prohibition of almost all possibilities for the securing of raw
materials had a further effect. Under the older system, the Ukrainian
peasants had time, during the winter especially, to work at home and
to supply themselves most of their need for manufactured articles.
They were able to work in leather and in cloth and wood. This was now
rendered impossible, for the individual plots were too small to furnish
the necessary raw materials and the peasants were forced, if they would
satisfy their most immediate needs, to rely upon the goods turned out
by the state factories. These goods were always inferior in quality and
short in quantity, for the whole point of the Five Year Plan was to
develop heavy industry as rapidly as possible and the government took
no interest in seeing that the villages were supplied with consumers’
goods. It concentrated its attention on those branches which could
be of use in military preparations. Even when petitions were made by
the Soviets in Odesa and Kharkiv for permission to establish textile
factories, they were peremptorily told that the plan provided for the
establishment of such plants only in selected parts of the RSFSR. Thus
to the local shortage was added the costs of distant transportation,
which made the price prohibitive even for the goods that were received.
In 1931 almost the entire grain reserves were removed from Ukraine and
the peasants had nothing to carry over, and when in 1932 there came a
drought in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the peasants had no supplies.
This did not bother the authorities. During 1931 and 1932 they
collected from the peasants all that they could. The next step was to
tighten the laws.
On August 6, 1932 the TsK VKP/b and the Soviet of Commissars issued
a decree for the “protection of socialist property.” Under this law
the stealing of a single ear of grain from a kolhosp granary could be
punished by confinement for ten years in a concentration camp. It was
so interpreted that if a peasant picked up a single stalk from the
field after the harvest, he was liable for the same punishment. In
other words, the peasant could only secure his grain legally from and
through the administration of the kolhosp.
With this law on the books, the Ukrainian collective farms could be
punished either for failing to protect “socialist property” or they
could be attacked for failing to present to the government crops and
grain in an amount equal to that foreseen by the plan. This was the
easier because there were few of the kolhosps that had been able to
sow the area required of them. Lack of intelligent and competent
leadership on the farms and the exigencies of the weather made it
almost inevitable that there would be deficiencies, especially since
the schedules were made up in Moscow and took no account of the local
conditions.
As the grain deliveries lagged, the demands increased and on January
24, 1933, the Central Committee of the VKP/b issued a new resolution
that “it was regarded as proved that the party organization of Ukraine
had not carried out the tasks assigned to it in organizing grain
deliveries and executing the grain plan.”
To remedy this, the central authorities ordered the formation of
political detachments in the machine tractor stations, “the chief basic
tasks of which were the insuring of the unconditional and immediate
execution by the kolhosps and their members of all their obligations
to the state and especially the decisive struggle with the stealing of
kolhosp property, the struggle with the manifestations of sabotage of
the income of the party and the government in the sharing of the grain
supplies and the meat products of the kolhosps.”
The leaders of these detachments were given the obligation “to secure
the constant lawful and accurate fulfilment of the laws of the Soviet
government by administrative and criminal measures against the
organizers of the stealing of Soviet property and the sabotage of
the income of the party and the government in the branch of village
agriculture.”
The machine tractor stations were staffed by men largely alien to the
Ukrainian countryside. The more fanatical Communists were placed in
these political detachments and were, in effect, told to supplement
or replace the local administration in the exercise of pressure and
terror upon both the heads and the members of the kolhosps. To aid
them in their work Moscow sent to Ukraine a Russian Pavel Postyshev as
a special plenipotentiary of the Central Committee with 7,000 party
workers from the Russian Republic.
The work of these special “commissions” and “brigades” was marked by
the utmost severity. They entered the villages, and made the most
thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up
the earth, broke into the walls of buildings and the stoves in which
the peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food. They even in
places took specimens of the fecal matter from the toilets in the
effort to learn in that way by analysis whether the peasants had stolen
government property and were eating grain. Wherever they found any, the
peasants were severely punished, while the detachments carried off not
only grain but everything edible.
The same reports came from every corner of Ukraine. “They requisitioned
everything that could be eaten” was the report from the village of
Zorich in the district of Poltava. In one village in the district of
Odesa, “they collected all the grain, potatoes, beets to the last
kilogram” and in other places they even took half-baked loaves of bread
from the stove. In at least one of these commissions, Molotov, then
head of the Council of Ministers, took a personal part.
The natural result was a famine of unprecedented severity. The villages
had been hungry in the autumn. After these searches commenced,
they literally starved. An Englishman, M. Magridge, wrote in the
_Fortnightly Review_ for May, 1933: “During a recent visit to Ukraine,
I have seen a little of the war which the Soviet government is
carrying on against the peasants. The fields were waste as in a real
war and the poverty had spread still further. On one side there were
millions of peasants with bodies swollen from hunger; on the other
side, soldiers, members of the GPU, carrying out the orders of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. They hurled themselves on the region
like a pack of locusts and seized everything edible. They shot and
hung thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they made of the
richest country in the world a melancholy wilderness.”
Reports from all sections of Ukraine have listed with depressing
regularity the articles of food that were eaten. They included grass,
weeds, bark, dead animals, field mice, dogs, cats. Finally, cannibalism
broke out and in many places sausages were found that were made of
human flesh, either of people who had died or who were killed for food.
The extent of this last is shown when in 1936, among the prisoners
of Solovki, there were three hundred twenty-five persons guilty of
cannibalism, seventy-five men and two hundred and fifty women.
An observer in the spring of 1933 gives this picture of a Ukrainian
village: “In the centre of the village, beside the ruins of the church
which had been blown up was the bazaar. All the people in it had
swollen faces, they were not talkative, but were silent and speechless.
Their movements were unsteady, for their legs and arms were swollen.
They sold or bought cornstalks, pounded corncobs, a black powder made
of Russian thistle, roots, and the lower parts of water plants. This
assortment of village wares was a diet which did not save the people
from death by starvation but merely by increasing their sufferings,
postponed it a little.”
The agronome A. S. who in March and April, 1933, was in the villages
of Izbinske and Starytsya, Vovchansky region, Kharkiv district, wrote:
“The people daily died in dozens. The corpses lay in the houses for
several days for there was no one to bury them. Pits were dug in the
cemeteries with great difficulty, large enough to hold several persons.
The corpses were piled on carts like wood and carried to the pits and
thrown in like logs without any of the customary or religious rites.
They fell as they would, head down, or on their side or standing--a
terrible sight. The gravedigger of to-day might be a corpse to-morrow.”
The bodies of the dead lay in all the villages, along the roads and
in the fields. Special brigades were formed in the villages to bury
the dead but they were too weak to collect all the corpses and these
were devoured by those dogs which had escaped being eaten and had gone
savage. The roads were deserted for it was dangerous for one or two
people to walk together because of the danger of attack by robbers who
sought to rob them or to kill them for cannibalistic purposes.
Under such conditions many of the people closed up their huts tightly,
lighted their stoves and inhaled the fumes to commit suicide.
In the spring, when those who had survived broke from the fields the
unripe ears of grain, they were seized by the government agencies
on the charge of stealing socialist and government property, while
the “light cavalry,” the armed Comsomols and the members of the
Communist Party, shot these “barbers,” as they were called in the press
contemptuously, like hares.
Thousands tried to secure work in the state agricultural enterprises
(the radhosps). The agronome B. B. wrote: “In going around the
experimental station in Poltavshchyna, I saw under a haystack a number
of people. To my questions, the manager of the station, a Russian in
origin, told me that they were peasants of the neighborhood who had
come in large numbers to the radhosp, hoping to find work and thus have
the money to buy food. Since they did not have the strength to return
home, they lay down under the haystack. Many died there and he added,
pointing to fresh earth, ‘There are the mounds where we buried those
individualists. What trouble the Khakhals have been.’”
The younger and more venturesome fled to other Soviet Republics in
search of work and food. Thousands departed from Ukraine without
permission, for this was not given, and crowded the offices of the
railroads, the wharfs and the junctions. They often found a tragic
end. Prof. O. O. tells of a case of which he was a witness. “In March,
1933, at the station in Vladikavkaz (Caucasus) there gathered a mass
of peasants with bags on their backs, waiting for a freight train.
Agents of the NKVD held them up and took away their grain. They begged
together and singly and prayed but it did not help. Then one peasant
climbed out on a high tree near the station and began to cry out about
all the horrors of the famine in Ukraine. He cursed the party, the
government, its leaders and the NKVD. A crowd quickly gathered and
soon came the agents of the NKVD who began to harangue the hearers and
urged the ‘orator’ to come down quickly, threatening him with life
imprisonment. He was immovable; then the NKVD called for the local fire
department who were told to turn their hoses on the tree. The peasant
climbed higher and then suddenly threw himself down like a stone.”
In the spring of 1933 the starving masses with their gray faces moved
into the large cities. They formed lines for the “buying of bread”[1]
or, begging, they surrounded the mills. They died by thousands in the
streets of Kharkiv, Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, and the other cities. In many
cases the police cars simply picked up the dead and dying every morning
and carried them out of the city where they were thrown into pits.
There were established in the cities and their environs “therapeutic
hospitals” near which were vans covered with tarpaulins. These were
used to collect the sufferers and the hospitals were simply places to
separate the dead and the dying.
[1] In the beginning of 1933 at the height of the famine in Ukraine,
the USSR opened shops in the cities where grain was sold at a doubled
price, i.e. commercial prices--4 karb. for 1 kg. of white and 3 karb.
for 1 kg. of black bread. The peasant received from the government
for the obligatory “sale” of grain 90 kop. for 16 kg. of wheat. These
commercial prices had to be paid for in foreign currency or in gold or
silver.
The children suffered terribly and thousands were picked up on the
streets. Parents often abandoned their children, usually near police
stations, in the hope that they would be picked up and taken to refugee
camps but here they were little better off. Prof. M. M. testified that
near Kharkiv the “NKVD opened a large children’s concentration camp,
the ‘Barracks of death’ as it was termed” and here by poor treatment
at least forty percent of the ten thousand gathered in, died.
The urban population felt the shortage because of the reduction of
the bread ration for the unemployed to two hundred grams a day. The
majority could not patronize the commercial shops for they had nothing
with which to pay and the legal allowance of other products as fat,
sugar and barley were either reduced or omitted. Even the more highly
qualified of the intelligentsia were obliged to sell all their trinkets
and gold teeth to secure some food. The prices allowed were ridiculous.
One teacher at these stores received for a silver dollar “500 grams of
sugar, a piece of soap and 200 grams of rice.”
Physicians were forbidden to enter “hunger” in the records of illness
and death. They were ordered to give as the cause of death “BBO”
(absence of white corpuscles). Sometimes it was recorded as “childish”
or “old age” weakness, “paralysis of the heart,” “diarrhea,” all
symptoms of death by starvation.
It is impossible to estimate accurately the number of deaths, for even
the indefatigable NKVD gave up the attempt to list the deaths along the
roads, in the fields, and in the streets of the cities. Villages died
out and this was indicated by the use of black flags on certain houses.
In these cases no attempt was made to keep the records in order. The
so-called “therapeutic hospitals” did not turn over their records or
admit to their files the workers of the ZATS (The Records of the Acts
of the Civil Population), who were the collaborators of the NKVD. Thus,
in one of these therapeutic hospitals in Kiev there were at least
5,000 deaths from starvation that were not recorded in the official
statistics.
Of course, none of these hardships were felt by the highly placed
Communists and party officials. They received their food through party
channels which were not accessible to the ordinary residents of the
city or the kolhosps.
It is difficult to estimate accurately the number who perished in
the famine, but it was approximately 4,800,000. This is certainly an
underestimate, although certain other calculations will place the
number between five and six million.
There is the frequent idea that the famine was specifically directed
against the rich peasants and the kurkuls. This is utterly false, for
these had been liquidated earlier. The blow of 1933 fell chiefly upon
the poorer classes who had always supported the Soviet regime and who
regarded their suffering in the beginning as a mistake which Moscow
would do its best to correct. In the same way it was the Ukrainian
workmen of the smaller cities who bore the brunt of the hardships. It
was the direct triumph of the Russian Bolsheviks over the Ukrainian
poor.
Another proof that the famine occurred in connection with the plans of
Moscow was the fact that Postyshev, besides his official post, held
that of general inspector of the Ministry of Grain Production for
resettlement. It turned out later that he was given the general task of
preparing a plan for an immigration into Ukraine from various portions
of the Soviet Union. The dislocation of the population was worked out
in detail. Millions of Russians, Byelorussians, Uzbeks, etc., were to
be sent in to complete the work of rerussification. Especial pains were
devoted to the regions close to Russia on the Left Bank of the Dnieper
and there was talk at one time of annexing to the Russian Republic the
Kharkiv-Donbas industrial region, but this did not fall in with the
plans of Stalin.
The result of the famine was the final stabilization of the collective
system of agriculture and the breaking of the old mode of life
throughout the whole of Ukraine. More than that, it established the
fact that in the economic sphere Moscow could direct Ukrainian life
as it would. It overawed the population for the moment but it did not
reconcile them to their fate and it went hand in hand with the attempt
to exterminate the old Ukrainian cultural life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Famine, the Soviets and the World
It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this artificially
induced famine in what had been one of the richest portions of the
Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Taken in connection with the
collectivization of agriculture which had served already to uproot and
exile or liquidate many of the most industrious and successful parts
of the population of the Ukraine, it was distinctly noticed that the
history of the Soviet Union had entered a new phase which might be
glossed over for public consumption but still represented a formidable
menace to the general development of the entire area.
During the years of the New Economic Policy and the period of
Ukrainization, much had been accomplished, not only to repair the
damages of the Civil War and the period of Militant Communism, but
great strides had been made in the development of Ukrainian culture.
The collectivization of 1929-31 had, in a sense, menaced some of the
economic gains but while the menace of Moscow was being felt on the
material field, it had not hitherto been regarded in the same way
culturally. It is true that there had been going on a great debate
between Khvylovy and his rivals but it is doubtful if either Khvylovy
or Skrypnyk had fully appreciated the forces that were now unleashed.
There had never been any question that every few decades Ukraine had
undergone severe droughts which had produced local famines, especially
in the Ukrainian steppes. The disorders of Militant Communism had
coincided with one of these periods and had produced the situation
in 1921-2. Still, at that time, for his own purposes, Lenin had
allowed relief to be sent from abroad to the victims. The agricultural
situation in 1931-3 was not so serious and the country might have
escaped, had it not been for the methods of the government in draining
off from the population the last possible reserves of food.
There can be no doubt that this was done deliberately, for every
measure taken by the government was intended to increase the
difficulties of the population and to prepare for the final crushing of
the Ukrainian renaissance that had been proceeding with ever increasing
force. Every measure, too, was intended to render it more difficult
for the outside world to secure any actual knowledge of the conditions
in the country until it was too late for the world to do more than
register vain protests, for it was very definitely at this period that
the censorship methods of the government and its apprehensions of what
knowledge might bring to the world actively commenced to draw an iron
curtain around Ukraine. Foreign correspondents were forbidden to visit
Ukraine on one pretext or another and they were forced to send out such
news as the government wished or to leave the Soviet Union.
The collectivization and the famine had coincided with the beginning of
the attack on Ukrainian scholarship and the arts, as we shall see, but
these attacks by their very choice of victims had been directed against
those men who had not been closely connected with the Communist Party
in the past, even though they had not been entirely hostile. Along with
the famine the tide turned, and soon the victims were those persons
who had dared to hope for an equality of treatment (with the Great
Russians) in the Soviet Union.
The famine was obviously intended not only to crush the population
already impoverished by the collectivization but to administer a sound
chastisement to all classes who were interested in the preservation and
development of local and republic interests.
The famine was at its height in the winter and spring of 1933 and was
only somewhat alleviated after the harvest of that year was brought
in. It was only natural that, despite the efforts of the authorities,
word of it would gradually seep out, in spite of the censorship. The
news was most accessible to the Western Ukrainians, for as yet all
communications had not been satisfactorily broken, and early in the
summer they began to seek permission to organize relief abroad for the
benefit of the sufferers. On July 14, 1933, such a body was already
formed in Lviv and soon in the other sections of Western Ukraine, while
their appeals were heard by the Ukrainian emigrés abroad.
In August, Theodore Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna had been convinced
of the truth of the famine and he appealed for aid for the starving.
In the same month the General Secretary of the Congress of European
Minorities published his summary of the conditions, as gleaned from
all available sources, and the League took action at its meeting
in September. In the same month the matter was brought up before
the League of Nations in Geneva and relief was referred to the
International Red Cross.
The movement spread to the Ukrainians in North America and on November
3, 1933, the sixth convention of the United Ukrainian Organizations
of the United States appealed to the government of the United States,
urging that an impartial commission be sent to Ukraine to report on the
truth of these reports.
This growing wave of protests among the Ukrainians and the emigrants
from Ukraine was met by a stony silence on the part of the Soviet
authorities, by absolute denial or by charges of unfriendly propaganda.
The Soviet government refused to lift its barrier on any visits to
Ukraine by foreign journalists or by any foreign visitors until
after the harvest of 1933 was brought in and then they induced such
journalists as Walter Duranty to recant previous statements as to the
extent of the famine and report on September 18, 1933, that the harvest
of that year was excellent “and all talk of famine now is ridiculous.”
Almost the first detailed account of an American journalist was given
by William Henry Chamberlin on May 29, 1934, on his return from the
Soviet Union, when he estimated that between four and five million
peasants were starving and he also quoted the speech of President
Kalinin of the Soviet Union, made the year before, “The collective
farmers have passed through a good school. For some, this school was
quite ruthless.”
This was a polite hint again that it had been the policy of the
government to allow the famine to run its course in the hope of
breaking any possible opposition on the part of the collective farms
and the individual peasants.
The famine then on the domestic scene marked a definite turning point,
a definite shift of emphasis in the relations between the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union, and that shift was
extended to the individual Ukrainian. Yet, the very reports that
emanated from the stricken country were not without their significance
for the world.
1933 was a fateful year for Europe. The order to apply the maximum
pressure on the Ukrainians came on January 24th. On January 28th, just
four days later and before the news could have leaked out, Kurt von
Schleicher resigned as Chancellor of Germany and was succeeded by Adolf
Hitler. Within a month came the Reichstag fire and all the turmoil
connected with the advent of the Nazis to power.