressed, or even killed, in the very first weeks of that year, including 381,000 families, totalling 1.8 million people, deported from 1930 to 1931. Of that number 64,000 families came from Ukraine, 52,000 from western Siberia, 30,000 from the lower Volga, and 28,000 from the Urals. Their destinations were the ‘special villages’ administered, after 1931, by the OGPU.21 Next came collectivisation, which reached its first peak in February 1930, by which time nearly eight million families had been collectivised. Violence and terror were the usual method for accomplishing this purpose, a fact that is not disputed: OGPU reports describing collectivisation do not differ markedly from descriptions left by the victims.22 By the end of February 1930, with some 60 per cent of peasant households already collectivised, the Soviet leadership thought success was near. At that point, however, under the stimulus of repeated requisitions and claims for tax arrears, villagers began uniting, overcoming their initial divisions, and actively opposing Soviet power. This mounting wave of peasant resistance was well documented by the OGPU. Tasked with compiling data for the Party’s top leadership, the secret police reported 13,754 peasant disturbances in 1930 (ten times the figure of the previous year) involving some 2.5 million participants in the 10,000 disturbances about which intelligence was gathered. Some 402 disturbances, four of them representing significant revolts, took place in January; 1,048, including 37 revolts, in February; 6,528, with 80 revolts, in March; and 1,992, with 24 revolts, in April 1930. To these uprisings and protests must be added approximately 4,000 acts of individual ‘terrorism’, including the murder of 1,200 Soviet officials. More than 7,380 of these disturbances were directed against collectivisation, 2,339 against the arrest or deportation of ‘anti-Soviet elements’, and 1,487 against the closing of churches. Lack of food (1,220), seizure of seed grain (544), and forced delivery of grain and other foodstuffs (456) were also reported officially as motivating rural resistance.23 The ‘region’ most affected by protests and uprisings was Soviet Ukraine, with 4,098 incidents recorded, in which well over a million people participated (29.7 per cent and 38.7 per cent of the respective totals). The Central Black Earth Region followed, including Tambov (the site of one of the Civil War’s most important peasant anti-Bolshevik insurrections, the Antonovshchina), with 1,373 disturbances involving more than 300,000 people. The northern Caucasus witnessed 1,061 demonstrations with 250,000 rioters, while the Middle Volga, the Moscow region, western Siberia and the Tatar Republic, with more than 500 395 09 Famines 09.indd 230 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 231 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 mass demonstrations each, came next. The influential role of women in these uprisings, and of women’s revolts specifically (which the OGPU counted at 3,712), were regarded as being particularly worrisome.24 The similarities between these incidents of resistance and Civil War insurrections – and sometimes even the revolts of 1905 – and where they took place are striking, as OGPU officials duly observed. In their reports on what was happening in Soviet Ukraine, for example, we read that rebellious villages were often the very same places that Semen Budënny’s Red cavalry had ‘cut’ (massacred) by some 50 per cent in 1920, while Iosif Vareikis, the Party Secretary of the Black Earth Region, noted that anti-collectivisation revolts were particularly strong in former Antonov strongholds. Interestingly enough, in the north, as well as in the Moscow and Leningrad regions, peasant resistance was less apparent, probably because these were grain-consuming areas, whose inhabitants lived off seasonal work in the cities and in industry, regions home to only a relatively few well-off peasants. Significant requisitions were not imposed here because Soviet officialdom knew full well how little could be secured from them. The demands voiced by those who rose up were also strikingly similar to those of the Civil War period. Again, OGPU reports present us with an unequivocal picture: the peasants demanded the recovery of their collectivised and requisitioned goods, the return of deported families, the disbanding of Komsomol (the Young Communist League was widely considered to be an agency for spying on the villages), respect for religious beliefs and practices, free elections to the village soviets, a halt to requisitions, and free trade. From every quarter the secret police reported that the peasants were unified in denouncing any return to a new kind of ‘serfdom’, by which they meant the imposition of collectivisation. Since peasants had been disarmed in previous years their demonstrations were mostly peaceful and the corresponding repressions, while harsh, were not as brutal as those carried out during the Civil War. Furthermore, given that tens of thousands of kulaks had already been shot, or arrested and deported, resistance was further muted. Nevertheless, hundreds of people were killed in Soviet Ukraine, possibly even thousands if the northern Caucasus is included, and arrest followed by deportation certainly involved hundreds of thousands more. While this was different from what had occurred in 1918 to 1922, a certain continuity was evident in the fact that many of the Civil War-era Bolsheviks did duty again in 1930 (for example, Vsevolod Balitskii in Soviet Ukraine and Efim Evdokimov in the northern Caucasus, where he led the internal security troops of the Dzerzhinsky Division). In general, these special units were employed to quell rural revolts, regular troops being deployed only on rare occasions, there being doubts about the willingness of conscripts drawn from the countryside to obey commands to repress people of the same class origins. In Soviet Ukraine, as in other non-Russian areas, nationalist slogans were heard in the resistance’s strongholds. In Central Asia – where basmachi (the fighter-bandits of the Civil War period) reappeared – and in the northern Caucasus (Chechnya in particular), armed skirmishes occurred: the three largest Kazakh incidents, for instance, witnessed between 2,000 and 4,500 insurgents 395 09 Famines 09.indd 231 13/2/15 09:58:54 232 A. Graziosi taking the field in anti-Soviet actions. From the perspective of Moscow, however, what happened along the western borders of Soviet Ukraine was far more important, since in that region local revolts had managed to effectively displace Soviet power, sometimes for weeks. Reports about peasants singing the praises of Ukrainian independence only served to confirm in Stalin’s eyes the soundness of his belief that a natural reservoir of regime-challenging nationalism reposed in Ukraine’s villages. When peasants of Polish ancestry organised entire villages, like Sulomna, and led marches west, towards the border with Poland, even as thousands of other Soviet citizens fled to neighbouring countries, the Politburo reacted by ordering the immediate deportation of kulak families from these western districts, starting with those of ‘Polish nationality’.25 For Moscow, these developments involved more than just a question of losing face – after all, official Soviet propaganda maintained that socialism was being built in a happy countryside. What worried Stalin most was the prospect of a repetition of 1919: large peasant revolts again opening up the way for external enemies, in particular for Piłsudski, whose forces had once allied with those of Petluyra and had even taken Kyiv in early May 1920. This time Stalin feared such an invasion might secure British and French support. Yet, even though Warsaw knew quite well that the Ukrainian peasants hated Bolshevism, and possibly longed for a revival of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Marshall Piłsudski also recognised that he did not have the military might needed for such an operation, and that most of the supposedly active underground Polish and Ukrainian nationalist organisations exposed by the GPU were, in reality, non-existent, phantoms conjured up to justify Stalinist repression. This spectre of a major Ukrainian revolt that would tempt hostile foreign powers to invade the USSR nevertheless became one of the main motives behind Stalin’s decision, in early March 1930, to bring forced collectivisation to a halt, albeit temporarily. He even went so far as to accuse local cadres of being the perpetrators of ‘excesses’, although he had actually demanded they do exactly what he now condemned. That it was a fear, born out of his own earlier experiences, that was troubling Stalin is further suggested by the fact that he insisted upon such conspiratorial charges being made a central pillar of the SVU trial, which opened in Kharkiv’s opera theatre in March 1930 and involved 45 defendants. Pravda devoted scores of articles to these proceedings, transforming the trial into a symbolic indictment of the dangers of nationalism, thus establishing the boundaries that national-communist leaders in all of the republics must not trespass if they wished to avoid being repressed. In March, a seriously worried Skrypnyk begged Stanislav Kosior, the Party Secretary for Soviet Ukraine, to make sure that at least the positive aspects of the Ukrainian Academy’s activities were mentioned at the trial.26 His request was denied, signalling Moscow’s intention to undermine any prospect of an autonomous and high Ukrainian culture that could challenge Russian predominance. At this very time, and for the first time since the 1920 war with Poland, the regime also began using Russian nationalism as a tool of social control, seeing it as an essential centripetal force for a Soviet state increasingly unsettled, economically, 395 09 Famines 09.indd 232 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 233 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 socially and psychologically. This appeal to Russian pride, which Stalin formalised in a speech to economic executives in February 1931, resonating as it did with the themes and words of Mussogorsky’s Khovanshchina, thereafter became a stable component of state policies and Stalinist ideology.27 This implied a retreat from support for indigenisation, a policy that had itself upset many Russians living outside the RSFSR, who now found themselves being extolled by Moscow for playing the pivotal, indeed the dominant, role in Soviet society. Even so, in primary education and in promotions from the ranks, Ukrainisation continued, and even, for a while, expanded: the publication of books in Ukrainian, which had started to grow in 1923, reached a peak in 1931 (77 per cent of all titles), although it started to decline after that. In 1931 the percentage of Party members of Russian origin in Soviet Ukraine, which in 1922 accounted for 72 per cent of its cadres, dropped to 52 per cent, while the number of ‘ethnic’ Ukrainians living in cities, or working in industry, grew rapidly, proving in the eyes of national-communist leaders the virtues of Stalinist industrialisation. In addition, by 1932, ethnic Ukrainians for the first time had passed the 50 per cent residency mark in a majority of Soviet Ukraine’s cities. In the sphere of culture, however, and not only in the elite circles already disrupted by the SVU trial, the promotion of Ukrainian culture was increasingly being circumscribed. Other minority nationalities in Soviet Ukraine did not fare much better. The attack against the NEP, and the liquidation, and often arrest, of nepmen, translated in Ukraine into an attack against diaspora communities (in Ukraine in 1926 more than 40 per cent of traders, artisans, shopkeepers and small industrialists were of Jewish, Armenian or Greek nationality). Jews, in particular, also suffered because of the 1927 to 1930 campaign against religion, which saw the closure of synagogues and the removal of rabbis, even as their shtetls, that traditionally survived by providing services to villagers, were economically devastated by the pauperisation of those same Ukrainian peasants. It is thus possible to maintain that while Stalin dismantled the NEP’s existing arrangements with the peasants and bourgeois specialists, as well as the currency and market reforms associated with the policy, he did not cancel the accommodations reached with the various nationalities in 1923 (indigenisation). Instead, he emasculated them with varying degrees of severity across the entire Soviet Union. How indigenisation was adapted and applied varied across the union republics according to the Centre’s geopolitical considerations. Since Moscow’s fears were focused in the USSR’s western borderlands, and in particular within Soviet Ukraine, the new strictures were most rigorously imposed there, while in the Caucasus, Central Asia or the far north – regions geographically remote from the sources of perceived threat – indigenisation officially continued in effect. Stalin’s March retreat, and the good crop of 1930 (three to five million tons larger than in 1929, even given the disruptions caused by collectivisation) seemed to calm the situation. However, a few months after this harvest, as the peasants’ reserve stocks shrank while rapid industrialisation continued to expand the state’s needs, the contest between the village and the state – which had succeeded in taking almost 30 per cent of the crop, and was thus able to export 4.8 million tons 395 09 Famines 09.indd 233 13/2/15 09:58:54 234 A. Graziosi of grain – reached new heights. Once more, Moscow focused its attention upon the grain-growing areas: at the end of 1930 Soviet Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region were given the target of collectivising 80 per cent of peasant families by June 1931, while in the USSR as a whole their number was to double from 6.5 to almost 13 million, approximately 50 per cent of the total. And so a new wave of arrests, deportations, forced collectivisation, ‘excesses’, and mass and individual acts of resistance, both active and passive (the new kolkhozniki resisted by doing far less work than they had when they were independent peasants), spread throughout the countryside, and especially within the above mentioned ‘regions’, where the peasants were given a ‘choice’: either join a kolkhoz, and give it 30 to 60 per cent of their time and labour for no remuneration at all, or attempt to flee to the cities, to find work in the industrial sector. The 1931 harvest was not a good one, although bringing in the crops did provide for a short lull in the struggle between the state and the countryside. Procurement operations soon became almost warlike, accompanied by violence and arrests, spreading fear throughout the rural areas and even raising concerns, and doubts, among local Party leaders. At the October plenum some openly suggested lowering procurement targets given that poor weather and the resulting crop failures were causing food shortages. Worried about feeding the cities and the army, and obsessed with hard currency problems and thus with export capacity, Stalin responded harshly to these calls, using Anastas Mikoyan as his proxy, to say that ‘the question of how much is left to eat and for other needs is not important. What is important is to tell the kolkhoz that they have to meet the state’s needs first; their own will have to wait.’28 Procurements were thus to be conducted independently of the condition of the peasants and their toil was to be compensated only if something was left after the state took what it needed (which amounted to approximately 40 per cent of the harvest, even more so in grain-growing regions). In 1932 the USSR was thus able to export almost five million tons of grain.29 In the countryside, however, there was havoc caused not only by the liquidation of the ablest peasants, the kulaks, but by the loss of a large part of their livestock (peasants often slaughtered, sold or ate their animals rather than giving them to the kolkhoz), the consumption of existing grain reserves, all compounded by the poor organisation and malfunctioning of most of the collective farms. All of this, in turn, undermined deeply the productive capacity and the spirit of the rural population, and consequently production throughout the USSR. The situation, however, had begun to diverge considerably across different areas. In grain-producing areas, where the Soviets concentrated their requisition efforts, food difficulties and peasant unrest were more intense, and, by the early spring of 1932, pockets of actual famine started to appear, just as they had in 1921 after the great requisition campaign of 1920. The first crisis would occur in Kazakhstan. As the work of Niccolò Pianciola has confirmed, the terrible famine and associated epidemics that would exterminate at least one-third of the indigenous, semi-nomadic Kazakh population were not the outcome of compulsory 395 09 Famines 09.indd 234 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 235 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 ‘sedentarization’, since that campaign was never fully implemented. Rather, grain and livestock procurements were the prime factors causing this tragedy, as would be the case throughout the entire Soviet Union. The decision to seize most of the Kazakh herds – in part to replenish the stocks of the Russian and Ukrainian agricultural regions that had already been devastated by collectivisation – was of special importance. The similarities between the Kazakh and Ukrainian (or the northern Caucasus) famines did not stop at causes: as in Soviet Ukraine so too the Kazakhs were, at times, prevented from escaping famine-struck regions or seeking relief in cities or towns. Yet, there were also important differences: in the Kazakh lands collective farming as yet played but a minor role, and the fate of the indigenous population resulted more from indifference than intention given that local officials, generally Slavs, preferred their kin when it came to the distribution of scarce resources. Furthermore, Moscow never pursued a deliberately anti-Kazakh policy, the local national-communists were relatively weak, and there was no significant threat to the USSR along its borders with China, certainly nothing comparable to the dangers perceived to be lurking in the western borderlands of Soviet Ukraine.30 Crisis and Holodomor, 1932 to 1933 In early 1932 Moscow realised that peasants, and especially those in the grainproducing areas such as Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region, were not doing what the state expected of them. True to form, Stalin interpreted their actions, which were a direct response to excessive requisitions, as a plot, orchestrated by enemies. The extensive lists of ‘kulak bandits’ and ‘leaders of kulak insurrections’ whose death sentences were sanctioned by the Politburo in March and April 1932 are indicative of the repression that followed. In spite of the 1931 decision to curtail deportations they began anew, and grew: in April alone the Politburo decided to deport 38,300 families, 6,000 from Soviet Ukraine. Eventually, more that 70,000 peasants would be deported, followed by another 200,000 in 1933, meaning that between 1930 and 1933 some 2.25 million people officially suffered this fate, excluding those displaced within their own region. Among themselves the USSR’s leaders referenced even higher figures: Stalin himself spoke of ten million exiled peasants, and, towards the end of his life, Molotov boasted of even higher numbers.31 Undeniable famine conditions did, at first, result in some ameliorative measures being adopted, patterned on the actions Lenin had authorised in the spring of 1921 under similar circumstances. At the end of March, for example, the Politburo prohibited the seizing of individual livestock, allowing peasant families to keep a cow, whose milk was essential for their children’s survival. The state also lowered the procurement targets for meat and grain, and in early May the kolkhozniki were permitted to sell whatever they could after first fulfilling their obligations to the state. Since most peasants had very little, or nothing, to sell, these ‘kolkhoz markets’, which were later to play an important role in Soviet history, barely functioned. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 235 13/2/15 09:58:54 236 A. Graziosi Stalin did consent to a limited amount of grain being bought in the Far East and from Iran, this aid being distributed to the peasants before the sowing of their own crops, suggesting that he knew what measures were needed in order to counter the crisis looming ahead. However, he authorised only the bare minimum of relief, without altering the basic course of his policies. Conditions therefore continued to deteriorate. Later in the spring, when even Slavic colonists began dying in Kazakhstan, the area being sowed in the most fertile agricultural areas shrank significantly, a result of the physical exhaustion and lack of motivation of the peasants, as well as of the great reduction in livestock (especially horses), exacerbated by the abysmally ineffective organisation of the collective farms. By mid-May 1932 only eight million hectares had been sowed in Soviet Ukraine, as against the 15.9 million hectares of 1930 and the 12.3 million hectares in 1931. Local officials, village schoolteachers and Party cadres had already begun to inform the Centre about the seriousness of the famine conditions affecting the regions where the requisition brigades had concentrated their efforts. By May, rumours about the sale of human flesh in city markets circulated in Kyiv and in June the OGPU reported that sowing was taking place in extremely tense conditions, even recording how peasants were committing suicide in order to avoid a painfully lingering death by starvation, with cannibalism becoming more and more frequent.32 On 10 June 1932, Soviet Ukraine’s premier, Vlas Chubar, wrote to Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, stressing how bad the situation was: at least 100 districts (raiony) desperately needed food aid, and there were growing difficulties in meeting the bread requirements of the cities. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Ukrainian president Petrovsky – who in April had written to Stalin about entire villages starving due to local requisition ‘excesses’ – informed the Ukrainian Party Secretary, Kosior, that the situation had become so dire that Stalin had to be told that procurements in Soviet Ukraine had to stop. Significantly, both Chubar and Petrovsky used the Russian word for famine (golod) in describing what was happening.33 This correspondence, and news about thousands of people starving to death, did prompt Stalin into authorising some concessions: on 26 June, for example, in a letter to Kaganovich, he mentioned the need to lower – ‘for a sense of justice’ – procurements in Ukraine’s most famine-ravished areas, while keeping in mind the needs of the border districts. However, all such reductions – Stalin added – were only to be of a local and limited nature and duration. More importantly, however, Stalin began to convince himself that the difficulties his anti-peasant policies were encountering in Soviet Ukraine were being stoked by local officials, treacherously abetting village resistance for ‘national’ reasons. As Terry Martin shows, Stalin was in fact the first person to give the famine a ‘national interpretation’.34 At first he did so in private, ranting against republican leaders whom he considered responsible for the crisis, insisting they had not met it with the necessary resolve. On 2 July, for example, he wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov, sharing his view that Chubar’s ‘corrupted’ 395 09 Famines 09.indd 236 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 237 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 and ‘opportunistic’ personality, and Kosior’s ‘rotten diplomacy’ and ‘criminally frivolous’ attitude towards his duties, were responsible for ruining Ukraine. It was therefore necessary, Stalin insisted, to impose a much firmer ‘Bolshevik stand’ at the Third Ukrainian Party conference, so confronting Petrovsky’s and Chubar’s hypocritical self-criticisms and Kosior’s silence.35 In fact, given the desperation increasingly evident in the countryside, members of the Party in Soviet Ukraine grew increasingly disillusioned with Moscow. At the conference, which opened on 6 July in Kharkiv, many delegates, whose speeches were subsequently censored in the official minutes, described how requisition brigades forced peasants to sit naked in the snow in order to intimidate them into giving up all of their belongings, and spoke about people so bloated from starvation that they could no longer even stand to do work. Chubar pleaded with local cadres not to accept orders without considering their consequences, so implying that responsibility for the famine lay with Moscow’s policies rather than with the republic’s government or even the peasants’ behaviour. Skrypnyk, who still headed the Commissariat for Education, was even blunter: What is the reason for our current failures, our current situation? How is it possible that Ukraine, in spite of a not particularly bad harvest . . . has to deal with food difficulties in many districts? Since January I have driven through more than thirty districts . . . I heard the following answer. . . . ‘The communists are at fault for the non-fulfillment of the grain-procurement plan, for the poor food situation; the communists took the grain, and that is why there is no grain to live on . . . that is why there is famine in certain localities.’36 As Stalin expected, however, the conference dutifully followed the line taken by Molotov and Kaganovich, who switched the focus away from complaints against Moscow to a reaffirmation of the duties all communists had towards the Soviet State. As Molotov was later to repeat, ‘even if we have today to face, especially in grain-producing areas, the famine’s ghost . . . procurement plans must be respected at all cost’, in order to avoid any repetition of the extensive food riots in industrial cities that had occurred in the spring while also honouring the need to repay German loans.37 The conference’s final resolutions did not, however, fully placate Stalin, who suspected that the Ukrainians only formally complied with his wishes, an inkling confirmed by what Kaganovich reported on what was possibly the last recorded disagreement to occur in a Politburo meeting involving Stalin. On 2 August, someone, possibly Petrovsky, dared to object to Stalin’s draft of what was to become, on 7 August, the draconian law on the defence of State property against theft. Criticism, also voiced by other leaders, focused on the law’s second paragraph, which imposed the death penalty upon anyone found guilty of stealing kolkhoz property, reduced to a five- to ten-year forced labour sentence if mitigating circumstances existed. On the basis of this decree, which was eventually approved as per Stalin’s initial text, more than 100,000 people would be 395 09 Famines 09.indd 237 13/2/15 09:58:54 238 A. Graziosi sentenced in under five months, 4,500 to the death penalty (a figure suggesting that later statistics about death sentences in the USSR are less than reliable). Some judges admitted that their own ‘petit-bourgeois’ prejudices caused them to agonise over sentencing a person to years in the Gulag camps for the theft of a few ears of grain.38 Stalin’s suspicions about his Soviet Ukrainian comrades were further heightened by OGPU reports, such as one dated 22 August, which accused the Ukrainian communist cadres of being infected with nationalism, and even of acting on orders sent from the Polish General Staff. According to the political police, members of at least 50 Party district committees, including those of Kyiv and Dnepepetrovsk (formerly Ekaterinoslav but renamed to honour Petrovsky), had doubts about procurement policies, evidenced by local Party cadres voicing views such as: ‘(1) I will not carry out procurement plans. (2) It will be difficult to fulfil procurement quotas, but I know what to do: I will return my Party card and become a free man. (3) To force the population to starve is criminal. It’s better to return my Party card, than to sentence peasants to death by starvation.’ On 11 August 1932, in what is now regarded as a crucial document, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich about how the situation in Soviet Ukraine had become the main issue facing him, about how the Republic’s Party, State, and even political police organs teemed with nationalist agents and Polish spies, and about the real risk of ‘losing Ukraine’, which he demanded must instead be transformed into a Bolshevik fortress.39 Since the USSR and Poland had actually signed a nonaggression pact on 25 July 1932, Stalin was exploiting a non-existent foreign threat to justify the liquidation of his internal enemies, using this tactic to further consolidate his position, as he had done in the past more than once, most famously against Trotsky in 1927. Meanwhile, the harvest, and procurements, confirmed the seriousness of the situation. Out of approximately 60 million tons of grain, a figure only slightly inferior to that of 1931, the State was able to seize only 19 million tons, against the 23 million secured in the previous year, leaving most of the harvest to rot in the fields. Procurements were especially poor in Soviet Ukraine and in the northern Caucasus, providing Moscow with 60 per cent less than what had been delivered in 1931, declining respectively from 32 per cent to 23 per cent, and from 14 per cent to 10 per cent of the procurement totals. The situation was also bad in the Black Earth Region, ameliorated only by deliveries from western Siberia and the Volga region, which were subjected to severe requisitioning.40 The lack of grain and other agricultural products lowered exports, causing a crisis in the balance of payments. Hard currency was simply not to be had, forcing the State to suspend payments to foreign specialists and workers, many of whom then left. Their departure, in turn, compounded problems in the newly built factories, which still needed parts, machinery and the advice of those very same foreign experts. Essential raw materials could also not be imported in the required quantities, and many industrial complexes producing tractors, armaments, vehicles and other machinery had to stop production for weeks at a time, imperilling the Soviet industrialisation campaign. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 238 13/2/15 09:58:54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 239 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 In September/October 1932 the regime was almost on the verge of collapse, and obviously so: grain reserves were low, exports were at a near standstill, the German bills of exchange, used in 1931 to relaunch industrialisation following the 1930 crisis, were coming due, cities teemed with former peasants deeply inimical to the regime, and there was mounting discontent in the workers’ ranks. Moscow feared what would happen if another cut in food rations was announced. In this perilous situation even men like Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s friend and the Commissar of Heavy Industry, despaired. Documents began surreptitiously circulating in Party circles attacking Stalin and his policies. Then, on 7 November, following the celebration of the October Revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, Stalin’s second wife Nadezdha Alliluyeva committed suicide, for reasons both private and political. Against this background there loomed a coming famine. While in 1921/1922 famine had put an end to the Soviet State’s first confrontation with the peasantry, the much more terrible hunger of 1932/1933 paradoxically allowed Stalin a chance to exercise his extraordinary self-confidence, cruelty and willpower. Despite all the setbacks he had so recently endured, Stalin determinedly deployed a prophylactic and collective model of repression against any and all national, social-national and political groups that he believed posed a threat to the Soviet regime and, in doing so, he rescued it from collapse.41 From the summer of 1932 even the Party’s members were targeted, just as they had been during the fight against both the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ oppositions. However, it was the need to collect grain, and thus the situation in the countryside, and most particularly so in Ukraine, that topped Stalin’s list of worries, especially after information about the new crop and procurements began to arrive. While, as late as September 1932, one could find references to starvation and cannibalism in the confidential reports for internal use only, all such intelligence disappeared after that because, as Kaganovich and others would observe, including any such ‘photograph of reality’ left Party cadres troubled, making them overly sensitive to human suffering and inclined to give the peasants bread. That could not be allowed. The cadres must instead be made to follow the Party’s dictates without question, regardless of the consequences.42 On 22 October 1932 Stalin dispatched Molotov, Kaganovich and Pavel Postyshev to Soviet Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region, each man tasked with fulfilling the quotas at all costs. Simultaneously, he telegraphed Filipp Goloshchekin in Kazakhstan, threatening drastic measures if grainprocurement plans there were not met. Stalin’s servitors left Moscow with firm instructions about how the crisis was to be resolved and they did as they were told. Within a week Molotov had forced the Ukrainian Politburo to approve a resolution calling for the ‘tightening of procurements’, indicating that this was to be the Party’s highest priority, with harsh punishments for any kolkhoz which did not fulfil its obligations. An even harsher treatment was inflicted by Kaganovich upon local officials in the northern Caucasus, and especially in the Ukrainian-settled Kuban. He said bluntly: 395 09 Famines 09.indd 239 13/2/15 09:58:55 240 A. Graziosi Let me remind you that in 1921 we deported the Cossacks who fought Soviet power. . . . You do not like to work here, then we deport you. Someone may object: you cannot do this, it is illegal. Well, that’s not true. It is legal. You take the side against Soviet power, you do not sow, therefore – in the name of state interests – Soviet power has the right to fight against your attitudes. . . . We shall achieve our aims, if not with you – dear comrades – then bypassing you.43 In early November 1932 Molotov and Kaganovich returned briefly to Moscow to report directly to Stalin about what they had seen. It was probably in those very days, around the time when Stalin’s wife committed suicide, that the decision to use the emerging famine conditions as a weapon was decided. The idea was to teach an unforgettable lesson to anyone who refused the ‘new serfdom’, using a brutally simple method: those who would not work in the fields of the collective farms would not eat. Stalin hinted at his thinking in correspondence with the writer, Mikhail Sholokhov, in 1933.44 Sholokhov had pleaded for relief for the Don region, which Stalin rejected, claiming that the ‘esteemed graingrowers’ there were engaged in a ‘ “secret” war against Soviet power’, that ‘they used hunger as a weapon’, for which they would now suffer the consequences, namely famine. In other words, the famine was their own fault. In the northern Caucasus, Kaganovich resorted to fines-in-kind to deprive peasants of meat and potatoes and ‘blacklisted’ entire areas, the goods and reserves of which were systematically removed, even as any new imports were forbidden.45 Local famines, of an entirely artificial sort, were thus induced. Entire villages were deported. Eventually, about 60,000 Kuban Cossacks were exiled, while many more simply starved to death. Since Kuban Cossacks were, largely, of Ukrainian descent, these deportations acquired an unmistakably ethnic dimension. Villages whose inhabitants were deported were then repopulated with former soldiers, mainly non-Ukrainians. Local communist cadres suspected of aiding or abetting the peasants were purged, because – as Stalin said – nobody believed their complaints about the lack of grain, and the State – not the village – took priority when it came to guaranteeing survival. At the end of November 1932 Stalin even maintained that, all things considered, the ‘sabotage’ of collectivisation and of the procurement campaigns was playing a positive role, allowing the Party and State to expose and expunge untrustworthy cadres. Kaganovich, for instance, divided rural communists into three categories: (1) Those unable to work, who because of their ignorance, or stupidity, fell easy prey to the bourgeois specialists’ machinations. (2) The hypocrites who, in the name of compassion and great-heartedness, treated the peasants liberally. (3) Those who were in the service of the enemy.46 Eventually, 15,000 local communists were arrested in the northern Caucasus, 5,000 of them in Kuban, where those of Ukrainian descent – charged with being agents of Petlyura and Piłsudski – suffered the most. Approximately half of the kolkhoz Party secretaries were punished, and many were executed, at times for the crime of ‘populism’ (meaning that they had fed the starving). 395 09 Famines 09.indd 240 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 241 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 In Ukraine an informal centre imposed and controlled by Moscow simply replaced the formerly elected bodies of the Party and Soviet Ukrainian state, leaving Soviet Ukraine governed on what amounted to an emergency basis. On 18 November 1932 Molotov forced the local Central Committee to pass a resolution on the ‘strengthening of procurements’ which ordered peasants to return the meagre food advances they had earlier received in exchange for their labour.47 In the following weeks he was thus able to squeeze another 90 million pud of grain out of the countryside, while – as in northern Caucasus – local officials who dared defend the peasants were fiercely purged. This negative selection rewarded the most brutal with promotion while the relatively more humane comrades were persecuted or committed suicide, as did a district president who, in a final letter addressed to Skrypnyk, wrote: ‘I no longer have the strength to so shamefully abuse my own people.’48 Meanwhile Balitskii, dispatched to Ukraine with Molotov and made head of the republic’s political police, used Stalin’s ‘national interpretation’ of the famine to launch a massive campaign of terror: the primary aim, he said, was to promptly expose, and excise, any rebel and counter-revolutionary activity, a goal that would be achieved by the imposition of harsh punishments on the kulak, counter-revolutionary and Petlyurite elements allegedly sabotaging Party and Soviet policies in the countryside. More than 1,200 counter-revolutionary groups would conveniently be ‘uncovered’ as operating on the Republic’s collective farms: in just one month (15 November to 15 December 1932), the Ukrainian GPU (whose leading troika enjoyed, for a time, the right to autonomously mete out the death penalty) arrested almost 16,000 people, busily destroying underground organisations of its own fabrication, accusing them of trying to exploit famine conditions to instigate insurrections, allegedly in concert with Poland and émigré Ukrainian nationalists. As a pleased Balitskii was to declare the following February, the GPU had thus defeated a well-prepared and coordinated plan whose aim had been to launch an armed revolt in the spring, an insurrection aimed at overthrowing Soviet power and re-establishing an independent Ukrainian republic (an obvious reference to 1919).49 Postyshev resorted to similar, if not as equally harsh, measures in the Volga region during his December tour, even as the crisis gave renewed impetus to repression throughout the Soviet Union.50 The political police arrested 410,000 people in 1932 and more than 500,000 in 1933, 283,000 of them for counter-revolutionary crimes (this figure is possibly an underestimate, given the arbitrariness of governance in the countryside). In 1932/1933 Stalin’s terror thus followed two principal lines, one linked to requisitions, and therefore concentrated in the grain-producing areas, and the other of a more directly political nature, which reached its heights in areas the regime considered particularly dangerous because of past rebellions, the strength of their national movements or their geostrategic location. Where just one of these ‘worries’ existed, the terror, albeit severe, was not as intense in comparison to where two or even three such considerations came into play. Soviet Belarus, for instance, though a western borderland, was not a major grain-producing 395 09 Famines 09.indd 241 13/2/15 09:58:55 242 A. Graziosi region and its national movement was far weaker than that in Soviet Ukraine. Thus, while repression came to Soviet Belarus, it was nowhere near as intense as what would be focused on the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, where Stalin’s ‘worries’ all coincided. And so it came to be that Stalin – who explicitly linked the national question with the peasant one, and recalled only too well what had happened in Ukraine in 1918 to 1922, and again in 1930 – combined his anti-peasant policies with quite effective anti-national ones, inaugurating his campaign with the alreadymentioned resolution on procurements in Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Western region of 14 December 1932. Six days later Kaganovich pushed the Ukrainian Politburo to accept even higher targets of grain procurements. Soon afterwards, he declared that the necessary precondition to reach them was the discovery, and confiscation, of family reserves, so opening the door to mass death.51 Finally, on 22 January 1933, Stalin and Molotov ordered the OGPU to stop the exodus of peasants trying to leave Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban in search of food. The Central Committee and government, they wrote: Do not doubt that this flight of villagers, like the exodus from Ukraine last year, have been organized by enemies of Soviet power, socialistrevolutionaries and Polish agents who use the [fleeing] peasants to agitate against the kolkhoz, and more generally against Soviet power in Northern territories. Last year the Party, Soviet, and Cheka agencies of Ukraine missed this counter-revolutionary undertaking. . . . Last year’s mistakes cannot be repeated this year.52 The Chekists and Party activists were thus given orders ‘to prevent the mass flight of peasants’ from Soviet Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, and to arrest those who attempted to flee. Since Ukrainian cities, while miserably supplied, did have some foodstuffs, they were cordoned off. Over the following months approximately 220,000 people, mainly starving peasants, were arrested and sent back to their villages, there to die. Areas stricken with famine were not extended any help until the spring of 1933 even as Litvinov, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, publicly denied the famine’s existence and the State ‘ferociously fought’ (in Kaganovich’s words) to fulfil its procurement targets. Famine – which, according to Stanislav Kulchytsky, killed approximately 100,000 people in 1932 – took on, as a result of political decisions, a quality and dimensions far more extreme than it would have if nature had followed its course. It did not effect as wide a geographic region as the 1921/1922 famine, nor was drought its cause. In fact the 1932 crop, though quite low, was actually greater than the one that would be harvested in 1945, and the latter did not result in any comparable scale of hunger-related deaths.53 We may therefore conclude that the famine of 1932/1933, which caused three to four times as many victims as that of 1921/1922, was essentially brought about by political decisions made by the Stalinist regime, aimed at saving it from the very crisis to which its own policies had led, assuring the victory of the ‘great offensive’ launched four years previously. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 242 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 243 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Also as a consequence of political choices, the 1932/1933 famine took on profoundly – and at times radically different – features in each of the Soviet republics and regions. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the general conditions of suffering and hardship observed throughout the USSR (the panSoviet famine) and the ‘local’ and far more terrible mass-starvation famines that occurred in specific territories. It is just as important to distinguish between what happened in the cities as compared to what took place in the countryside, both at a pan-Soviet level and in the most-stricken rural areas. In the major Soviet cities, Stalin’s choices took on features that, as extreme as they may seem, cannot be compared with what was done in the grain-producing and predominantly non-Russian rural areas. At the end of 1932, for example, in order to strengthen control over urban and industrial centres, and to prevent any repetition of the unrest that had been evident that spring, the Politburo launched a mass ‘cleansing’ of major urban-industrial centres. This was done by reintroducing, only for urban residents, an internal passport system, akin to the one that had existed in Tsarist times, and whose abolition had once been vaunted as one of the great victories of the October Revolution.54 In January 1933 Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkiv, then Soviet Ukraine’s capital, were the first cities to be ‘passportized’. Kyiv, Odesa and Minsk, all major urban centres situated within 100 kilometres of the western border, and industrial boom towns such as Magnitogorsk, underwent the procedure in the spring. Everywhere, thousands, and often scores of thousands, of vagrants, ‘unreliable elements’, people with ‘a suspicious past’, were removed from the cities in which they had been living and working. The comparatively lucky were dropped off in the countryside, 100 kilometres or so from their previous residences. Those less fortunate were exiled to hinterland locations where, at times, they met a fate even more terrible than that of dekulakised peasants.55 Since the regime provisioned the ‘cleansed cities’ far better than others, the internal passports, a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for securing a residence permit, represented a coveted entitlement. Moscow and Leningrad were thus only slightly touched by famine: in the first quarter of 1933, for example, the Soviet capital received 165,000 tons of grain, plus 86,000 for the surrounding district. By contrast, the entire Soviet Ukrainian Republic, with a far larger population, received only 280,000 tons.56 Even major cities in Soviet Ukraine witnessed starvation deaths, with Italian and Polish diplomats becoming accustomed to recording the daily removal of the emaciated bodies of those who had somehow bypassed the roadblocks, only to die in the streets of Kharkiv and Kyiv.57 The strategy elaborated in the autumn of 1932 was systematised and sanctioned at the Central Committee plenum of January 1933, where Stalin declared that it was no longer necessary to spur the USSR forward. Industrial investments were thus reduced, and factories were told to raise productivity by reducing the labour force. In the countryside special ‘political sections’, charged with controlling the collective farms and their kolkhozniki, were established in the Machine and Tractor Stations (MTS). It was also decided to launch a general purge of the 395 09 Famines 09.indd 243 13/2/15 09:58:55 244 A. Graziosi Party, whose rural structures had already been reduced in previous months. Command over this effort rested with Nikolai Ezhov, an uncultivated Stalinist henchman who, under his master’s guidance, was to transform this purge into what came to be known as the ‘Great Terror’ in 1936 to 1938. Meanwhile Postyshev, accompanied by hundreds of cadres, was dispatched from the Centre, entrusted with ‘normalising’ the Ukrainian Party, the latter being deemed to be a special case requiring especially careful treatment. Soon after the plenum, at the first congress of collective farm workers, held in February 1933, Stalin stated that the main difficulties of the past had been overcome, and that existing problems were not as bad as what had gone before. Possibly, from his perspective, this was true: he was indeed winning his war against the countryside. In the villages, however, and especially in Soviet Ukraine, the tragedy was just then reaching its acme. As Kosior reported on 15 March 1933, so confirming that hunger had been deliberately used to teach the population a lesson, ‘the unsatisfactory course of sowing in many areas’ showed ‘that famine still [hadn’t] taught reason to many kolkhozniki’.58 New repressive measures were thus adopted, such as prohibiting the sale of meat and grain on the kolkhoz market, no longer being made available even to those who had fulfilled their quotas if they lived in areas that had not completely complied with the requisitioning agenda. In March a new law on seasonal work restricted any chance of peasants leaving their home districts, making it necessary for them to first obtain a permit from the kolkhoz authorities. A resolution was also passed which redefined as a kulak any peasant unable or unwilling to fulfil his labour and procurement obligations towards the State.59 This measure opened up the prospect of another round of mass deportations similar to those of 1930/1931. However, such plans, while they were drafted, were not executed. Even so, in March, still fearing peasant uprisings, Moscow decided to remove from Soviet Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the central Black Earth Region anyone who had been sentenced to more than two years, so eliminating every potential danger. Throughout 1933 another 270,000 peasants were deported. Even the Gulag administration complained about the condition of these deportees (as many as 3 per cent died during transport). The situation was likewise dire in the ‘special villages’. Some 90,000 of the 1.3 million people living in them died in 1932, and in 1933 the number of deaths, generally caused by starvation, passed the 150,000 mark. It is also reasonable to assume that many of the 200,000 registered as having escaped from their ‘special’ villages actually died of hunger or exposure, a fact local administrations were unwilling to admit.60 In the early months of 1933 people starved to death in many regions across the Soviet Union, more so in the smaller centre than in larger cities, and especially so in the prisons, Gulag camps and special settlements. Above all, however, people perished in the rural areas, where between 25 and 30 million peasants suffered severe food shortages. In Soviet Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region the extraordinary requisitions launched in November 1932 deprived villagers of their food reserves, supplies essential to carry these 395 09 Famines 09.indd 244 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 245 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 communities over the winter and into the next harvest. While secreting food allowed some to survive for a time, once those stocks were depleted the population foraged for whatever else was edible – dogs, cats, fish, rats, small animals, roots, tree bark, even weeds. By mid- to late January 1933 death from starvation became ubiquitous. Possibly 80 per cent of the more than four million Ukrainians who perished during the Holodomor did so in the compressed period of time between March and May 1933, the most intense mass extermination to occur in the twentieth-century history of Europe, a fact still unrecognised. Throughout the USSR the months of April and May 1933 witnessed extensive mortality, with as many as five million deaths occurring (one or more million deaths, previously attributed to the period between late 1932 and early 1933, were actually people who had died in the previous two years). Aside from the losses in Soviet Ukraine, 1.3 to 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan (where the dying started earlier, exterminating between 33 and 38 per cent of the Kazakhs and 8 to 9 per cent of the Slavic/European population), along with several hundred thousand victims in the northern Caucasus (where the father of the future CPSU general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, lost three of his brothers) and, on a lesser scale, in the Volga region.61 Other Russian regions, larger cities and major industrial centres also suffered, with deaths in such places numbering in the thousands, the deaths generally occurring among people living outside the ‘special regime’ (that is, outside the passportised areas). In Transcaucasia the crisis hit far less harshly. Local leaders – traditionally hostile to the Slavic penetration of their homelands – were more worried about halting the inflow of refugees from the famine-blighted lands. If we consider annual mortality rates per thousand inhabitants in the countryside for the USSR as a whole, and make 1926 equal to 100, we see an increase during 1933 to 188.1 across the USSR and an increase to 138.2 in the RSFSR (which then included both Kazakhstan and the Kuban, meaning that the figure for Russia proper is lower). The increase in Soviet Ukraine rose to 367.7, almost triple what was happening elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Life expectancy at birth dropped from 42.9 years for men and 46.3 for women registered in 1926 to, respectively, 7.3 and 10.9 in 1933 (it was 13.6 and 36.3 in Ukraine in 1941). In addition, in Ukraine there were 782,000 births in 1932 but only 470,000 in 1933, compared with an average of 1.153 million per year for the period from 1926 to 1929.62 As we know, differences in the severity of the death-tolls over the entire USSR are explained by the famine’s different course, for which the varying policies Moscow imposed were largely responsible. The same applies to the variation in the intensity of the famine in Soviet Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region. Here, too, large cities and industrial centres suffered far less than villages, while border areas were known to have received better supplies, for strategic and political reasons. Death rates were thus unevenly distributed, even within Soviet Ukraine, with regions such as Kyiv, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Kharkiv suffering a decline in population of 25 per cent or more, as was the case in the Kuban. Northern regions, bordering 395 09 Famines 09.indd 245 13/2/15 09:58:55 246 A. Graziosi Soviet Russia, fared better, as did the Donetsk mining and heavy industrial area.63 As the Army Political Directorate reported to Voroshilov in 1933, the most terribly affected areas were those in which the Bolsheviks had traditionally encountered ‘special difficulties in the class war’.64 Here the famine took on unmistakably deliberate features. Mortality thus depended on residency, urban or rural, and not explicitly on nationality, meaning that people living in the countryside suffered regardless of their ethnic background. Yet one cannot forget that the rural areas of this Soviet republic remained overwhelmingly Ukrainian-populated. Meanwhile, the bettersupplied cities largely preserved their Russian, Jewish and Polish character. Thus, the countryside was targeted for the purpose of breaking the peasants because they were understood to represent the spine of the Ukrainian nation, the core of its resistance to Soviet rule. What did Stalin know of the consequences of his decisions, and how did he respond to the information he received? Documents exist confirming that key local leaders – such as Turar Ryskulov and Stanislav Kosior – sent Stalin detailed information about the famine, as did intellectuals like Sholokhov who, on 4 April 1933, addressed him a 16-page letter describing the procurement operations being carried out in the Don region: I will never be able to forget what I saw. By night, under a cruel wind, in the frost, when cold made even dogs hide, the families evicted from their houses lit fires in the street and gathered around them. Children wrapped in rags lay on the earth the fire had thawed. . . . A woman with an infant went from house to house asking for shelter. To let her in was forbidden, and in the morning the infant was dead in his mother’s arms.65 Sholokhov recorded painstakingly the methods used to intimidate the peasants: mass beatings, naked people left to freeze outdoors, feigned executions, torture with red-hot irons, suffocation, and similar cruelties. In addition, he informed Stalin that these brutalities were carried out on instructions received from above rather than being excesses indulged in by misguided local activists. Stalin also received OGPU reports which did not pretend that ‘enemy’ machinations were somehow at the root of the problems existing in the countryside. Instead these memoranda accurately described the famine, the resulting mass mortality and cannibalism, and the corresponding growth of anti-Soviet sentiment. Towards the end of 1932 Stalin also received rather precise data about the famine’s demographic effects.66 However, as Khlevniuk has noted, Stalin not only rejected the idea that he was in any way responsible for the famine (the very existence of which would repeatedly be denied publicly) but he even circulated a contrary explanation for what was happening, built upon a mixture of lies and clever reinterpretations of reality. First of all, any link between his policies and mass starvation was rejected: the responsibility for famine, Stalin insisted, lay with enemy sabotage and with the opposition, combined with the thievery and ignorance of the 395 09 Famines 09.indd 246 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 247 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 peasants, who did not understand the need to put the State’s interests before their own. These very same malignant and maligning elements also purposely exaggerated the famine’s real dimension: all reports of famine were nothing, in other words, but tools in the fight against Soviet power. By claiming that the real culprits were the very peasants actually dying from the famine, and insisting that all accounts deliberately inflated its real scale, Stalin freed himself from any obligation to help the starving.67 It is known that in the summer of 1932 Moscow held grain reserves (1.4 million tons) sufficient to feed approximately four million people for one year. Those stocks were never deployed to feed the hungry. Instead, in 1933, 220,000 tons were exported and no food was imported, nor was any proffered foreign aid accepted. Mass death from starvation could have been averted but was not because the Stalinist regime did not, as yet, wish to end the famine, because it served their geopolitical ends. In the early spring of 1933, even despite their catastrophic situation, some peasants were still resisting. As the Italian vice-consul in Novorossiisk reported to Rome in April: The terms of the struggle remain the same: the rural masses passively but effectively resist; the Party and the government are determined to suppress their resistance. . . . The peasant revolt (it cannot be called otherwise) is too vast to be effectively controlled and suffocated, and has disrupted the kolkhoz. Yet, force is but on one side: peasants are just an amorphous, clearly powerless mass. Starving peasants are completely destitute, and no organization, certainly not the persecuted church, keeps their spirit and resistance alive, yet their resistance is not sapped. To a well-equipped and resolute army, villages do not oppose an army of their own, not even the bands and the brigandage that have always accompanied rural revolts. Perhaps here lies the peasants’ strength, or, rather, the reason of their enemies’ failure. The well-armed and very powerful Soviet apparatus cannot look for victory in the open field; the enemy does not regroup, is everywhere, and the battle – that cannot be joined – is rather reduced to a neverending series of very small, minimal operations: an un-weeded field here, a few quintals of grain hidden there, tractors that do not work properly, go around in circles, or are maliciously broken everywhere.68 In those very same weeks, however, hunger was ‘winning’ the war. As a senior Soviet official wrote following a tour in the Don region, ‘in most villages the “conspiracy of silence” [peasants had stopped talking to local authorities] has been broken. People speak again at meetings, and they do so to ask for bread, promising that once food will come, work will be properly done.’69 He added that a small increase in the number of those reporting for work could be noted, even though ‘generalized sabotage’ was not yet over. The handing out of approximately 1.3 million tons of seed grain, and of more than 300,000 tons in food aid – a proportion reflecting the regime’s priorities – sealed Moscow’s victory. That 395 09 Famines 09.indd 247 13/2/15 09:58:55 248 A. Graziosi summer, Germany’s agricultural attaché, Dr Otto Schiller, returning after a road trip through parts of Soviet Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, told Bernardo Attolico, the Italian ambassador to Moscow, that ‘the secret of the Ukrainian agriculture’s revival’ lay precisely in the fact that ‘peasants were not left with any other choice than working for the government in exchange for a minimum of food, or literally starving to death’. In those very weeks Piłsudski was forced to admit that the mass starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry represented a victory for Stalin. By the time these conclusions were reached, the Stalinist triumph was indeed complete. In July, Attolico reported to Mussolini what the German diplomat had told him, namely that ‘stuck in their villages, and deprived of the possibility to beg for food in the cities’, Ukrainian peasants had finally understood that the only way to survive was to work for the Soviet State.70 Of course, resistance and localised rebellions did not disappear entirely, and peasant labour did not become particularly efficient (laying the basis for Soviet agriculture’s intrinsic weakness), yet the Bolsheviks finally realised their longheld dream of extracting from the countryside what they deemed they needed, without fairly compensating peasants for their industry.71 After the summer of 1933, while Stalinist leaders gloated, the State was able to seize, without difficulty, more than 30 per cent of what proved to be a rather poor crop.72 National repression and terror His understanding of the fact that in Ukraine and the Kuban the peasant question was also a national question strengthened Stalin’s determination to ‘solve’ both as one. In order to make sure that the solution he imposed would be final it was complemented by a decision to purge the nation’s elites, suspected, as they were, of abetting peasant resistance. On 14 and 15 December 1932, the Politburo passed two secret decrees that reversed, but only in Ukraine, the official nationality policies originally announced in 1923. Since the view from Moscow was that korenizatsiya, as implemented originally in Soviet Ukraine and in Kuban, had not undermined nationalistic feelings but had instead helped them grow, producing ‘enemies with a Party card in their pocket’, that situation must now be reversed. Peasants were obviously not the only ones responsible – they shared the blame with Soviet Ukraine’s intelligentsia, its political and cultural elites, who would now be repressed. A few days later, on 19 December, similar if less harsh measures were also imposed on Soviet Belarus, where – as in Ukraine – the peasant and the national questions largely coincided, and had caused problems during the Civil War, even if not on the same scale as in Ukraine. Here, too, in early March, the Republican Party was accused of abetting nationalism, resulting in local Party cadres and the Belarusian intelligentsia suffering for these ‘crimes’. even if there was no reversal of ‘Belarusisation’.73 Working from this premise, Ukrainization programs were also discontinued in the Soviet Russian Republic. Several million Ukrainians who, following the border delimitations of the mid-1920s, found themselves living in the RSFSR, 395 09 Famines 09.indd 248 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 249 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 lost the educational, press and communal rights which other nationalities continued to enjoy. As a result the 1937 Soviet census would reveal that only three million citizens of the RSFSR identified themselves as Ukrainian, compared to the 7.8 million who had done so in 1926 (at least part of this decline was caused when Kazakhstan, previously an autonomous republic within the RSFSR, became a union republic).74 Soon afterwards, an attack on the Ukrainian language was launched in Ukraine itself. Stalin was not, however, content with just the indirect consequences of his policies, which would have brought about the re-Russification of Ukraine’s cities and would have long-term and significant consequences still evident in contemporary Ukraine. His aim was to simultaneously transform the Ukrainian language into a second-rate and subordinate one, which upwardly mobile people would abandon in favour of Russian. Thus policies were put into place aimed at bringing the Ukrainian language closer to Russian. As this happened, thousands of state officials who had earlier been tasked with promoting Ukrainisation lost their jobs, if not suffering even worse fates.75 While in Kharkiv, according to Italian diplomats, top GPU officials boasted of changing the ‘ethnographic material’ of the countryside, at the Central Committee plenum of February 1933 Skrypnyk was attacked because ‘not only did he not wage a struggle against . . . the bourgeois-nationalist line on the questions of creating Ukrainian scholarly terminology, he also facilitated this distortion of the line on the linguistic front’.76 This was equated with ‘separating the Ukrainian language from the Russian language’. Skrypnyk was also criticised for his ‘theory of a mixed dialect’, according to which children of ethnic Ukrainians who spoke surzhyk (an Ukrainian-Russian patois) were supposed to begin their schooling in the Ukrainian language, thus preparing for the transformation of Ukraine into a completely Ukrainian-speaking republic. In addition, he was accused of having introduced a scholarly-based, nationwide orthography of the Ukrainian language, which included the linguistic features of both Soviet-ruled Ukraine and western Ukraine. This orthography, confirming the separateness of the Ukrainian language, impeded the process of bringing it closer to Russian, and so was deemed unacceptable.77 Meanwhile, hundreds of middle and local cadres and intellectuals continued to be repressed, at times even sentenced to death for alleged sabotage or for having ‘undermined agriculture and caused a famine in the country’ (accusations that reflected reality much better than official propaganda which continued to deny the existence of famine conditions). Among them was Skrypnyk’s secretary Esternyuk, born in Galicia and accused of being a member of another concocted body, the Ukrainian Military Organisation. While Skrypnyk energetically defended himself, Esternyuk, under duress, confessed to being involved in the counter-revolutionary activities of this clandestine organisation. Other ‘Galician’ intellectuals – often refugees from Poland, until recently called ‘western Ukrainians’ – were quickly arrested, while in both the Party and State a wave of deUkrainisation began, signalled among other things by a switch from the use of Ukrainian to the Russian language in many newspapers, journals and university 395 09 Famines 09.indd 249 13/2/15 09:58:55 250 A. Graziosi classes. More than 2,000 officials of the Commissariat of Education –which had been the hearth of Ukrainization – were removed, including almost the entire senior management of the Commissariat’s oblast directorates. The publication of Ukrainian dictionaries was also suspended, new editions began incorporating Russian terms and the 1928 Ukrainian orthography was abolished.78 Scores of Ukrainian writers were also arrested. Not surprisingly these measures precipitated deep angst among Soviet Ukraine’s national-communist leaders and intellectuals. In May the most important Soviet Ukrainian writer, Mykola Khvylovy, committed suicide. Skrypnyk, who tried to answer the criticisms directed at his work by penning an essay on nationality policies, had his efforts rebuffed by the Ukrainian Politburo, and was mercilessly criticised on the eve of the Ukrainian Central Committee plenum of June 1933, where Postyshev once more attacked Skrypnyk’s orthographic reforms and branded all attempts at promoting Ukrainian among the working classes as counterrevolutionary. In despair, but reportedly willing to say ‘everything’, Skrypnyk considered personally confronting Stalin but his wife convinced him not to, threatening to herself commit suicide if he did so. Thus, on 7 July 1933, he went to a Politburo meeting carrying a document acknowledging his guilt but then left the room and retired to his office where he took his own life. With the repression of thousands of its cadres, and the death of its leaders, the Soviet Ukrainian national-communist experiment that had emerged during the Civil War thus came to an end. Skrypnyk’s suicide ended his denigration in public (Stalin, almost respectfully, spoke about Skrypnyk’s ‘biblical fall’) but the anti-Ukrainian purge continued. In November the Central Committee repeated that the most dangerous enemy lurking in Soviet Ukraine was Ukrainian nationalism, supporting, and itself shored up by, the threat of foreign intervention, a reversal of the view that the greatest hindrance to the emergence of ‘Soviet man’ was Great Russian chauvinism. Postyshev boasted of the purge of nationalistic-minded personnel in the educational system, which included the firing of 4,000 ‘hostile’ teachers. Soon afterwards, at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, he confirmed that the Ukrainian Party organisation had been ruled directly and firmly from Moscow. A few weeks later, he asked the GPU, which was still engaged in ‘uncovering’ counter-revolutionary organisations, to evict from their apartments and deport to the north the families of all those who had been arrested or executed as nationalists, their relatives losing their jobs even as their sons were expelled from their schools. This 1933/1934 anti-Ukrainian terror thus portended what would happen during the ‘Great Terror’ in 1936 to 1938, when some of the ‘cases’ the GPU had fabricated in Soviet Ukraine were reopened and used against senior leaders in Moscow, such as Georgy Piatakov. The Terror thus started in Soviet Ukraine, as Lev Kopelev maintained, and it is possible to say that Ukrainians – including those starving in the Kuban, or losing their national rights in the Soviet Russian republic – were actually the first nation to be ‘punished’ by Stalin.79 This explains why Stanislav Kulchytsky challenged Viktor Danilov’s 395 09 Famines 09.indd 250 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 251 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 remark that Ukrainians suffered fewer losses than Russians in 1937/1938. Kulchytsky noted, accurately, that Soviet Ukraine had already been visited by the Terror in 1932 to 1934, when the security organs arrested approximately 200,000 people, almost as many as the total of all those who would be victimised in later years.80 Conclusions: the question of genocide It would be wrong, at present, to suggest that we know exactly or entirely what happened in 1931 to 1934: much remains to be learned from new research on the causes of the Soviet famines, their mechanics, geographical variations, chronology, and the long-term consequences of the enormous human suffering they caused, particularly to the psychological and spiritual well-being and subsequent social and political behaviour of the surviving millions. Yet much has been uncovered and, with a few exceptions, many past controversies about the nature, course and consequences of these famines have become the subjects of learned discourse rather than of polemical exchanges. The effort to reach a consensus on at least the crucial features of the Ukrainian tragedy is still, however, hampered by difficulties not only of an intellectual or documentary nature. The definition of the Holodomor, its post-Soviet use in the process of Ukrainian nation building, and consequential Russian–Ukrainian arguments over responsibility – as groundless as they may be, given that both nations were victims of the Stalinist regime in the 1930s – still distort scholarly discourse, especially over the question of whether or not the famine in Soviet Ukraine was a genocide. On the one hand, there is the ‘genocide thesis’ that sees in the events of 1932/1933 a famine organised in order to alter or destroy the Ukrainian nation’s social and demographic fabric, a concerted effort aimed at undermining this nation’s ability to resist the transformation of the USSR into what it became under Stalin: a despotic empire. Given what happened up until the autumn of 1932, this variant of the genocide thesis is inadequate. On the other side, there are historians, including V. Danilov, R. Davies, S. Wheatcroft and V. Kondrashin, who, though acknowledging the criminal nature of Stalin’s policies, deem it necessary to study the famine as a ‘complex phenomenon’. They maintain that the famine was the unplanned result of Stalin’s catastrophic anti-peasant policies; that the regime used it to force peasants to work for the kolkhoz; that the famine had regional peculiarities which determined its scale and consequences, being intense in the areas of full collectivisation, where the State faced the reactive resistance of the peasantry and the threat of an agricultural collapse; that the situation in Soviet Ukraine was defined by its role as grain provider, by the extent of peasant opposition, and by the measures taken to eradicate this resistance to prevent the collapse of the kolkhoz system; that the Ukrainian crisis did give the Stalinist regime a pretext for also tackling national problems, but, they insist, the famine was not engineered to resolve the national question but was instead a consequence of the 395 09 Famines 09.indd 251 13/2/15 09:58:55 252 A. Graziosi problems of the kolkhoz system, an economic and political crisis resolved using brutal methods reflecting the personality of the leader; and, finally, they point out that the famine did not distinguish among people of different nationalities. As such they conclude that there was no genocide but rather a more widespread tragedy involving the Soviet countryside as a whole, obviously including Ukraine and Russia.81 While all of the above observations are partially true, these historians ignore Stalin’s view of ‘the national question’ being ‘in essence a peasant question’. As a result, they focus on the ‘pan-Soviet’ phenomena and largely ignore the different outcomes of Stalin’s policies at the national level. Above all, they do not fully appreciate the crucial turning point which took place in the autumn of 1932 when, in Soviet Ukraine, the Kuban, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region, a ‘spontaneous’ famine was made into a politically orchestrated one that would continue to ravage the rural communities of Soviet Ukraine and adjacent lands well into the summer of 1933. In short, Stalin transformed a famine that his policies had inadvertently caused into a weapon of state power. Instead of ameliorating an existing famine in Soviet Ukraine, as he could have done, Stalin instead instituted what has come to be known as the Holodomor. Did he intend to eradicate the entire Ukrainian nation? No. But he did wish to emasculate it through the decimation of its peasantry, the purging of its intelligentsia and the cowing of its Republican Party cadres, all accompanied by the undoing of Ukrainisation. Stalin’s strategy attained some of his designs. While the Soviet famines of 1931 to 1933 had essentially different consequences in each of the different Soviet republics and regions where they occurred, there was also a common, and Union-wide, experience of hunger, suffering and want during this period. Thus, throughout the USSR, the political use of hunger broke peasant resistance; guaranteed Stalin’s victory; opened the door to the subsequent Terror; allowed, by means of the subjugation of the most important republic, the de facto transformation of a avowedly federal state into an empire; and left a dreadful legacy of grief in a multitude of Ukrainian families who were prevented from hallowing their dead or recalling what they had endured as long as the official taboo against any mention of the 1932/1933 famine prevailed, as it would for several decades, even as the Stalinist myth about life having become ‘more joyous’ was promoted. In Soviet Ukraine and in Kazakhstan famine took on unparalleled dimensions. Kazakhstan’s traditional society was seriously disrupted. In Soviet Ukraine not only the nation’s rural core but society’s elites were destroyed or subjugated, significantly impeding and distorting the process of Ukrainian nation building.82 The destruction of this nation involved more than just blunt repression. Postyshev often wore Ukrainian embroidered shirts, he raised monuments to Ukraine’s national bard Taras Shevchenko, he allowed the publication of Ukrainian books and magazines (albeit in much reduced print runs) and even oversaw, in 1933, Kyiv becoming Ukraine’s capital city. But none of these gestures evidenced any genuine sympathy for what may be described as 395 09 Famines 09.indd 252 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 253 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 the Skrypnyk brand of Ukrainisation. Instead, a ‘Bolshevik’ style of indigenisation came to the fore, the main pillar of which remained the promotion of communist cadres of Ukrainian origin provided that they accepted Russification, the Ukrainian-turned-Russian Leonid Brezhnev being a most notable embodiment of the end-product of this process. In many urban centres, where the proportion of ‘ethnic’ Ukrainians continued to grow, almost reaching the 60 per cent mark nationally by 1939 (although, in the major cities, this figure was much lower), cultural Ukrainisation was halted even as two linguistic spheres coalesced, one Russian, the other Ukrainian, the former enjoying preeminence, as Ukrainian language use came to be identified with rural backwardness and social inferiority. Only from this perspective can one explain the much weaker presence in 1941 to 1945 of any organised Ukrainian national movement in eastern Ukraine, in the very region where just such a force had played a vital role during the revolutionary and insurrectionary years of 1917 to 1922 (while, in western Ukraine, namely Galicia and Volyn, which had not been part of the USSR until late September 1939, a nationalist insurgent movement would vigorously contest Soviet power well into the 1950s). Then came the famine of 1946/1947, once more ravaging a large swathe of Soviet Ukraine.83 The memory of these two tragedies, together with the suffering caused by collectivisation, widespread deportations, the war and the oppression of the late Stalin period, coalesced into an almost uninterrupted continuum of extreme hardship between 1929 and the year of Stalin’s death, 1953, affecting negatively the psychology of a large proportion of Ukraine’s population over several decades. The Holodomor left its most discernible imprint on the Ukrainian nation’s demographic structures. As another chapter in this volume underscores, over four million people died in Soviet Ukraine in 1933 alone, most of them in the first six months of that year.84 The French demographers France Meslé and Jacques Vallin previously noted that Ukraine’s population without the Holodomor would have been 52 million in 2007 instead of the 46.5 million recorded. Without the subsequent devastation of the Second World War, and of the 1946/1947 famine, Ukraine’s populaton would have been 65.7 million. These statistics expose the intensity and scale of the Ukrainian nation’s losses over a time-span of less than two decades, a crippling legacy that continues to resonate within today’s Ukraine. Intriguingly, Stalin hinted that he knew what he was doing when he used famine as a tool of national destruction. In 1952 he told a Ukrainian Politburo delegation: ‘the history of mankind knows many tragic cases in which entire nations died out because of lack of bread, and were thus cancelled from history.’85 A final note. Both the Holodomor and the Kazakh tragedy share an important feature, namely that the regime bearing responsibility for them succeeded for decades in concealing the truth about what had happened. As a consequence our historical memory of the 1930s, and more generally about the twentieth century, was crafted without reference to these Soviet famines, which this author 395 09 Famines 09.indd 253 13/2/15 09:58:55 254 A. Graziosi considers genocidal.86 That helps explain the harshness of the debates over this period in Soviet history, arguments that were integral to the difficult process that has led to our present-day understanding of the extraordinary dimensions and consequences, moral and interpretive ones included, of what the Soviet regime was, and what it did. To bring awareness of the Holodomor into the collective discourse about Europe’s immediate past we must radically revise the previously received and widely accepted story. That will require time, and it will not be painless. Acknowledgement I am grateful to Professor Lubomyr Luciuk for his editorial comments and assistance with several earlier drafts of this chapter. Notes 1 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the TerrorFamine (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), complemented by the findings of the US Commission on the Ukrainian Famine (James E. Mace (ed.), Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–33: Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988)) and by those of the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932/1933 Famine in Ukraine, reproduced in Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Lisa Grekul (eds), Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2008), 245–351. 2 Among published memoirs see: Viktor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York: Scribner’s, 1946); Semen O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, vol. 2, The Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933 (Detroit, MI: Globe Press, 1955), and Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985). In the mid-1960s Dana G. Dalrymple reviewed the available sources in ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–1934’, Soviet Studies 15(3) (1964), 250–284; 16(4) (1965), 471–474. Diplomatic reports started to be published in the 1980s, including Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan (eds), The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–33 (Kingston: Limestone Press, 1988); Dmytro Zlepko (ed.), Der ukrainische HungerHolocaust (Sonnenbühl: Verlag Helmut Wild, 1988); Andrea Graziosi (ed.), ‘ “Lettres de Char’kov”: La famine en Ukraine et dans le Caucase du Nord à travers les rapports des diplomates italiens’, 1932 to 1934, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 1–2 (1989), 5–106. See also the more complete Lettere da Kharkov: La carestia in Ucraina e nel Caucaso del Nord nei rapporti dei diplomatici italiani, 1932–33 (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1991), and Athanasius D. McVay and Lubomyr Y. Luciuk (eds), The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: University of Toronto, 2011). Historians who mentioned the famine include Naum Jasny, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR: Plans and Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1949); Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; 3rd edn, 1992); Moshe Lewin, ‘ “Taking Grain”: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War’ (1974), now in The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Methuen, 1985), 142–177; and Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). 395 09 Famines 09.indd 254 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 255 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 3 Sergei Maksudov [A. Babyonyshev], Poteri naseleniia SSR (Benson, VT: Chalidze, 1989); Feliks M. Rudych et al. (eds), Holod 1932–1933 rokiv na Ukraïni: Ochyma istorykiv, movoiu dokumentiv (Kyiv: Vyd-vo politychnoï literatury Ukraïny, 1990); Stanislav V. Kulchytsky (ed.), Kolektyvizatsiia i holod na Ukraïni, 1929–1933 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1992); Stanislav V. Kulchytsky (ed.), Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraïni: Prychynyi naslidky (Kyiv: Instytut istoriп Ukraпny NAN Ukraпny, 1995); Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie (Moscow: Magistr, 1996); Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); M.K. Kozybaev et al., Nasil’stvennaia kollektivizatsiia i golod v Kazakhstane v 1931–33 gg (Almaty: XXI vek, 1998); Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v derevne (1928–1933 gg) (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000); V. Danilov, Roberta Manning and Lynne Viola (eds), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie, vol. 3, Konets 1930–1933 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Yury Shapoval and Valery Vasylyev, Komandyry velykoho holodu: Poïzdky V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha v Ukraïnu ta na Pivnichnyi Kavkaz, 1932–1933 rr. (Kyiv: Heneza, 2001); Robert W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk and Edward A. Rees (eds), The Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–36 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Viktor Viktor Kondrashin and D’Ann Penner, Golod: 1932–1933 gody v sovetskoi derevne (na materiale Povolzh’ia, Dona i Kubani) (Samara: Samara University Press, 2002); Volodymyr M. Lytvyn (ed.), Holod 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni: Prychyny ta naslidky (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 2003); Robert W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Niccolò Pianciola, ‘Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928–1934’, Cahiers du monde russe 45(1–2) (2004), 137–192. Some of these sources were compiled by Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl (eds), The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook (Toronto: CIUS Press, 2012). 4 Population loss estimates have been calculated by the demographers France Meslé and Jacques Vallin in Mortalité et causes de décès en Ukraine aux XXe siècle (Paris: Cahiers de l’INED, 2003), translated into English as Mortality and Causes of Death in 20th Century Ukraine (Dordrecht: Springer 2012). More recently their calculations have been refined further. See Omelian Rudnytskyi et al., Chapter 8, this volume. 5 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire; Larisa S. Gatagova et al. (eds), TsK RKP(b)VKP(b) i natsional’nyi vopros, kniga 1, 1918–1933 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), 696–698. 6 Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War; Andrea Graziosi, ‘The Soviet 1931–33 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible and What Would its Consequences be?’, in Hunger by Design, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1–20 (originally published in Ukraine in 2005); Andrea Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin and Stalin (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007); Andrea Graziosi, ‘Why and in What Sense Was the Holodomor a Genocide?’, in Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine, ed. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2008), 139–158; Andrea Graziosi, ‘ “Nezruchnyj klass” u modernizacijnykh proektakh’, Ukraina Moderna 6 (2010), 9–17; my contribution to a forum discussing Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Journal of Cold War Studies 14(3) (2012). Most recently, Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn, ‘Introduction’, in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), xx. 7 Arthur E. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign, 1918–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Andrea Graziosi, Bol’sheviki i krest’iane na 395 09 Famines 09.indd 255 13/2/15 09:58:55 256 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 A. Graziosi Ukraine, 1918–1919 gody (Moscow, AIRO XX, 1997); Stephen Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–1922: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Both Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) and Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian under the Soviets (New York: Putman’s, 1945) vividly describe the entrance into Kyiv of Ukrainian peasant detachments in 1918/1919. See e.g. Lenin’s theses of November 1919, written to dictate the policies to be followed in Ukraine after its reoccupation, in Richard Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). ‘Draft Platform on the National Question for the Fourth Conference, Endorsed by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee’, 9–12 June 1923, in Works, vol. 5, 1921–23 (Moscow, 1952–1954), 297–348; Andrea Graziosi, ‘Vneshniaia i vnutrennaia politika Stalina: o natsional’nom voprose v imperskom kontekste, 1901–1926’, in Istoriia stalinizma: itogi i problemy izucheniia, ed. E. Iu. Kondrashina et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 215–235. Iosif V. Stalin, ‘Concerning the National Question in Yugoslavia’, Bol’shevik 7 (15 April 1925), in Works, vol. 7, 1925, 69–76. James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Bohdan S. Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-century Ukraine (New York: Macmillan, 1985); Martin, Affirmative Action Empire; Graziosi, Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 223–226; TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b) i natsional’nyi vopros, kniga 1, 1918–33. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 89–98. Yuri G. Fel’shtinskii, ‘Konfidentsial’nye besedy Bukharina’, Voprosy istorii 2–3 (1991), 182–203; Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 228–252. Andrea Romano and Nonna Tarkhova (eds), Krasnaia armiia i kollektivizatsiia derevni v SSSR, 1928–1933. Sbornik dokumentov iz fondov RGVA (Napoli: Istituto universitario orientale, 1997). Moshe Lewin, La paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique, 1928–1930 (Paris: Mouton, 1968); Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 241. While it is true that during the First World War Europe’s peasants had been excluded from rationing, no state attempted to take their land and animals or to systematically rob them of the greater part of their produce. In the conditions prevailing in the USSR during the 1930s this exclusion, maintained up until the abolition of rationing at the end of 1934, effectively meant that the Soviet State formally decided not to consider the peasantry as full citizens of Soviet society. Miklos Kun, Bukharin, ego druz’ia i vragi (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), 247. ‘Iz ‘Pis’ma k Fedoru’, Politicheskii dnevnik 25 (October 1966), 148ff. In the summer of 1928 the fact that Stalinist policies could precipitate a famine was discussed openly (in Fel’shtinskii (ed.), ‘Konfidentsial’nye’, 198). Marco Carynnyk, ‘Day for Night: The Death and Life of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’, Kino-Kolo 22 (2004). Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 100. Viktor N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930–1960 (Moscow: Nauka, 2003); Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie; J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930–1953 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997); Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003). Compare the OGPU reports published by Danilov with the testimonies collected in Black Deeds of the Kremlin. V.P. Danilov and Alexis Berelowitch, ‘Les documents des VČK-OGPU-NKVD sur la champagne soviétique, 1918–1937’, Cahiers du monde russe 35 (1994), 633–682. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 256 13/2/15 09:58:55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 257 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 24 Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 2, Noiabr’ 1929-Dekabr’ 1930; Andrea Graziosi, ‘Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales à travers les rapports du GPU d’Ukraine de février-mars 1930’, Cahiers du monde russe 3 (1994), 437–632; Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: Collectivisation et changement social, 1928–1945 (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006). 25 Timothy Snyder, ‘A National Question Crosses a Systemic Border: The Polish-Soviet Context for Ukraine, 1926–1935’, paper presented to the Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia contemporenea, Bozen/Bolzano, 2004. 26 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 249–260. 27 I.V. Stalin, ‘The Tasks of Business Executives: Speech to the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry’, 4 February 1931, in Works, vol. 13 (Moscow, 1954), 31–44. 28 Viktor Kondrashin, ‘La carestia del 1932–33 in Russia e Ucraina: analisi comparativa (cause, dati, conseguenze)’, in La morte della terra. La grande carestia in Ucraina nel 1932–33, ed. Gabriele De Rosa and Francesca Lomastro (Rome: Viella, 2005), 44. 29 Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War, 44; Robert W. Davies, Mark Harrison and Stephen G. Wheatcroft (eds), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 285. 30 Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale, 1905–1936 (Rome: Viella, 2009); Ohayon, Sédentarisation des Kazakhs; Sarah Cameron, ‘The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–1934’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2011. Of special importance is Turar Ryskulov’s detailed letter to Stalin of 9 March 1933, in Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 1928–1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999), 204–225. 31 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (New York: Bantam, 1962); Feliks Ivanovich Chuev (ed.), Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago, IL: I.R. Dee, 1993). 32 Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 3, 420–422. 33 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 296–299; Yury Shapoval, ‘La dirigenza politica ucraina e il Cremlino nel 1932–33: i coautori della carestia’, in De Rosa and Lomastro, La morte della terra, 92. 34 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 273–308. 35 Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 152. 36 Now in Klid and Motyl, Holodomor Reader, 237. 37 Quoted in N.A. Ivnitskii, ‘Golod 1932–33 godov: kto vinovat’, in Golod 1932–33 godov (Moscow,1995), 59. 38 Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, 134, 256, in the original Russian edition; Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 111–129. 39 Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, 273–274, in the original Russian edition. 40 O. Chlevnjuk (Khlevniuk), ‘Stalin e la carestia dei primi anni Trenta’, Storica 11(32) (2005), 27–40. 41 In a 2004 letter to this author, Khlevniuk pointed out that many of Stalin’s policies had what could be called ‘genocidal’ features. ‘No matter what problem arose in the country, it was solved through the application of violence directed at specific and well-defined socio-cultural or national groups of the population.’ These groups and the treatment inflicted upon them, from preventive measures to liquidation, varied over time according to the internal and international situation and the despot’s own beliefs. The Holodomor must be understood against this background. 42 Chlevnjuk, ‘Stalin e la carestia dei primi anni Trenta’. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 257 13/2/15 09:58:55 258 A. Graziosi 43 Loris Marcucci, ‘Il primato dell’organizzazione. Biografia politica di L. Kaganovich’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Università di San Marino, Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici, 1991, 282–283; Shapoval and Vasylyev, Komandyry velykoho holodu. 44 Yuri G. Murin (ed.), Pisatel’ i vozhd’: Perepiska M. A. Sholokhova s I.V. Stalinym 1931–1950 gody (Moscow: Raritet, 1997). 45 Shapoval and Vasylyev, Komandyry velykoho holodu. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Graziosi et al., ‘Introduction’, in After the Holodomor, xx. 49 Yury Shapoval, ‘The Holodomor and its Connection to the Repressions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1934’, in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), xx. 50 Krawchenko, I Chose Freedom; Kondrashin and D’Ann Penner, Golod: 1932–1933 gody v sovetskoi derevne. 51 Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 3, 603, 611. 52 Now in Klid and Motyl, Holodomor Reader, 254. 53 Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War, 60. 54 V.P. Popov, ‘Passportnaia sistema v SSSR (1932–1976 gg)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 8 and 9 (1995), 3–14, 3–13; ‘Izmeneniia pasportnoi sistemy nosiat printsipial’no vazhnyi kharacter’, Istochnik 6 (1997), 101–122; Gijs Kessler, ‘The peasant and the town: rural–urban migration in the Soviet Union, 1929–1940’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, European University Institute, 2001; Graziosi, Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 343–345. 55 Nicholas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 56 Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War, 63. 57 R. Kuśnierz, ‘Głod na Ukrainie w latach 1932–1933’, Dzieje Najnowsze 2 (2007), 129–159; R. Kuśnierz (ed.), Pomór w ‘raju bolzewickim’ (Toruń, 2008); Lettere da Kharkov, 170. 58 Ruslan Pyrih (ed.), Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni (Kyiv: Instytut Istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, Vyd. Dim Kyievo-Mohylians’ka akademiia, 2007), 771. 59 Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v derevne. 60 Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); V.N. Zemskov, ‘Spetsposelentsy’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 11 (1996), 6. 61 Kondrashin and D’Ann Penner, Golod: 1932–1933 gody v sovetskoi derevne. 62 Meslé and Vallin, Mortalité et causes de décès en Ukraine. 63 The rate of population decline in various Ukrainian regions is shown on the map ‘Political Geography of the Holodomor’, in Luciuk (ed.), Holodomor: Reflections, 32. More recently, cartographic work on the demography and geography of the famine has been undertaken at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. See the map of direct losses by oblast and accompanying text found in this volume as well as the complementary chapter by Rudnitskyi et al. (Chapter 8, this volume) 64 In Krasnaia armiia i kollektivizatsiia derevni v SSSR. 65 Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 3, 717–718. 66 Chlevnjuk, ‘Stalin e la carestia dei primi anni Trenta’. 67 Ibid. 68 Lettere da Kharkov, 157–164. 69 Nicolas Werth and Gaël Moullec, Rapports Secrets Soviétiques, 1921–1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 155. 70 Lettere da Kharkov, 192–194. Schiller’s 23 May 1933 report is reproduced as Document 36 in Carynnyk et al., The Foreign Office and the Famine, 258–268. 395 09 Famines 09.indd 258 13/2/15 09:58:56 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stalin’s solution: Soviet Ukraine, 1932/1933 259 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 71 Andrea Graziosi, ‘Stalin, krest’ianstvo i gosudarstvennyi sotsializm, 1927–1951 gg’, in Istoriia stalinizma: krest’ianstvo i vlast’, ed. A.K. Sorokin (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 12–32. 72 Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War, 69. 73 Elsewhere, in Central Asia, as in the Far North or the Far East, there was also a turn in national policies, but on a much lesser scale. The percentage of ‘indigenous’ leading cadres went down at the senior levels but not so much at the medium and lower ones, where it continued to grow; most languages were switched back from a Latin to a Cyrillic alphabet and the unifying role of Russian was extolled. See Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 344–393. 74 Vsesoyuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 g. Kratkie itogi (Moscow: Institut istorii SSSR AN SSSR, 1991). 75 See the above-mentioned forum on N. Naimark’s book, in Journal of Cold War Studies, 165. 76 Lettere da Kharkov, 168. 77 See Hennadii Efimenko, ‘The Kremlin’s Nationality Policy in Ukraine after the Holodomor of 1932–33’, in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), xx; Yury Shapoval, ‘The Holodomor: A Prologue to Repressions and Terror in Soviet Ukraine’, in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), xx. 78 The short-term consequences of the Holodomor – that is, of the way Stalin chose to deal with the Ukrainian question on both the social and the national front – acquired crucial long-term implications whose effects are still evident today, as shown by the importance and the regional peculiarities of the language question in contemporary Ukraine. 79 Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 80 Stanislav Kulchytsky, ‘The Holodomor and Its Consequences in the Ukrainian Countryside’, in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), xx. 81 Viktor Kondrashin, Golod 1932–1933 godov: tragediia rossiiskoi derevni (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008). 82 Graziosi, ‘The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor’, 10. 83 Vladimir F. Zima, Golod v SSSR 1946–1947 godov: proiskhodzhenie i posledstviia (Moscow: Institut istorii SSSR AN SSSR, 1996); Olexandra Veselova’s contribution in After the Holodomor (forthcoming). 84 O. Rudnytskyi, N. Levchuk, O. Wolowyna and P. Shevchuk, ‘Famine Losses in Ukraine in 1932 to 1933 Within the Context of the Soviet Union’, in Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered, ed. D. Curran, L. Luciuk and A. Newby (London: Routledge, forthcoming) (Explorations in Economic History). 85 Valerij Vasylyev (ed.), Politicheskoe rukovodstvo Ukrainy, 1938–1989 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), 168. 86 On the question of genocide see Graziosi, ‘The Soviet 1931–33 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor’, 11. For the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide go to the Yearbook of the United Nations (New York: Department of Public Information, 1948–1949), 959. See also Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 82. Lemkin’s speech, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’ (New York, 1953) is reproduced in Luciuk (ed.), Holodomor: Reflections, appendix A, 235–242. While the 1932/1933 famine was neither an expression of Russian nationalism nor a premeditated plan on Stalin’s 395 09 Famines 09.indd 259 13/2/15 09:58:56 260 A. Graziosi part to destroy the Ukrainian nation – though he did gain politically from the harrowing consequences of his policies to subjugate and emasculate Ukraine, its peasants and its intelligentsia – I accept Lemkin’s position that ‘generally speaking genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation . . . it is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.’ Considering (1) the substantial difference in mortality rates across the different Soviet republics, (2) the millions of Ukrainians who were forcibly Russified after December 1932, including Ukrainian peasants who took refuge in the Soviet Russian Republic, (3) the fact that approximately 20 to 30 per cent of the Ukrainian nation either perished or were subjected to Russification, and remembering that (4) these losses were caused by a political decision, unquestionably subjective, that occurred when Stalin fused an anti-Ukrainian purpose to an existing famine, and that (5) without such a decision the death-toll would have been, at most, in the hundreds of thousands, and remembering, finally (6) the widespread liquidation of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic’s political, religious and cultural elites coupled with deliberate measures adopted to distort the development of the Ukrainian language and culture, then ‘yes’ is the answer to the question ‘Was the Holodomor a genocide?’, as Lemkin himself affirmed. Of course the Ukrainian nation was not extirpated. Stalin well understood that orchestrating such an erasure was both improbable and unnecessary. That said, Ukrainian society still bears the negative demographic, spiritual and political consequences of the Stalinist agenda, being what Professor James Mace once described as a ‘post-genocidal society’. See ‘Spadshchyna holodomoru: Ukraina iak posthenotsydne suspilstvo’. Available at: www. msmb.org.ua/books/thematic_bibliography/292/ (accessed 1 October 2014). 395 09 Famines 09.indd 260 13/2/15 09:58:56 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45