2005 Ukrainian Famine Lecture focuses on dekulakization policies (11/27/05)

2005 Ukrainian Famine Lecture focuses on dekulakization policies

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - Prof. Lynne Viola, professor of history at the University of Toronto, delivered this year's Ukrainian Famine Lecture.

Prof. Viola has spent over 20 years working in Soviet archives and is acknowledged as one of the leading scholars in the study of Stalinism, particularly the peasantry and collectivization. Her publications include "Peasant Rebels under Stalin" (1996), "The Best Sons of the Fatherland" (1987), and "A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History" (co-editor, 1990).

She is a co-editor of a new series published by the Yale University Press Annals of Communism, "The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside," in which the first volume - "The War against the Peasantry, 1927-1930" - has been published and includes documentation relating to the background of collectivization, its violent implementation and the mass peasant revolts that followed. She is one of the few researchers in the world to have had access to the files of the KGB.

The lecture, which was sponsored by the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Toronto Branch and the Toronto Ukrainian Charitable Fund, was held on November 9.

Prof. Viola's presentation was titled "Before the Famine: Peasant Deportations to the North," but she called it the "story of the other archipelago." While the labor camps of the gulag archipelago - the Soviet penal network - have been studied extensively by scholars, less is known about the settlement archipelago, the system set up during the dekulakization period of collectivization.

Dekulakization - ridding the countryside of so-called "wealthy" peasants - involved the expropriation of their land, the execution of a significant number of heads of household and the forced deportation of whole families to special settlements in the north.

Dekulakization had an economic aspect: kulak property was to serve as capital for the new collective farms and the deportees were used to settle uninhabited regions where they served as the labor force. It also had an ideological aspect and was used as a stimulus for the collectivization of the countryside - either the peasants joined the collective farms or they were labeled kulaks and class enemies and deported.

Prof. Viola argued that the mass deportations were the first phase in the repression of the village. They were a precursor of the Great Famine and part of the attempt by the Soviet authorities to decapitate the village of its leadership and thus stamp out any opposition to Bolshevik rule.

Prof. Viola gave the following figures: in 1930 and 1931, 63,720 peasant families from Ukraine were forced from their homes and villages and deported to the frozen wastelands of the Soviet hinterland (19,658 families to the north, 32,127 to the Urals, 6,556 to Western Siberia, 5,056 to Eastern Siberia). If one takes the figure of five members per family, this means 318,600 persons from Ukraine were deported. The Ukrainian deportees were the largest single category of deportees. Next in line were families from North Caucasus (38,404), Lower Volga (30,933), Middle Volga (23,006) and the Central Black Earth Region (26,006).

The large-scale deportations began in February 1930 and the process, in which families were often separated, was chaotic and disorderly. There was a general lack of food and warm clothing for the deportees, and many died en route.

Upon arrival in the north, the able-bodied deportees were sent into the forests and mines to work in the extraction of raw materials and the timber industry, which was crucial to the industrialization projects of the time. Families were left behind in atrocious conditions and housed anywhere room could be found. Overcrowding and the lack of supplies led to widespread disease, malnutrition and death. The most vulnerable were the children.

Prof. Viola read from some letters sent by the settlers.

Dr. V. V. Lebedev wrote about what he saw in Vologda in the spring of 1930: "A great many dekulakized are accumulating in Vologda ... They will be sent on further north, to the most distant, uninhabited and ruinous places, but they are temporarily housed in Vologda churches, the majority of which have already been long closed to believers. There they built bunks and the people are packed into the church buildings and typhus is breaking out. Horrors have begun ... The gubernia GPU [secret police] called me in, and the chief said to me: 'If you don't liquidate the typhus - I will shoot you.' I went to one of the churches together with some GPU men. A guard stood at the church, and behind the door - groans and cries. They opened the doors. And there I saw hell. The sick, the healthy, the dying - men, women, old people, children. And the live ones cried out and raised their arms to us: 'Water! Water!' I have seen many terrible things in my life, but nothing like this."

Ekaterina Sergeevna Lukina, exiled to Narym, remembered her first days in the special settlement: "In the beginning we lived in shacks made from birch bark, then people began to build wooden huts. [They] gave us meager rations ... We children scavenged clay from which our parents built stoves. [They] gave us six kilograms of flour a month ... We were weak ... People began to swell and die. [They] buried them without coffins, in fraternal graves, which grew every day ..."

The deportees were expected to construct the special settlements in which they were to live and also required to work for the state - often for 11 or 12 hours a day. The settlements, which had 100 to 200 families each, were to be self-supporting, but they were isolated and hard to supply, and it was difficult to transport people there. In fact, they turned out to be more expensive than penal camps.

At first the industries that employed the deportee workers were responsible for the settlements, but there were continuous mass escapes and the settlements were porous and disorderly. By the summer of 1931 the GPU took over the running of the settlements. Deportations continued but, by the early 1930s, there was a general move from settlements to penal camps.

During World War II families were freed from the settlements if any member went into the army. At the end of the war there were 600,000 persons in the settlements and, as restrictions were eased, by 1947 some 230,000 settlers remained. However, the settlements were replenished by new groups - the deported nationalities accused of collaboration during the war.

Prof. Viola called this story of the "other archipelago" a prehistory of the Great Famine and the first stage of the repression of the Ukrainian peasantry.

During the question period, Prof. Olga Andriewsky of Trent University asked about the political character of the deportations as most of them were from areas that were historically the most resistant to tsarist, and later Soviet, rule. Prof. Viola acknowledged that, in addition to ideological and economic considerations, politics did indeed play a role in the deportations.

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