3

Famine and Truce, the 1920s

We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance in the coming decades.

Lenin, in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, 19221

Since our literature can at last follow its own path of development … we must not, on any account, follow the Russian … Russian literature has been burdening us for ages, it has trained us to imitate it slavishly.

Mykola Khvylovy, 1925²

The truce with Piłsudski as well as the defeat of Denikin, the Directory and a wide array of rebels, finally allowed the Bolsheviks to force an uneven peace on Ukraine in the course of 1920–1. The bloodshed did not stop right away: Makhno’s Black Army kept on fighting through the summer of 1921, and some of Petliura’s forces were still fighting that autumn even though Petliura himself had fled. The Cheka killed 444 rural rebel leaders in Ukraine during the first half of that year, and reckoned that thousands of ‘bandits’ still roamed the countryside.³ Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s gloomy founder, personally brought 1,400 men to Ukraine to help his local allies finish them off.⁴

Ukraine’s new rulers, not trusting the mood in Kyiv, moved the republican capital east to Kharkiv, a city further from the Polish border, closer to Russia, and with a large, Russian-speaking proletariat. The Red Army divisions stationed in Ukraine retained their foreign character, with the majority of soldiers hailing from Russian districts far away. In a 1921 speech the Red Army’s top commander in Ukraine and Crimea, Mikhail Frunze, described the Ukraine-based Red Army as 85 per cent Russian and only 9 per cent Ukrainian. (The rest consisted of ‘other nationalities’, including Poles and Belarusians.)5

The shaky ‘peace’ did not bring prosperity either. Waves of violence had displaced people and destroyed villages, towns, roads and railroads. The politics and policies of the Bolsheviks had rendered the economy nearly dysfunctional. The abolition of trade, the nationalization of industry, the failed experiments with collectivization and the use of forced labour had all taken their toll. ‘Industry was dead,’ wrote one observer:

Trade existed only in violation of Soviet law. Agriculture, still in the process of communization, had almost reached the point where what it produced, if evenly distributed, was scarcely enough to maintain the people of the country. Administrative chaos and physical deterioration of rail and river transport made distribution impossible. Hunger, starvation, disease were increasing.⁶

Prospects for the future were hardly any better. This time a Ukrainian government, directed by the Ukrainian Communist Party – a separate entity from the Soviet Communist Party, with its own Politburo and Central Committee – was formally in charge. But in practice, policy was made in Moscow, and it sounded much the same as in the past. At the national level, Trotsky called for the militarization of the economy, the use of forced labour brigades and requisitioning, the same tactics deployed in the months following the 1917 revolution.⁷ During a visit to Kharkiv, Stalin announced the creation of a ‘Ukrainian Labour Army’. In a speech to the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920, he argued that the military tactics used to win the civil war could be applied to the economy: ‘We shall now have to promote economic non-commissioned officers and officers from the ranks of the workers to teach the people how to battle against economic disruption and build a new economy … this requires training “officers of labour”.’⁸

But the renewed language of War Communism held no attraction for Soviet peasants, and ‘officers of labour’ offering lessons in the ‘new economy’ could hardly have inspired them either. In practice, the end of the civil war brought back Shlikhter’s hated prodrazvyorstka, the mandatory food confiscation, as well as the komnezamy, the poor peasants’ committees in Ukraine. The party was taking no chances: it wanted once again to strengthen its hand against the wealthier peasants and to ensure some control over the village soviets (the Bolshevik name for village councils), many of which were led by the same village elders as in the past.

To the peasants, the newly reinforced requisitioning committees seemed to have no scruples. Their members, now veterans of the brutal peasant uprising, were clearly working to gain privileges and protection in a devastated and hungry world. Their behaviour was described by one peasant very succinctly: ‘If they want, they take the grain; if they like it, they arrest; what they want, they do.’9 Another remembered that nobody seemed to control the committees at all: ‘The komnezamy were left to themselves and were guided in all their actions by their “revolutionary” self-consciousness.’ Those further up the chain of command deliberately reinforced this sense of impunity. The party authorities told one local committee that anyone who showed any signs of ‘kulak counter-revolution’ should be locked up for fifteen days. If that didn’t work – then ‘shoot them’.¹⁰

The cruelty they used was no secret. During a confidential meeting in the summer of 1920, the Soviet ‘procurements commissars’, the men tasked with organizing the collection of grain, considered the ‘impact of the requisitions on the population’. After a long debate, they made a decision: ‘no matter how heavy the requisitions can be for local inhabitants … state interests must anyway come first’.¹¹

This harsh attitude created a harsh response. Matvii Havryliuk, a peasant who worked as a grain requisitioner in 1921, remembered the violent emotions of this period in testimony he gave a decade later:

In 1921, when the state needed food, I worked in the food procurement squad collecting bread from the kulaks in our village and then in five villages in Ruzhyn district and helped the army squads, deployed outside the village, catch those who would spread kulak unrest. Despite this very trying time, when kulaks did not want to submit any grain and even threatened to kill me and my family, I persevered and stayed vigilant on behalf of the Soviet power. I requisitioned grain under the supervision of special plenipotentiary Bredykhin [from the Cheka] who rated my work highly. From that moment on I learnt to work in the village, how to organize poor peasant masses, to motivate them to participate in the campaign. Siding with Soviet power right from the beginning made me an enemy of the kulaks in the village too. I always fought with the kulaks … they care about their own interests rather than those of the state.12

Thanks to the ‘perseverance’ and ‘vigilance’ of men like Havryliuk, the great grain collections of 1920 spared nobody. Lenin’s instructions explicitly called for the requisitioning of all grain, even that needed for immediate consumption and for planting next year’s harvest, and there were many people willing to carry out his orders.¹³

In response, the peasants’ enthusiasm for growing, sowing and storing grain plunged. Their ability to produce would have been very low in any case: across Ukraine and Russia, up to a third of young men had been mobilized to fight in the First World War. Even more had joined the armies of the civil war, on one side or another, and hundreds of thousands had not returned. Many villages lacked sufficient numbers of men fit to work the fields. But even those who had returned and could work had no incentive to produce extra grain that they knew would be confiscated.

As a result, the peasants sowed far less land in both Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 1920 than they had at any time in the recent past.¹⁴ And even that land wasn’t particularly fruitful, for that spring turned out to be ‘hot and almost rainless’, as one observer wrote: ‘the land at the time of the spring planting was caked and dry’. Very little rain fell that summer or the following winter either.¹⁵ As a result, between a fifth and a quarter of the grain sown in the summer of 1921 withered on the stalk.¹⁶ The drought eventually struck about half of the food-producing areas in the country, of which roughly a fifth experienced total crop failure.¹⁷

By itself, the bad weather would certainly have caused hardship, as bad weather had in the past. But when combined with the confiscatory food collection policies, the absence of able-bodied men and the acres of unsown land, it proved catastrophic. The twenty most productive agricultural provinces in imperial Russia had annually produced 20 million tonnes of grain before the revolution. In 1920 they produced just 8.45 million tonnes, and by 1921 they were down to 2.9 million.18 In the Stavropol province of the Northern Caucasus, almost the entire crop disappeared.¹⁹ In southern Ukraine the drop was especially dramatic. In 1921 the amount of grain harvested in the province of Odessa dropped to 12.9 per cent of previous levels. The southeastern provinces of Katerynoslav, Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv produced between 3.7 per cent and 5.1 per cent of their normal crop. In other words, some 95 per cent of the normal harvest had failed to materialize.²⁰

Historically, both Russian and Ukrainian peasants had survived periodic bad weather and frequent droughts through the careful preservation and storage of surplus grain. But in the spring of 1921 there was no surplus grain: it had all been confiscated. Instead, food shortages quickly resulted in famine in the Russian Volga provinces – the wide swath of territory along the middle and lower part of the Volga River – in the Urals and southern Ukraine. As the peasants grew hungry, many left home in search of food. More than 440,000 refugees fled the Volga region alone, some mistakenly making their way to Ukraine. Poorly informed officials even deliberately directed orphans from starving Russia towards Ukraine, but when they arrived they found no orphanages and no food.²¹

Just as they would a decade later, peasants began to eat dogs, rats and insects; they boiled grass and leaves; there were incidents of cannibalism.²² A group of refugees who managed to board a train to Riga from Saratov, a Volga river port at the heart of the famine district, described life in the city:

Old garbage carts collected the dead daily as they used to collect garbage … we saw many cases of bubonic plague in the streets. This never was mentioned by the Soviet press, the officials attempting to keep knowledge of this plague from the public …

The Soviet government reports the peasants are abandoning their children. This is not true. It is correct that some parents turn over their children to the state, which promises to care for them and does not. Others throw their children into the Volga, preferring to see them drown rather than be brought up in the communist faith, which they believe is an anti-Christ doctrine.23

Just as they would a decade later, starving people sought to escape the barren countryside and instead gathered within makeshift refugee camps in cities and around train stations, living in discarded boxcars and ‘huddled together in compact masses like a seal colony, mothers and young close together’.²⁴ An American journalist, F. A. Mackenzie, described the scene at Samara station:

Here were lads, gaunt and tall, thin beyond any conception a Westerner can have of thinness, covered with rags and dirt. Here were old women, some of them sitting half-conscious on the ground, dazed by their hunger, their misery and their misfortune … Here were pallid mothers seeking to feed dying babies from their milkless breasts. Were a new Dante to come among us, he could write a new Inferno after visiting one of these railway stations.²⁵

But in one extremely important sense this first Soviet famine did differ from the famine that was to follow a decade later: in 1921 mass hunger was not kept secret. More importantly, the regime tried to help the starving. Pravda itself announced the existence of famine when on 21 June it declared that 25 million people were going hungry in the Soviet Union. Soon after, the regime sanctioned the creation of an ‘All-Russian Famine Committee’ made up of non-Bolshevik political and cultural figures. Local self-help committees were created to assist the starving.²⁶ International appeals for aid followed, most prominently from the writer Maxim Gorky, who led a campaign addressed ‘To All Honest People’, in the name of all that was best in Russian culture. ‘Gloomy days have come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka,’ he wrote, and called for contributions. Gorky’s list of Russian luminaries conspicuously left out the names of Lenin and Trotsky.²⁷ Extraordinarily – given how paranoid they would become about the diaspora in the years that followed – the Ukrainian Communist Party even discussed asking for help from Ukrainians who had emigrated to Canada and the United States.²⁸

This public, international appeal for help, the only one of its kind in Soviet history, produced fast results. Several relief organizations, including the International Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC, or simply ‘Joint’), would eventually contribute to the relief effort, as would the Nansen Mission, a European effort put together by the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. But the most important source of immediate aid was the American Relief Administration (ARA), which was already operating in Europe in the spring of 1921. Founded by future president Herbert Hoover, the ARA had successfully distributed more than $1 billion in food and medical relief across Europe in the nine months following the 1918 armistice.29 Upon hearing Gorky’s appeal, Hoover, an astute student of Bolshevik ideology, leapt at the opportunity to expand his aid network into Russia.

Before entering the country, he demanded the release of all Americans held in Soviet prisons, as well as immunity from prosecution for all Americans working for the ARA. Hoover worried that ARA personnel had to control the process or aid would be stolen. He also worried, not without cause, that Americans in Russia could be accused of espionage (and they were indeed collecting information, sending it home and using diplomatic mail to do so).³⁰ Lenin fumed and called Hoover ‘impudent and a liar’ for making such demands and raged against the ‘rank duplicity’ of ‘America, Hoover and the League of Nations Council’. He declared that ‘Hoover must be punished, he must be slapped in the face publicly, for all the world to see’, an astonishing statement given how much aid he was about to receive. But the scale of the famine was such that Lenin eventually yielded.³¹

In September 1921 an advance party of ARA relief workers reached the city of Kazan on the Volga, where they found poverty of a kind they had never seen before, even in ravaged Europe. On the streets they met ‘pitiful-looking figures dressed in rags and begging for a piece of bread in the name of Christ’. In the orphanages they found ‘emaciated little skeletons, whose gaunt faces and toothpick legs … testified to the truth of the report that they were dying off daily by the dozen’.³² By the summer of 1922 the Americans were feeding 11 million people every day and delivering care packages to hundreds of thousands. To stop epidemics they provided $8 million worth of medicine as well.³³ Once their efforts were underway, the independent Russian famine relief committee was quietly dissolved: Lenin didn’t want any Russian organization not directly run by the Communist Party to gain credibility by participating in the distribution of food. But the American aid project, amplified by contributions from other foreign organizations, was allowed to go ahead, saving millions of lives.

Yet even within this ostensibly outward-looking, genuine and robust response, there were some discordant notes. Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership – just as it would a decade later – never relinquished its desire for hard currency. Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery. By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread and foreign aid was still coming in.34 This was no secret: Hoover fulminated against the cynicism of a government that knew people were starving, and yet exported food in order to ‘secure machinery and materials for the economic improvement of the survivors’.³⁵ A few months afterwards the ARA left Russia for precisely this reason.

As it would a decade later, the authorities’ reaction to the famine also differed between Russia and Ukraine. Like their Russian colleagues, the Ukrainian communists set up a famine committee. But the purpose of the committee was not, at first, to help Ukrainians.³⁶ In its September 1921 resolution ‘on the campaign against hunger’, the Politburo noted that many districts in northern Ukraine could be ‘fully provided by their provincial and county funds’. It therefore instructed the Ukrainian famine committee to direct any surplus Ukrainian grain – and there was some, in the northern parts of the republic not affected by the famine – to the starving Russian provinces of Tsaritsyn, Uralsk, Saratov and Simbirsk, not to the starving people of southern Ukraine.³⁷ At about the same time Lenin wrote to Rakovsky, then still the leader of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, to remind him that he was expecting food and cattle from Kyiv and Kharkiv to be sent to Russia too.³⁸

By late autumn 1921, with food shortages worsening, Lenin’s tactics sharpened. Although he had already halted food collections in the worst-affected parts of Russia, the Soviet leader ordered even more pressure to be put on peasants in better-off provinces; Ukraine, despite the disaster in its southern and eastern provinces, was deemed to be one. Lenin sent frequent requests to Kharkiv for more grain.39 He also suggested new tactics: those who refused to turn over grain should face fines and prison – or worse.

In November, Lenin specifically ordered ‘harsh revolutionary methods’, including the taking of hostages, to be used against peasants who refused to hand over their grain. This form of blackmail, used with such powerful effect against the Jews during the civil war and the pogroms, was now deployed to facilitate collection of this precious commodity. Lenin gave the grain collection teams and komnezamy a clear order: ‘In every village take between 15 and 20 hostages, and, in case of unmet quotas, put them all up against the wall.’ If that tactic failed, hostages were to be shot as ‘enemies of the state’.⁴⁰ Pressure from above was accompanied by propaganda below. In the Mykolaiv province of southern Ukraine, where famine was already beginning to bite, posters exhorted ‘Workers of Mykolaiv, help the starving of the Volga.’⁴¹

The men of the ARA also noticed Lenin’s different treatment of Ukraine and Russia, and recorded it in their notes and memoirs. Initially, the authorities in Moscow did not tell the Americans about food shortages in Ukraine at all. The organization instead learned of the famine in southern Ukraine from the Joint Distribution Committee, which received reports of mass starvation there and passed them on to the ARA and others.

More peculiarly, the ARA’s first requests for permission to visit Ukraine were turned down on the grounds that northwestern Ukraine was still producing plenty of grain and the republic had no need of special help. When two ARA officials finally managed to travel to Kharkiv in November 1921, they were met with a cool welcome. Mykola Skrypnyk, at that time the Ukrainian Commissar of Internal Affairs, received the Americans and told them they could not operate in the republic because Ukraine, unlike Russia, did not have an agreement with the ARA. The men were ‘partly amused, partly irritated’, and insisted that they were interested in famine relief, not politics. Skrypnyk responded that Ukraine was a sovereign state, and not part of Russia: ‘you are mixing in politics when you differentiate between the two republics; when you treat with one, and refuse to do so with the other, when you regard one as a sovereign state and the other as a subject state.’42 Given that Ukraine was at that time contributing to the relief of the Soviet famine, was subject to Soviet laws and confiscatory Soviet agricultural policy, Skrypnyk’s insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty in the matter of famine relief was absurd.

Only when starvation in the southern provinces of Ukraine was so widespread that it could not be ignored did the Moscow party bosses and their Ukrainian colleagues relent. In January 1922 the Ukrainian Politburo finally agreed to work with the ARA, as well as with other European and American famine relief organizations. Feelings of trust were still lacking: the Politburo empowered Comrades Rakovsky and Vasilii Mantsev to negotiate with foreign donors, but also to ‘take measures’ against relief organizations that might turn out to be covers for espionage.⁴³ Years later Soviet citizens who had worked for the ARA became objects of suspicion: in 1935 an Odessa woman was sentenced as a counter-revolutionary, in part because she had worked with the Americans who sought to relieve the famine in her city.⁴⁴ Despite the general ill will, ARA soup kitchens nevertheless began to operate across southern and eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea in the winter and spring of 1922.⁴⁵ The Ukrainian Red Cross contributed to the effort too, as did the Joint Distribution Committee, which provided food and other aid to victims of the pogroms.⁴⁶

Inevitably, all the foreign organizations operated under restrictions. The Nansen Mission was forced to work through Soviet institutions instead of using its own personnel. The Joint Distribution Committee did send its own employees, but all of them had to promise to ‘refrain from expressions of opinion on national or international politics’ and ‘do nothing that shall in the slightest way aid or abet any section or element of people over and above any other section or element’.⁴⁷ Anti-semitism hampered the Committee’s relief programme; posters, leaflets and other objects bearing its logo were often quickly removed or confiscated by the authorities. The ARA was sometimes banned from particular places with little advance notice. At one point its officials were told to keep away from the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, probably because partisans were still operating there. Soviet authorities feared the influence of Americans in territory that was not quite pacified.⁴⁸

Eventually, aid reached Ukraine, food became more available, and death rates slowed. By the end of 1923 the crisis seemed to be under control. But the delay in the delivery of aid had caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Many wondered, both at the time and later, why it had happened. The ARA’s members discussed it among themselves and wrote about it years later. Most believed that the initial Soviet opposition to their relief programme in Ukraine was politically inspired. Southern Ukraine, one of the worst-hit regions in the whole of the USSR, had also been a Makhno and Cossack stronghold. Perhaps Soviet authorities were ‘willing to let the Ukraine suffer, rather than take the chance of new uprisings which might follow foreign contact’, the Americans mused.49 Aware that they were perceived as spies, the Americans also thought that the regime expected them to act as provocateurs. They may well have been right.

More recently, some Ukrainian scholars have offered an even more pointed political explanation: perhaps the Soviet authorities actually used the famine instrumentally, as they would in 1932, to put an end to the Ukrainian peasant rebellion.⁵⁰ This thesis cannot be proven: there is no evidence of a premeditated plan to starve the Ukrainian peasants in 1920–1. At the same time, it is true that if Moscow had indeed been using its agricultural policy to put down rebellion, it could hardly have done so more efficiently. The grain requisition system broke up communities, severed relationships, and forced peasants to leave home in search of food. Starvation weakened and demoralized those who remained, forcing them to abandon the armed struggle.⁵¹ Even at the time, many noted that conditions were particularly bad in Huliaipole, the home province of Makhno. The territories where he held power in the south were among the most devastated, first by the crop failure and then by the lack of famine relief.⁵²

Certainly the regime did use the famine – as it would a decade later – to strike hard at the Ukrainian religious hierarchy. In the name of famine relief, the state forced Ukrainian churches to give gold objects, icons and other valuables to the state. But behind the scenes, party leaders, including Skrypnyk, who led the collection drive, hoped that they could use the policy to create tensions between the newly formed Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and its main rival, which was still loyal to the Moscow patriarchate. Over many weeks the Ukrainian Politburo discussed these Church ‘donations’, inquired after them, and interested itself in their sale abroad.53 In 1922, Lenin, who was then already ill, sent a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, who preceded Stalin in the leadership of the Communist Party secretariat. The letter, arguing that the famine offered a unique opportunity to seize Church property, was to be passed on to party members. The Church’s sacrifice of valuable objects could, Lenin wrote, have an important political impact:

Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of [reactionary] clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force.⁵⁴

This, Lenin explained, was a time to teach the peasants, the clergy and other political opponents a ‘lesson’, so that ‘for the coming decades they will not dare think about any resistance’.⁵⁵

But the extent of the famine did frighten the Bolsheviks. Food shortages might possibly have helped to end peasant rebellions in Ukraine, but elsewhere they fuelled them. In the Russian province of Tambov, food requisitioning sparked the Antonov rebellion, one of the most serious anti-Bolshevik uprisings of the era. Food shortages also helped inspire the infamous Kronstadt rebellion, during which the Red Army fired on sailors who had played an important role in the revolution. Over the course of three years some 33.5 million people were affected by famine or food shortages – 26 million in Russia, 7.5 million in Ukraine – though precise death rates are difficult to calculate because nobody was keeping track of the numbers.⁵⁶ In Ukraine the best guesses put the number of deaths between 250,000 and 500,000 for southern Ukraine, the hardest-hit region.⁵⁷ In the USSR as a whole the ARA estimated that 2 million people had died; a Soviet publication produced soon after the famine concluded that 5 million had died.⁵⁸

These numbers shook the regime’s confidence. The Bolsheviks feared that they were blamed for the disaster – and indeed they were. One survivor of the 1932–3 famine later remembered meeting a peasant from the Dnipropetrovsk province in 1922 and hearing of the famine there. The man explained what had happened that year in no uncertain terms: ‘The Bolsheviks robbed people, took horses and oxen. There is no bread. People are dying of hunger.’59

By 1922 the Bolsheviks knew that they were unpopular in the countryside and especially the Ukrainian countryside. The expropriation of food had led to shortages, protest and finally starvation, all across the nascent USSR. Their rejection of everything that looked or sounded ‘Ukrainian’ had helped keep nationalist, anti-Bolshevik anger alive in Ukraine.

In response, the regime changed course and adopted two dramatically new policies, both intended to win back the support of the recalcitrant Soviet peasants, and especially recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants with nationalist sentiments. Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy’, which put an end to compulsory grain collection and temporarily legalized free trade, is the better remembered of the two. But in 1923, Moscow also launched a new ‘indigenization’ policy (korenizatsiia) designed to appeal to the Soviet federal state’s non-Russian minorities. It gave official status and even priority to their national languages, promoted their national culture, and offered what was in effect an affirmative-action policy, replacing Russian cadres from Moscow with ethnic nationals. The policy was known in Ukraine as ‘Ukrainization’, a word that had actually been coined by Hrushevsky, who had called for the Ukrainization of the Russian-speaking state apparatus back in 1907.⁶⁰ Hrushevsky (who was long gone from politics by the early 1920s) had wanted to use the language to solidify support for national independence. The goal of Lenin’s 1923 policy was precisely the opposite: he hoped to make Soviet power seem less foreign to Ukrainians, and thus reduce their demands for sovereignty.

To the purists, both of these strategies represented a step ‘backwards’, away from Marxist-Leninist ideals, and many refused to believe that they would be permanent. One senior Bolshevik, Grigorii Zinoviev, called the New Economic Policy ‘a temporary deviation’ and a ‘clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labor against the front of international capitalism’.61 Lenin himself, when explaining the New Economic Policy to the party’s political educators in October 1921, used the expression ‘strategic retreat’. When discussing the policy, he often sounded almost apologetic. He told one group of educators that Soviet economic policy had so far been based on a mistaken assumption, namely that ‘the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution’.⁶² Because the peasantry had not yet reached the correct level of political evolution, some retrenchment was now required. Once they became enlightened, it might be possible to try more advanced communist economic policies once again.

To those who had believed in a unified, homogenized, Russian-speaking workers’ state, the very notion of ‘Ukrainization’ was similarly disheartening. Rakovsky, who was still leader of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars in 1921, declared that widespread use of the Ukrainian language would mean a return to the ‘rule of the Ukrainian petit-bourgeois intelligentsia and the Ukrainian kulaks’. His deputy, Dmytro Lebed, argued even more forcefully that the teaching of Ukrainian was reactionary, because it was an inferior language of the village, whereas Russian was the superior language of the city. In an essay outlining his ‘Theory of the Two Cultures’, Lebed conceded that there might be a reason to teach peasant children in Ukrainian, since it was their native language. Later, however, they should all study Russian, in order to help them eventually merge with the Russian proletariat.⁶³

Beneath their fears of the ‘reactionary’ and ‘kulak’ Ukrainian language, Rakovsky, Lebed and the other Russophone Bolsheviks in Ukraine had a mixed set of motives. Once again, there was an element of Russian chauvinism in all of their thinking: Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else. Ukrainian, to many of them, was a ‘barnyard’ language. As the Ukrainian communist Volodymyr Zatonskyi complained, ‘it is an old habit of comrades to look upon Ukraine as Little Russia, as part of the Russian empire – a habit that has been drummed into you throughout the millennia of the existence of Russian imperialism’.64 Others had deeper objections and argued that Ukrainian was actually a ‘counter-revolutionary language’. Scarred by the peasant revolt, they had a well-founded fear of Ukrainian nationalism, which they identified with the Ukrainian language. Zatonskyi again explained: ‘Precisely in the year 1919 … there was a certain suspicion regarding the Ukrainian language. Such feelings were widespread, even in circles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry of undeniably proletarian origin.’⁶⁵

Their prejudice against all things Ukrainian of course had an ideological source too: the Bolsheviks were committed to a heavily centralized state and the destruction of independent institutions, whether economic, political or cultural. Intuitively, they understood that the autonomy of any Soviet province or republic could become an obstacle to total power. Class solidarity, not national solidarity, was supposed to guide the way. As another communist leader put it: ‘I think that if we concern ourselves with the culture of every nation individually, then this will be an unhealthy national vestige.’⁶⁶

Still, both of the new policies had enthusiastic supporters at the highest levels. The New Economic Policy found a champion in the Bolshevik intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, who came to believe that the USSR would reach the higher stages of socialism through market relations, and who argued forcefully against grain requisitioning.⁶⁷ Partly thanks to his support, and to Lenin’s support in the months before his death in January 1924, the New Economic Policy – widely known by the acronym NEP – briefly evolved into a form of what Lenin called ‘state capitalism’. Under the new system, markets functioned, but only under heavy state control. The state abolished the prodrazvyorstka, the mandatory grain procurement, and replaced it with a tax. Peasants began to sell grain again in the traditional way – that is, for money. Small traders – ‘NEP men’ – also bought and sold grain and thus organized its distribution, as they had for many centuries. At this very elementary level, a market economy was restored and food gradually became more available.

Ukrainization had real advocates too. After the experience of the peasant rebellions, Lenin himself said in 1919 that it would be a ‘profound and dangerous error’ to ignore nationalist sentiment in Ukraine.⁶⁸ In February 1920, as the third and final Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine got underway, he sent a telegram to Stalin, telling him to hire interpreters for the Red Army in Ukraine and to ‘oblige unconditionally all their officers to accept applications and other documents in the Ukrainian language’.69 Lenin did not want to lose Ukraine again, and if that meant indulging Ukrainian national emotions, then he would do so.

Inside Ukraine, the moment of the ‘national communists’ had arrived. Optimistically, they argued that Ukrainian national feelings would enhance the revolution, and that Ukrainization and Sovietization were not just compatible but mutually reinforcing. Skrypnyk – the same Ukrainian official whose resistance to American aid had so surprised the men from the ARA – was the most enthusiastic of all. Ever since he had served as Lenin’s envoy to Ukraine in December 1917, Skrypnyk had been arguing that the hostility between the Russian-speaking proletariat and the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry was counter-productive.⁷⁰ His views were echoed by Zatonskyi, who told his fellow Bolsheviks in 1921 that they had missed the nationalist moment: ‘When the dark peasant masses rose up and became conscious of themselves, when the peasant who had previously looked at himself and his language with scorn put up his chin and started demanding more – we didn’t make use of it.’ As a result, the national revolution had been hijacked by the bourgeoisie: ‘We should say it straight: that was our great mistake.’⁷¹

Oleksandr Shumskyi and other members of the far left Borotbyst group, which had secured so much popularity in 1917–18, also joined the ranks of the national communists after 1920.⁷² By the standards of the USSR at the time, Shumskyi’s position was unusual. Although socialists, Mensheviks, anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries were already under investigation or arrest all over the Soviet Union, Moscow made an exception in Ukraine for a few of the Borotbyst group, who were brought into the Soviet fold. Lenin hoped that they would align their peasant supporters with the Bolsheviks and add a touch of native authenticity to the new regime.

Shumskyi himself suspected that he was serving as a form of camouflage, but he accepted the arrangement and agreed to serve as Commissar of Education in Ukraine. Skrypnyk became Commissar of Justice. In the summer of 1923 the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party – the wider body of leaders, beneath the Politburo – passed its first decree on Ukrainization. The authorities in Kharkiv recognized Ukrainian as the majority language in the republic, and required all state employees to become bilingual within a year.73

Through these changes, Ukraine’s national communists hoped to make Soviet communism seem more native, to make it look less like a Russian imposition. They also hoped to encourage the Ukrainian intellectual elite to be more sympathetic, and even to make Soviet Ukraine attractive to the ethnic Ukrainians who lived across the border in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The USSR was always looking out for foreign revolutions that it could support. To most people it looked as if Moscow had fully thrown its weight behind these policies, and for a few short years many sincerely believed that they might work.

In March 1924, nearly seven years after his triumphant speech to the flag-waving crowds in Kyiv, Mykhailo Hrushevsky returned to Ukraine. After fleeing the country in 1919, he had lived for a time in Vienna. For a couple of years he contemplated moves to Prague or Lviv, even Oxford or Princeton. He negotiated with the Bolsheviks and seems to have sought a political role.

Although he did not find one, Hrushevsky decided to come back anyway, returning to Ukraine as a ‘private person’ and a scholar. No one doubted the symbolic significance of his decision, including the Ukrainian communists. Between January and June 1921 the Ukrainian Politburo had discussed Hrushevsky and his possible return no fewer than four times.⁷⁴ Many of the Ukrainian national leaders who remained in exile denounced his decision as a ‘legitimization’ of Bolshevik rule; the Bolsheviks celebrated it for the same reason. It was proof that their policy was working. Later, they would claim he had begged to return, having repented of his previous counter-revolutionary activity.⁷⁵

But Hrushevsky himself said repeatedly that he had made no concessions. He was returning, he said, because he believed that a Ukrainian political revival first required a Ukrainian cultural revival, and he thought that such a thing might now be possible. Restricted though he might be in the Soviet Union, Hrushevsky could not miss this moment, so pregnant with possibilities for Ukraine. ‘One must think how to avoid allowing cultural life to backslide,’ he wrote to a colleague. ‘So far, both government and society are holding their own.’76 Not everyone in the Ukrainian administration felt the same way: as soon as he arrived back in his homeland, the secret police began to construct what would become a massive surveillance operation all around him, recruiting dozens of people to report on his movements and his thinking.⁷⁷ Hrushevsky may not have known the details of this operation, but he surely suspected something like it: before his return, he had asked both the Ukrainian Communist Party and the government to write him letters guaranteeing him immunity from political prosecution.⁷⁸

Nevertheless, on the surface the Bolsheviks accepted his presence, and he accepted the Bolsheviks. Hrushevsky received state support to set up a new institute for historical studies in Kyiv under the banner of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences – Vseukraïnska Akademiia Nauk – best known by its Ukrainian acronym, VUAN. He went back to work on his multi-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, began editing a journal, and encouraged younger colleagues in their work.⁷⁹

Hrushevsky’s return set the tone for a period of genuine intellectual and cultural ferment in Ukraine. For a few brief years his fellow historians at VUAN produced monographs on nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant rebellions and the history of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment.⁸⁰ The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church declared itself fully independent in 1921; it rejected the authority of the Moscow patriarchate, decentralized the hierarchy, revived Ukrainian liturgy, and anointed a leader, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyi. Artists and architects in Kharkiv experimented with Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism, just like their counterparts in Moscow and Paris. Ukrainian architects built the first skyscraper complex in Europe, a cluster of buildings that included government offices, a library and a hotel. Years later, Borys Kosarev, an artist, set designer, and one of the stars of Kharkiv modernism, remembered that in Kharkiv ‘new theatres opened regularly. Performances were accompanied by heated debate.’ Kosarev worked on one production created to mark the opening of a tractor-production plant: ‘The plant was built by discharged Red Army soldiers and peasants from remote villages – our potential spectators. The task was to tell them the truth about their reality, as well as to create a fascinating performance. But first the spectators had to be lured in.’81

Meanwhile, young Ukrainian literati dreamed of inventing whole new forms of artistic experience. One literary group, Hart (‘The Tempering’), sought to ‘unite the proletarian writers of Ukraine’ the better to create ‘one international, communist culture’. Not that its leaders, former Borotbysts, were sure what such a thing would look like in reality:

We do not know whether, during Communism, emotions will disappear, whether the human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of the head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being. Therefore we do not know precisely what form art will assume under Communism …⁸²

Another organization, Pluh (‘The Plough’), sought to cultivate peasant writers, in the hope that they could help awaken the creativity of rural Ukraine. They started rural reading circles and sent evangelistic envoys into the countryside. Their literary programme proclaimed the group’s goal to be the ‘creation of broad pictures, works with universal themes, dealing primarily with the life of the revolutionary peasantry’.⁸³ They also established one of the first writers’ colonies in Ukraine, an apartment compound in Kharkiv where writers and journalists could live together.⁸⁴

The Ukrainian intelligentsia also had, for the first time, the resources and the legal status that they needed in order to standardize their own language. Because Ukrainian had never before been the official language of a modern state, not everybody agreed upon proper usage. Ukrainians in the western half of the country had borrowed many words and spelling habits from Polish, whereas in the eastern half they borrowed from Russian. For the first time in its history the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences set up an orthography division to iron out the differences, and began work on a definitive Russian-Ukrainian dictionary. In 1925 the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars also created a special orthographic commission to formalize and standardize the language, under the leadership first of Shumskyi, and then of Skrypnyk. After many months of debate, the commission’s work culminated in a conference, held in Kharkiv in the spring of 1927, to which Skrypnyk invited leading scholars from Lviv, which was part of Poland. The resulting ‘Kharkiv orthography’, finally published in 1929, proved acceptable to both eastern and western Ukrainians. It was intended to become the standard textbook for those living inside the Ukrainian Republic as well as those outside its borders.85

As their confidence rose, some of the Ukrainian leadership also began to seek to spread Ukrainian culture beyond the country’s formal borders, partly with Moscow’s support. The Stalinist leadership particularly approved of Kharkiv’s efforts to exert its influence on the Ukrainians across the border in Poland. Shumskyi served as liaison to the Communist Party of western Ukraine, meaning the territories that then belonged to Poland. Stalin personally received a delegation from western Ukraine in 1925, and of course it was hoped that these West Ukrainian communists would help destabilize the Polish state.⁸⁶ Things became more complicated when some of the national communists grew interested in the nearly 8 million Ukrainian speakers living across their eastern border in Russia, and especially the 915,000 living in the neighbouring North Caucasian district of Kuban. From 1925 onwards the Ukrainian leadership grew more enthusiastic in its pursuit of national links in Russia, agitating for more Ukrainian-language schools there and even seeking to change the republic’s eastern border in order to include more Ukrainian-speaking territory.

Although the alarmed authorities in the North Caucasus successfully resisted all but the most minimal border change, they were forced to relent on schools after a Central Committee investigation into the political mood of the Cossacks found evidence of ‘mass counter-revolutionary work’ and general dissatisfaction. To placate them, Moscow granted the Cossacks all across Ukraine and Russia recognition as a national minority. Because the Kuban Cossacks spoke Ukrainian, they too had the right to open Ukrainian-language schools.⁸⁷

This ‘high’ cultural activism was accompanied by what was referred to as ‘low’ Ukrainization, meaning the promotion of the Ukrainian language in ordinary life – in the media, in public debate, and above all in schools. Just before the start of the school year in 1923, the republican government decreed that all Ukrainian schoolchildren should be taught in their own language, using a new educational programme designed to ‘cultivate a new generation of loyal citizens’.88 The idea was to make the peasantry both literate and Soviet. By absorbing Marxist thought in Ukrainian, they would come to feel like an integral part of the USSR. In order to promote the language more widely and faster, Skrypnyk even imported 1,500 schoolteachers from Poland, where Ukrainian-language schools had been in existence for longer and where the teaching of Ukrainian was more entrenched.⁸⁹

These decisions had a significant impact. The percentage of books published in Ukrainian doubled between 1923 and 1929, and the number of Ukrainian-language newspapers and periodicals grew rapidly as well. So did the number of Ukrainian schools. In 1923 just over half of schools in the republic taught children in Ukrainian. A decade later the figure had risen to 88 per cent.⁹⁰

In many places the change went even deeper than language. Petro Hryhorenko, a schoolboy at the time – the son of peasants, he became a Soviet general, and later a dissident – remembered the era as one of real enlightenment. Two of the teachers in his village founded a branch of Prosvita, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian cultural organization, which had been revived: ‘In their house I first saw and heard played the Ukrainian national musical instrument, the bandura. From them I learned of Kobzar, written by the great Ukrainian poet Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko. And from them I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko, that I was Ukrainian.’⁹¹ At the time Hryhorenko perceived no conflict between his ‘Ukrainian’ identity and the ideals of the Bolsheviks: ‘Love for my culture and my people mingled in my mind with the dream of universal happiness, international unity and the unlimited “power of labor”.’ His Prosvita club eventually founded a Komsomol cell, and he eventually became an active communist.⁹²

Others trod a similar path. Ukrainization launched a broad fashion for folk music, and hundreds of young Ukrainians, both urban and rural, formed bandura ensembles that performed traditional songs at public events. Sometimes the songs, with their Christian and anti-Russian echoes, had to be toned down and ‘secularized’. But their romantic appeal seemed to move young people, including those like Hryhorenko who had not grown up with them.93

Romantic legends of the past inspired many. One headmaster in Kyiv was so moved to teach children the language of Ukrainian poetry that he christened his school Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Labour School No. 1, and put Ukraine’s national poet at the centre of the curriculum. He encouraged the school’s pupils to keep journals, to write down their thoughts and to draw pictures in response to Shevchenko’s poetry. They also performed skits about the poet at the local workers’ club, and interviewed the school janitor, whose father had met the poet, for the school newspaper.⁹⁴ In all of these projects the slogans calling for social justice derived from Shevchenko, not Marx. That some of Shevchenko’s verse had anti-Russian overtones seemed, at the time, not to matter: his words were interpreted as opposition to the Russian empire, not to the Russian nation, and allowed to stand.

Still, cracks in the scheme were visible very early. Not all of the schools officially deemed ‘Ukrainian-speaking’ necessarily taught the language very well. The majority of teachers were still native Russian speakers, and few of them found it easy to make the switch – or wanted to. In rural schools, teachers who spoke bad Ukrainian were instructing pupils who also spoke bad Ukrainian; both might end up speaking an ungrammatical mix of languages. Attempts to verify the skills of teachers met with many forms of passive resistance. Teachers would refuse to be tested, protest that they had no time to acquire fluency or complain, no doubt accurately, about inadequate textbooks. It was hard to disprove their claims, since many members of the commissions set up to check on the teachers’ aptitudes could not themselves speak Ukrainian either.⁹⁵

Some resisted more actively. Many people didn’t want their children to be educated in Ukrainian, on the grounds that they would be handicapped when attempting to enter higher education, where Russian was still dominant.⁹⁶ Bureaucrats also resisted efforts to make the state apparatus use Ukrainian. Despite being theoretically required to speak Ukrainian, party officials often shirked the task with impunity. By the second half of the decade the regional party committee in Odessa, a Russophone city, had established courses in Ukrainian for 300 party apparatchiks. Only 226 actually registered, and of that number only 75 attended regularly. Even fewer paid the required fees. The organizers of the programme harassed the recalcitrant pupils to pay up, which could hardly have encouraged them to attend, and complained constantly that they had lost money.97

The party’s failure even to train its own officials in the language hinted at something deeper. By the mid-1920s the USSR had already become a strict police state, one that, if it had wanted to do so, could have cracked down hard on party members who refused to learn Ukrainian. But in truth the police state was already quietly pursuing another set of policies. Even as Hrushevsky, Shumskyi, Skrypnyk and other advocates of an independent Ukrainian identity rose to prominence in cultural and educational ministries, a very different group of officials were rising alongside them. Pro-Soviet, Russian speaking – and, often, Russian, Jewish or even Latvian or Polish by ‘ethnicity’ – Ukraine’s political policemen were far more likely to be devoted to Stalin than to any abstract idea of the Ukrainian nation. As the decade wore on, their allegiances would begin to show.

Of the Ukrainian policemen who came of age in the 1920s, the most loyal, and in many other ways the most notable, was Vsevolod Balytsky.⁹⁸ Born in 1892 in Verkhniodniprovsk, a small city on the Dnieper River, Balytsky spent most of his childhood in the industrial city of Luhansk, where his father was an accountant in a factory. Raised in the Russian-speaking world of the Ukrainian industrial intelligentsia – rumour had it that he was even of aristocratic origin – Balytsky described himself in a 1922 document as ‘Russian’, though later he changed his national designation to ‘Ukrainian’. Only much later, at the time of his arrest during the ‘great terror’ of 1937, did he declare himself ‘Russian’ once again.

In fact, Balytsky’s national sympathies had always been less important to him than his political sympathies. He was radicalized as a teenager, and later claimed to have been ‘in contact with the revolutionary movement in Luhansk’ from the age of seventeen. He went to law school in Moscow, and in 1913 joined the Menshevik Party, the Bolsheviks’ rivals, a fact that he later tried to strike out of his biography. He switched sides and became a Bolshevik in 1915, joining the party early enough to count as a true believer. Tall and blonde, he was given to dramatic gestures and radical declarations. After being drafted into the army to fight in the First World War, he conducted ‘revolutionary agitation’ among other soldiers. When the revolution finally broke out in February 1917, he ran one of the bloody ‘people’s tribunals’ in the Caucasus. Perhaps it was there that he acquired his taste for identifying, purging and murdering class enemies. Violence, in Balytsky’s rhetoric, was often associated with cleansing and purifying, with ridding the party of ‘termites’ and ‘pollution’.

Balytsky’s belief in the cleansing power of political violence motivated him to return to Ukraine, and to join the Ukrainian Cheka, in 1919. In February of that year he published a poem in the Ukrainian Izvestiya:

There, where even yesterday life was so joyous

Flows the river of blood

And so? There where it flows

There will be no mercy

Nothing will save you, nothing!99

Soon after his return, Balytsky had the opportunity to see the ‘river of blood’ he had imagined. He played an active role in resisting the peasant rebellion of 1919. Fighting alongside the Red Army, he took part in the mass murder of hostages, before being forced out of the republic altogether. For a few weeks he wound up in Gomel, in the southeastern corner of the Republic of Belarus, in what must have felt like a major setback. Just as he had been preparing to take his place among the leaders of Ukraine, he found himself stranded in a distant provincial city, once again leading a revolutionary tribunal. Nevertheless, he stuck to his goal even at the edge of the war zone, arresting and shooting counter-revolutionaries, speculators and others who seemed to pose a threat to Soviet forces.

Eventually, Balytsky returned to Ukraine, where he triumphantly helped Dzerzhinsky ‘clean up’ in the wake of the White Army’s retreat. He travelled a good deal around the republic at this time, and at one point accidentally walked into a band of Makhno partisans. According to his own account, the insurgents immediately arrested him and marched him to the edge of the village to be shot. But one of their commanders, apparently impressed by Balytsky’s aristocratic bearing, stopped them from killing him. After a brief interrogation, the partisan chief decided to let him go. A few years later Balytsky returned the favour. After Bolshevik forces captured the same commander, Balytsky allegedly commuted his death sentence.100

After the fighting died down, Balytsky was rewarded for his loyalty. In 1923 he became commander of the Ukrainian Cheka. Taking the lead from his colleagues in Moscow, who were then busy prosecuting the Bolsheviks’ socialist opponents, he helped organize the first trial of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. In this period the courts handed down relatively mild sentences and many of the accused received pardons.

Quietly, Balytsky’s power and influence kept growing. In 1925, at his insistence, the Ukrainian Politburo signed a series of decrees strengthening the Ukrainian secret police, whose name was changed first to GPU – the State Political Directorate – and then to OGPU – the Joint State Political Directorate.¹⁰¹ Among other things he convinced the Politburo to protect the salaries of his departments’ employees. Even as the cultural influence of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was its height and the power of the peasants was at their greatest, Balytsky, Ukrainian by birth but Russian-speaking and Soviet by sympathy, was building the loyalty of quite a different team, preparing them to play a large role in the future of Ukraine.