1998: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The Great Famine: a reassessment

Seventy years ago, momentous changes began to occur in Ukraine. Let us recall that at that time Ukrainian lands were divided between several countries. Most of western Ukraine was under the rule of a newly restored Polish state, with small areas controlled by Czecho-Slovakia and Romania. Eastern Ukraine, a larger area was under Soviet rule. However, for five to six years the Soviet authorities had introduced a policy that permitted non-Russian republics to develop governments that were "national in form, socialist in content." Ukraine had made significant progress in the development of national culture. In 1928, this was about to change.

In the 1920s a power struggle took place in the USSR during which Lenin's successors waged a non-publicized battle for control. This struggle was won by the Georgian Iosif Djugashvili, better known as Stalin, "man of steel." Stalin was a man paranoid by nature, trusting no one, with an almost overwhelming suspicion of the peasantry. He had cast off his Georgian background like an old shoe that he no longer wished to wear. Instead, he adopted the outlook of a Great Russian, disguised as internationalism, whereby any manifestation of one's national culture - in a non-Russian form - could be labeled "national deviationism."

But Russification was only one goal. The major questions for Stalin were how to ensure that the mass of the population was pacified, and how to feed a growing industrial workforce harnessed to his First Five-Year Plan. Could there be a guaranteed supply of food?

Lenin had advocated an alliance between the workers and the poor peasants that would lead to class warfare in the countryside. Throughout the period of the civil war, harsh grain requisitions had been extracted from the farms through the Committees of the Poor Peasantry. The policy was an abject failure that resulted in mass hunger, drought and eventual famine. In March 1921, this policy was exchanged for the New Economic Policy (NEP), which replaced requisitions with a flat tax and allowed the peasants to sell their excess grain on the open market. It was, in brief, a return to capitalism in the village.

NEP undoubtedly worked for a time, but the more ideological Communists resented what seemed to be a return of capitalist practices to the village. Also, prices for industrial goods were generally higher than those for agricultural products, and what was termed a "scissors crisis" developed, making it economically inexpedient for the farmer to sell grain at continued low prices. It was often better for him to store the grain in anticipation that grain prices would eventually rise.

Stalin, who had but a single experience of this practice during a visit to a farm in the Urals, called this "hoarding." To him it was a signal that the peasant farmer would never willingly give up grain to the state. If the USSR was to become a powerful industrial country and to catch up with the capitalist nations of the West, it would not only have to industrialize, it would have to ensure that food reached the growing industrial workforce. And like his mentor Lenin, he believed in the use of coercion and an artificial class warfare in the villages, particularly in grain-growing republics such as Ukraine.

The beginning of collectivization

Stalin's answer was mass collectivization - a policy that was intended to divide the peasants among themselves, to outlaw the richer peasants, and form alliances with the poorest and the middle. In reality the regime went much further than this: by 1928, the concept of a rich peasant was alien to the average village. Even according to Soviet statistics, only 5 percent of all peasants could be termed rich. Thus, the mass of middle-ranking peasants also were targeted. They all were encompassed by the general term "kulaks," who were either executed as criminals, arrested or deported to Siberia and other remote regions.

Stalin demanded that the kulaks be "liquidated as a class." The result was wholesale expropriation of land and property, and the deportation of families under the harshest of conditions. This was the prelude to collectivization and included about 5 million peasants.

Collectivization was imposed from above. Outsiders usually came into a village. They were given blocks of 10 houses and had the task of "persuading" the heads of household of each one to agree to form a collective farm. This entailed giving up one's land, livestock and implements, and being permitted only a small kitchen garden on which to grow crops privately. Those peasants with little or no land or livestock were naturally the first to join since they had little to lose. The richer farmers rarely joined such farms willingly.

Collectivization was imposed first in grain-growing regions, foremost of which was Ukraine. In Stalin's mind, if grain was to reach the towns, then the grain-producing peasantry had to be completely subjugated. Left to himself, he believed, the peasant would not willingly produce a large surplus of grain; and even if he did, he would not sell it to the state at the sort of prices introduced in the 1920s. What was required was a class war, during which the kulaks were arrested and executed or exiled from the native villages. This policy was first evident in Kazakstan where the farmers were nomadic. In 1930-1931 it is estimated that one-third of all peasants lost their lives as a result of a famine in Kazakstan, a casualty figure of around 1 million. This was a foretaste of things to come.

Ukraine was collectivized faster than most other regions. Rather than give up their livestock to what seemed a hopeless enterprise, many families shot and ate them. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a drastic reduction in the number of dairy livestock, sheep and horses. Collective farms would spring up and collapse overnight, as soon as the Soviet authorities left the villages. In March 1930, Stalin tried to slow down the process, publishing an article in Pravda that claimed his officials in the countryside were "dizzy with success." They had been over-zealous and violated the voluntary nature of the process of collectivization. It was time to call a temporary halt. In this way the blame for the abuses perpetrated were shifted from the Soviet leader to the regional bureaucracy. Given an opportunity, the peasantry abandoned the collectives in droves.

With the help of fanatical Communists from the new towns - they were called 25,000ers, after the total number eventually chosen for the task - collectivization was renewed in the fall of 1930. A grain quota was then set by the state and had to be given up before peasant families could feed themselves. The quota in Ukraine reached one-third of the total output. When the harvest was bad, as in 1931, no reserves were left. The state officials took any surpluses of grain that was destined for export or to feed the Red Army in the Far East. The peasant farmers themselves, the grain producers, received last priority. After the disastrous harvest of 1931, when it was evident that Ukraine could not meet its quota of grain, the state provided aid to avert a crisis.

One year later, however, these policies were rejected as too lenient and the harshest measures were imposed for failure to meet the quota. In January 1933, the former party boss of the Kharkiv region, Pavel Postyshev, became second secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Stalin's local plenipotentiary. His job was to reverse the mild policies hitherto embraced by the leadership of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Both Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, two of Stalin's closest associates, made frequent visits to Ukraine at this time to ensure that the state quota was being fulfilled. The grain was confiscated or stored, and the majority of collective farmers in the regions of eastern Ukraine were not paid for their labor; generally they received this payment in kind rather than in wages. Famine broke out in Ukraine in 1932 and continued throughout 1933. The peasants ate their domestic pets, or bark off the trees. Every living thing was consumed. Before long it was common to see the dead lying for days in the streets.

The Western reaction

Many myths abound about that Famine. It was denied by the Soviet authorities for the next 54 years. Those westerners who visited the Soviet Union in these years - George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb are the classic examples - were taken to see model farms and returned home glowing with praise for what they had seen. Propaganda movies showed villages loaded with grain, happy villagers singing for joy. But in Poltava, Kharkiv and other regions, the peasants were starving.

What causes a famine? It is not a natural event. Drought may occur naturally but famine requires the intervention of the human hand. In Ukraine's case it was an official silence in response to the cries of millions. They were not allowed to leave their villages to find food because of the official passport system, and there was no one to whom they could appeal. Those Ukrainian party leaders who made known to the Moscow officials what was happening were regarded as dangerous subversives, as putting Ukrainian interests above those of the party. Virtually all these people were to perish in the purges over the next several years, including the archetypal Stalinist Postyshev himself.

The world remained preoccupied with the social effects of the Great Depression, but was also duped by a combination of Soviet duplicity and the collusion of the Western media corps in Moscow, several of whom were not willing to provide an accurate portrayal of what was happening in the Famine regions. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reports from the Soviet Union, was the principal culprit, reporting in his bold prose that there were indeed food problems in the Soviet utopia, but no famine. In dispatch after dispatch he refused to use this word.

It should be noted, however, that even those who accused Mr. Duranty of one-sided reporting, such as William Henry Chamberlin and Malcolm Muggeridge, were at one time or another admirers of the Soviet experiment. To them, it seemed that a great economic transformation was taking place by means of which the USSR would avoid the massive depression that capitalism had brought elsewhere in the world. They were not anxious to expose such a system as fraudulent. In addition, many feared that they would lose their accreditation as Moscow correspondents if they were too critical of the system.

One consequence of such misreporting was the diplomatic recognition of the USSR at the end of the Famine year of 1933 by the United States.

It was possible for the authorities to conceal the effects of the Famine also because those suffering had no means to alert outsiders as to their plight. The media was under state control. The party authorities could only report to Kyiv, and in turn to Moscow. Very few foreigners were able to travel to these areas. Some foreign correspondents witnessed starving peasants at railroad stations but it was often hard to gauge the massive scale of the problem.

In general it is fair to say that many outsiders regarded peasants in the former Soviet Union as passive and somehow used to suffering. If one reads these accounts from Moscow correspondents today, they seem both callous and unperceptive. They speak of Russian peasants - never Ukrainian, the concept of a distinctive Ukrainian peasant was alien to them - who had long accepted their difficult fate, who continued as always to live in deplorable conditions and who had barely advanced from the medieval age (in spite of the abolition of serfdom some 70 years earlier). If this was the attitude of correspondents, one can presume that it had filtered to government circles also.

To take this perspective one step further - for it is very significant when analyzing Western perceptions of what was occurring in the USSR - the Soviet government was attempting to transform the situation with a great experiment. Many western technicians and specialists traveled to the USSR in the early 1930s to lend their expertise and assistance to the Soviet regime. They soon became disillusioned, but their personal predicaments did not alter fundamentally the attitude of their governments or intellectual circles. One recalls that in this period also, the Cambridge economist Malcolm Dobb began recruiting agents for the Soviet cause: Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and company. Stalin did not merely hoodwink his own public; foreigners were anxious to believe in his utopia.

Several Moscow embassies filed information about the Famine back to their governments, but the latter were reluctant to take action against the Soviet regime.

The results of the Famine

In 1932-1933, between 4 million and 7 million people in Ukraine, the Kuban region and the North Caucasus died of starvation. The exact number may never be known because there was no census taken of the Soviet population between 1926 and 1937. For Ukraine the horror of this period is hard to measure. So-called rich farmers had already been banished from their homes, the purges were just four years hence. Stalin told Churchill curtly during a World War II discussion that 10 million peasants had died during the upheavals of the 1930s.

The Ukrainian population fell by more than 3 million between the censuses of 1926 and 1939 (and we now know from the research of S.G. Wheatcroft and others that the latter census was doctored), whereas the population of Russia increased by 16 million over the same period.

The Famine, then, was part of a series of calamities that befell the Ukrainian republic in this decade. But what caused it precisely?

The scholarly debate

Today, 65 years later, we are only beginning to comprehend these issues. Historians continue to debate the reasons behind the Famine, whether Stalin had turned on Ukrainians specifically, peasants in general, or whether he decided to sacrifice the villages in order to feed the cities. No definitive answer has emerged thus far, but the scholarly debate has been extensive. Until the mid-1980s there were no academic Western monographs on the Famine and, naturally, none from the Soviet Union. However, in the 1960s, Ukrainian historians tried manfully to highlight the true state of affairs without going so far as to mention the fact of the Famine.

In the West, a notable article by Dana Dalrymple appeared in the British journal Soviet Studies in 1964 but did not attract much attention. Classic works on collectivization, such as "Russian Peasants and Soviet Power," written in the 1960s by University of Pennsylvania historian Moshe Lewin, made no reference specifically to a major famine in Ukraine.

In 1983, on the 50th anniversary of the Famine, a Harvard University Project was already under way, headed ultimately by Robert Conquest, a British literary historian based at Stanford University, and his assistant, James E. Mace, a native of Oklahoma. Dr. Conquest was well-known for his work on the Stalin purges, but he had also made himself a reputation as an outspoken anti-Soviet ideologue, as evident from the title of one of his books, "What To Do When the Russians Come." The result of his labor was "The Harvest of Sorrow," a book that was widely acclaimed as providing the best account of the Famine to date.

That book did not satisfy everyone, however. Several critiques appeared. One alleged that Dr. Conquest relied on sources that were unreliable, such as the collection, "The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book," which had been compiled by anti-Soviet activists. Another noted that not all the photographs in the book were authentic, as many were extracted from collections portraying the Famine of 1920-1921 in Ukraine and other regions. Westerners had received appeals from the new Soviet government to respond to that Famine - a result of seven years of world war and civil war, and also excessive grain requisitions - and numerous photographs had been taken. The same criticism was also leveled at a film produced in Montreal and eventually shown on the PBS network called "Harvest of Despair."

The Communist sympathizers in North America were also quickly on the attack: in the summer of 1987, a Winnipeg schoolteacher and Communist called Douglas Tottle published a book with Progress Publishers of Toronto called "Fraud, Famine and Fascism," which alleged that the new details about the Ukrainian Famine were a myth propagated by Ukrainian nationalists to divert attention from their collaboration with the German occupants of Ukraine during World War II.

This astonishing claim was soon undermined by none other than the dour archetypical Communist Party boss in Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who acknowledged the existence of the Famine for the first time in a speech of December 1987, likely under pressure from Moscow. This speech opened the floodgates for Ukrainian scholars to delve deeper into the subject, led by the indefatigable Kyiv historian, Stanislav Kulchytsky.

By this time the U.S. government had established a Commission on the Ukraine Famine, led by Dr. Mace, assisted by Walter Pechenuk and others, which conducted interviews with dozens of elderly eyewitnesses and published the results in a three-volume collection.

Further research was carried out from 1983 onward by the Harvard-based Ukrainian demographer, Aleksandr Babyonyshev, whose careful calculations established irrefutably that the number of deaths was at least 3.5 million.

But has this research helped us determine the exact cause of the Famine? There are several schools of thought. That of Dr. Mace, who is now based in Kyiv, supports the notion that the Famine was an act of genocide against the people of Ukraine. This school of thought, to which also subscribe most historians of the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, cites the fact that the borders were closed, that there was no famine in Russia or Belarus, that the Famine coincided with an assault on national deviationism led by Stalin's henchman, Kaganovich, and that the intention was to suppress potential national opposition to the Stalin regime in Ukraine. Writing in the prestigious scholarly journal Slavic Review, Mark B. Tauger attempted to refute this claim by producing figures that purported to show that the harvest of 1931-1932 was much poorer than recognized hitherto, and that the authorities faced an acute shortage of grain over which they had little control. Dr. Tauger's article, which appeared in 1991, sparked a furious exchange with Dr. Conquest in future issues. One can say that even if Tauger's theory is correct, then one would have derived the cause of grain shortages, but not necessarily famine.

My own perspective is that the chief cause of the Famine was excessive grain requisitions from the Ukrainian villages, a failure to pay farmers adequate wages or food, and an acute shortage of machinery or draught animals on the new collective farms. The latter were often run by people chosen more for their Communist sympathies than for farming ability; often they were outsiders to the village. The situation in the countryside east of Kyiv was one of absolute chaos. Genocide seems unlikely for several reasons. [The genocide question is complex. I take genocide to be the premeditated attempt to physically exterminate a group on racial grounds. There is no evidence in this case of any premeditation or that Stalin made any particular distinction on racial or ethnic grounds between the different nationality groups of the Soviet empire. - Author's note.] The Famine affected only certain areas of Ukraine (an Alberta doctoral scholar, Colin P. Neufeldt, recently demonstrated conclusively that there was no famine in the southern regions of Ukraine inhabited by some 80,000 Mennonites, for example). Moreover, the known famine territory extended to the North Caucasus and the Kuban and Don regions. Also, the hunger was ended by the decision of the authorities to supply grain from outside Ukraine in 1934.

Thus there was no long-term plan against Ukraine as a region of the USSR. Stalin was a vindictive and neurotic tyrant who was suspicious of everyone. His suspicions of Ukraine reached a culmination in the second world war, but prior to that there are few indications of a prejudice against Ukrainians per se. Paradoxically Stalin had probably treated the Georgians the worst of any Soviet nationality group in the period of the Civil War. He could never forgive the presence there of a Menshevik government.

Stalin was nonetheless prepared to sacrifice Ukrainian farmers in order to fulfill his quotas of grain. In this, as noted earlier, he was following a policy initiated by Lenin during the period of so-called War Communism in 1918-1921. He was also fomenting a civil and class war. Stalin and his close associates were responsible for the onset of the Famine. There is moreover no proof either that collectivization provided a safeguard for industrial development, or that more grain reached the towns after collectivization than before. The Stalin regime chose the most extreme of all alternatives. To paraphrase Stalin's own words, one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. Yet even the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began to show signs of rebellion. At the 17th Party Congress, Stalin no longer received the most votes from the membership. The situation in the countryside, particularly in Ukraine, had horrified even his most loyal followers.

Conclusion

The period 1929-1933 has been termed the Second Bolshevik Revolution, and it was one that produced far more victims than the first, even if one includes the period of the Civil War. Whatever the cause, the Ukrainian peasants were the victims of a policy so tyrannical that it almost defies belief: those who fed the country were not permitted to feed themselves. Grain could rot in barns rather than be used to make bread to feed ravenous families. After August 1932, a peasant could be executed for the theft of a single ear of grain from land that he had cultivated himself.

The Famine remains as one of the 20th century's most lasting monuments of humankind's inhumanity to its fellows. It occurred under Stalinism, a system that even today has not acquired the stigma that it deserves, a system that showed not an ounce of feeling or remorse for the suffering that it induced.

It is important in my view for historians to reach a consensus about the Famine. It is not taught rigorously in schools, and it lacks both the publicity and the horror elicited by events such as the Jewish Holocaust. In part this problem may be a consequence of Ukraine's unfortunate history during the Soviet period when one event ran into another: the Famine, purges, the losses of World War II and the more recent catastrophe at the Chornobyl nuclear power station. But the other significant reason cannot be escaped, which is sympathy of some sort for the Soviet system by scholars, writers, and the media from the 1930s until the darkest years of the Cold War. Not until 1990 did a Western historian, Alan Bullock, take the obvious step of comparing Stalin with Hitler.

The newly independent Ukrainian state, moreover, has yet to establish a new school of historians freed from the ideological guidelines of the Soviet system. This has not been an easy transformation and is reflected in the regularity with which Ukrainian historians prefer today to cite Western secondary sources in their works rather than primary documents. The Soviet perspective has been discredited, but there has been nothing with which to replace it other than emulation of the West.

What is needed is an objective consensus on what could or did cause the Famine, the number of deaths and the like. Instead the focus has been on the proverbial: Who is to blame? Further, the difficult economic conditions in today's Ukraine, the corruption endemic in society and the struggle for subsistence in some rural areas have precluded the diversion of funds for something as frivolous as academic research. Professors in Ukraine cannot even make a living from such pursuits. This situation is particularly problematic when so many questions pertaining to 20th century Ukraine merit more profound investigations. There are too many "blank spots" in Ukrainian history.

As for Western historians, there is no Famine school as there is on other atrocities of this century. One can say that at best the topic is marginalized, despite the tremendous interest in contemporary Ukraine. What is sorely needed is work based on Soviet archives in Moscow that reveals some of the discussions held at the highest levels of the Soviet bureaucracy.

But the picture is not universally gloomy. Independent Ukraine has survived for seven years - longer than any other time in its history. Thus, while we commemorate today the millions of silent, innocent victims, men, women and children, we should also acknowledge the spirit of the people of these lands, which was not cowed by the persecution of Stalin or Hitler, but which preserves the memory of lost relatives and friends and has the courage to face a future that may be no less difficult than the Stalinist past.

- Dr. David R. Marples

The writer is professor of history and director of the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He delivered this paper to the Calgary Ukrainian Professional and Business Club, at the University of Calgary, on November 19.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 27, 1998, No. 52, Vol. LXVI

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