4

The Double Crisis, 1927–9

Glavlit instructs you to take all measures to completely bar the appearance in the press of any dispatches (articles, items, etc) that refer to difficulties or interruptions in the supply of grain for the country as they could, without sufficient grounds, cause panic and derail measures being taken by the government to overcome temporary difficulties in the matter of grain procurements and supplies for the country.

Mailgram to all units from the information department of the OGPU, 19271

It is not possible that there is no bread. If they gave us rifles we would find some.

Comment overheard by a secret police informer, 1927²

War Communism had failed. The radical workers’ state had not brought prosperity to the workers. But by the latter part of the 1920s, Lenin’s New Economic Policy was failing too.

Theoretically, markets were free. But in practice, the state was not content to leave them alone. Officials, suspicious of the traders profiting from the sale of grain, interfered constantly by circulating aggressive, ‘anti-speculator’ propaganda and imposing heavy regulations. They set high prices for industrial goods and low prices for agricultural products (hence the designation ‘scissors crisis’), which created an imbalance. Some traders offered to buy grain at low ‘state’ prices, others offered high ‘private’ prices. Many peasants who could not get the higher prices did not sell at all. Instead they preferred – logically – to store their grain, feed it to their livestock, and wait for the prices to go up.

This new crisis came as a shock. Food supplies had gradually been improving since the famine of 1921–3. A poor grain harvest in 1924 led once again to widespread hunger, but the peasants still had beets, potatoes, and their cows and pigs to rely upon. The moratorium on enforced grain collection, which was still then in place, meant that peasants were willing to plant during the following spring.3

By 1927 the system looked shaky again. In that year the state obtained (according to its own unreliable counting methods) 5.4 million tonnes of grain. But the food distribution agencies that handed out strictly rationed bread loaves to the urban proletariat and the bureaucracy had been counting on 7.7 million tonnes.⁴ In an all-union survey, the OGPU reported ‘crushing mobs and shouting matches’ in the queues for food all across the USSR. The same secret survey quoted the wife of a factory worker: ‘the whole day is killed just for 10 pounds of flour, your husband comes home from work and dinner isn’t ready’. Ominously, some of the complaining had a political edge. In the city of Tver, police found a proclamation calling for a strike: ‘There’s no butter, flour became available only recently, there’s no kerosene, the people have been duped.’⁵ Paul Scheffer, the Moscow correspondent for Berliner Tageblatt, reported ‘waiting lines in front of the shops everywhere in the Soviet Union’ and extraordinarily high prices. His ominous thought: ‘Might one not say, in comment on all such things, that they are “like the winter of 1917” in Germany?’⁶ Eugene Lyons, freshly posted to Moscow as the correspondent for United Press International, also described the queues he saw in the winter of 1927–8:

Everywhere these ragged lines, chiefly of women, stretched from shop doors, under clouds of visible breath; patient, bovine, scarcely grumbling … Bread, which constitutes the larger half of the ordinary Russian’s diet, became a ‘deficit product’.⁷

For the Communist Party the crisis threatened to overshadow an important anniversary: ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars. Food of all kinds was obsessively rationed – workers received food coupons according to their status – and very scarce. So sensitive was information about grain production that five months before the anniversary celebrations, in May 1927, the OGPU forbade all Soviet newspapers from writing about any ‘difficulties or interruptions in the supply of grain to the country as they could … cause panic’.8

The renewed food crisis also came at a critical moment in the Communist Party’s own internal power struggle. Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had been organizing support inside the Communist Party, marshalling his forces against Trotsky, his main rival. To do so, he had sided with the ‘Rightists’, most notably Nikolai Bukharin – who supported the principles of the New Economic Policy, limited free commerce and cooperation with the peasants – against Trotsky’s ‘Leftists’, who warned that the policy would create a new capitalist class and enrich the kulaks in the countryside. But in 1927 he flipped his politics: having satisfactorily disposed of the ‘Leftists’ – Trotsky was by now in disgrace, and would soon be in exile – Stalin now began preparing an attack on the ‘Rightists’, Bukharin and the New Economic Policy. In other words, Stalin used the grain crisis, as well as the general economic dissatisfaction, not only to radicalize Soviet policy, but also to complete the destruction of this group of rivals.

From the Kremlin’s standpoint, 1927 was also an important year in foreign policy. For the previous several years, the OGPU had been expanding its spy network throughout Europe with great enthusiasm. But in 1927 the Soviet Union’s foreign spies suffered some embarrassing setbacks. Major Soviet espionage operations were uncovered in Poland, Turkey, China and France, among other places. In London, the British government broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR after uncovering an operation described by the Home Secretary in the House of Commons as ‘one of the most complete and one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet’.⁹

At the same time the newly expanded Soviet espionage service uncovered what it claimed to be evidence of Japanese territorial designs on the Soviet Far East. Poland was assumed to have ongoing designs on the USSR as well, especially after Marshal Piłsudski’s successful coup d’état in 1926 brought the victor of the Polish-Bolshevik war back to power. Ironically, Poland did secretly sponsor some schemes to promote Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s, with some support from Japanese diplomats, but there is no evidence that Stalin knew about it.10 His suspicions were focused instead on non-existent Polish and Japanese spy networks and what was, at best, some very superficial Polish-Japanese military collaboration.¹¹

Taken together all these incidents did seem threatening, especially to Soviet leaders who still remembered the bitterness of the fighting a decade earlier. In a Pravda article in July 1927, Stalin warned of the ‘real and material threat of a new war in general, and a war against the USSR in particular’. Unconnected stories were presented in newspapers and public speeches as a looming conspiracy.¹² The accompanying propaganda campaign prepared Soviet society for wartime conditions and more austerity, and sought to inspire greater loyalty to the communist system at the same time.¹³

Responding both to the apparent threat of hostilities as well as to the more realistic prospect of mass food riots, the OGPU proposed a list of harsh new policies in October 1927. Among other things the secret police wanted the right to ‘hold accountable’ private grain traders who were ‘speculating’ in scarce goods and inflating prices.¹⁴ The Politburo also called for an immediate transfer of industrial goods to the countryside (a carrot among the many sticks); the collection of back taxes; the freezing of grain prices; and the direct involvement of local party officials in the collection of grain.¹⁵

None of these changes had any significant impact. In early January 1928 the Soviet Central Committee observed that despite their orders, ‘no breakthrough was visible’ in the collection of grain. To solve the problem, Stalin told party bosses to ‘rapidly mobilize all of the party’s best forces’, to make local party leaders ‘personally responsible’ for grain collection, to organize a propaganda campaign that would point clearly at those who were failing, and to apply ‘harsh punishments’ to those who were refusing to pay their taxes, especially if they were kulaks.¹⁶ Eventually, the state would fine peasants who could not deliver grain, charging them up to five times its monetary value. Those who refused to pay these fines could have their property confiscated and sold at auction.¹⁷

The language Stalin now used was militaristic. He spoke of ‘mobilization’ and ‘fronts’, as well as of ‘enemies’ and ‘danger’. The kulaks and the speculators had, he said, ‘taken advantage of the goodwill and the slow workings of our organizations and broken through the front on the bread market, raised prices and created a wait-and-see mood among the peasants, which has paralysed the grain collection even more’. In the face of this threat it would be a terrible mistake to move softly or slowly. Instead, the kulaks and traders had to be separated from the other peasants, and hit hard with arrests:

Only with that kind of policy will the middle-income peasants understand that the possibility of higher prices is a lie invented by speculators, that the kulak and the speculator are enemies of Soviet power, that linking their own fate with the fate of speculators and kulaks is dangerous.18

At about this time Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership also brought back the phrase chrezvychainye mery, ‘extraordinary measures’, as well as the chrezvychaishchina, a state of emergency, words still redolent of Tsaritsyn, the Red Terror and the civil war. And along with the language of the civil war, the tactics of the civil war – the violence Stalin had deployed in Tsaritsyn ten years earlier – returned too.

In early January, Genrikh Yagoda, now the chairman of the OGPU, issued abrupt instructions to immediately arrest ‘the most prominent private grain procurement agents and most inveterate grain merchants … who are disrupting set procurement and market prices’. In practice, anyone making a living trading grain was now liable to be reclassified as a criminal. By the middle of the month more than five hundred people had been imprisoned across Ukraine, and more investigations were underway. In Cherkasy, Mariupol and Kharkiv, among other places, police discovered many tonnes of grain that had been kept back because peasants had, quite rationally, been waiting for prices to rise. The police pounced upon this evidence of conspiracy.¹⁹

The OGPU meanwhile concluded that some of the dealers concealing this grain were aware of police repression and seeking actively to avoid it. Many had moved their grain to prevent being arrested; others, hoping for the wave of repression to subside, were paying peasants to hold onto grain in order to wait for a better moment.²⁰ The OGPU ended all this activity with a blunt decree on 19 January: anyone who refused to sell grain to the state at the agreed price would be arrested and tried.21 With that order the New Economic Policy effectively came to an end.

The grain traders were useful scapegoats. But in truth, Soviet economic policy in the 1920s had rested on a fundamental contradiction, and even ordinary people could see it. At the beginning of 1929, Semen Ivanisov, an educated peasant from Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine, wrote a letter to a friend who was a party official. The letter praised Lenin, who had once written of the ‘indispensable link’ between workers and peasants. But Ivanisov feared that Lenin’s sentiments had been forgotten. ‘What do we see now? The correct relationship with the peasantry, a relationship of allies – it doesn’t exist.’

Instead, wrote Ivanisov, he and his fellow peasants were now in an impossible situation. If they worked hard and built up their farms then they became kulaks, ‘enemies of the people’. But if they took the other option and remained bedniaks, poor peasants – then they were worse off than the ‘American peasants’ with whom they were supposed to be competing. There seemed no way out of the trap. ‘What shall we do,’ Ivanisov asked his friend, ‘how shall we live?’ His own situation was deteriorating. ‘Now we have to sell our cows, without that there is nothing. At home there are tears, endless shouting, suffering, curses. I would suggest that if you should go soon and visit a peasant family and listen, you would say: this isn’t life, but rather hard labour, hell, worse than the devil knows what. That’s all.’²²

Ivanisov, like many others, faced an impossible choice: ideologically approved poverty on the one hand, or dangerously unacceptable wealth on the other. The peasants knew that if they worked badly, they would go hungry. If they worked well, they would be punished by the state. Even Maurice Hindus, the American journalist who generally admired the USSR, could see the problem: ‘When therefore a man came into possession of two or three horses, as many or a few more cows, about half a dozen pigs, and when he raised three or four hundred poods of rye or wheat, he fell into the category of kulak.’²³ Once a peasant became wealthy and successful he became an enemy. Farmers who were too efficient or effective immediately became figures of suspicion. Even girls stayed away, Hindus recorded: ‘Nobody wants to marry a rich man nowadays.’24 Eugene Lyons in Moscow noted that ‘the more industrious, more unscrupulous and more prosperous peasants’ were all under huge pressure. The writer Mikhail Sholokhov, in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, also depicted a character whose farm had simply prospered too much:

I sowed twelve, then twenty, and even thirty hectares, think of that! I worked, and my son and his wife. I only hired a labourer a couple of times at the busiest season. What was the Soviet government’s order in those years? Sow as much as you can! And now … I’m afraid. I’m afraid that because of my thirty hectares they’ll drag me through the needle’s eye, and call me a kulak.²⁵

Thus had the Soviet Union comprehensively destroyed the peasants’ incentive to produce more grain.

Perhaps not all of the Bolsheviks understood this contradiction. But Stalin certainly did, and in the winter of 1928 he and his most senior comrades decided to take it on directly. The Politburo sent one of its members, Anastas Mikoyan, to the North Caucasus in order to uncover the source of the food shortages. Molotov went to Ukraine. Stalin himself decided to go to Siberia.

The records of Stalin’s three-week trip are revealing. In the reports he wrote afterwards, he observed that most of his party colleagues on the ground – some of whom still dared to argue with him – were convinced that the grain shortage could be solved by technical changes, for example by offering the peasants more manufactured goods in exchange for grain. But would a better supply of shoes for peasant children really fix the longer-term problem? At a meeting with Siberian party leaders, Stalin, clad in a brand-new sheepskin coat, unexpectedly began to think aloud about the deep flaws of Soviet agriculture. After the revolution, he reminded them, peasants had occupied and divided up the private estates of aristocrats and monasteries, thus creating hundreds of thousands of tiny, unproductive farms and similar numbers of poor peasants. But this was precisely the problem: kulaks – rich farmers – were so much more productive than their poor neighbours because they had held on to bigger properties.

The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay ‘in the fact that his farming is large scale’. Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology. Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became kulaks, and therefore ideologically unacceptable.

What should be done about this? Stalin’s ideology would not let him conclude that successful farmers should be allowed to accumulate more land and build up major estates, as had happened in every other society in history. It was impossible, unimaginable, that a communist state could contain major landowners, or even wealthy farmers. But Stalin also understood that persecution of successful peasants would not lead to higher grain production either. His conclusion: collective farming was the only solution. ‘Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms … for us is the only path.’26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms. The peasants had to give up their privately owned land, pool their resources, and join them.

Collectivization had, as noted, been tried on a small scale and mostly abandoned in 1918–19. But it aligned with several other Marxist ideas and had some advocates in the Communist Party, so the idea had remained in the air. Some hoped that the creation of collectively owned communal farms – kolkhoz – would ‘proletarianize’ the peasantry, making farmers into wage labourers who would begin to think and act like workers. During a discussion of the subject in 1929 one advocate explained that ‘the large kolkhoz – and this is entirely clear to everyone – must in its type be a production economy similar to our socialist factories and state farms’.²⁷ The collectivization propaganda also contained more than a whiff of the Soviet cult of science and of the machine, the belief that modern technology, increased efficiency and rationalized management techniques could solve all problems. Land would be shared. Farming equipment would also be shared. In the name of efficiency, tractors and combine harvesters would be controlled by state-owned Machine Tractor Stations, which would lease them out as needed to the collective farms.

Collectivization and centrally planned agriculture also matched Stalin’s plans for Soviet industry. In 1928 the Soviet government would approve its first ‘Five-Year Plan’, an economic programme that mandated a massive, unprecedented 20 per cent annual increase in industrial output, the adoption of the seven-day week – workers would rest in shifts, so that factories would never have to close – and a new ethic of workplace competition. Foremen, labourers and managers alike vied with one another to fulfil, or even to over-fulfil, the plan. The massive increase in industrial investment created thousands of new working-class jobs, many of which would be taken by peasants forced off their land. It also created an urgent need for coal, iron and natural resources of all kinds, many of which could only be found in the far north or far east of the USSR. These resources would also be mined by peasants made redundant by collectivization.

The ‘emergency methods’, the collectivization drive and rapid industrialization quickly became Stalin’s signature policies. This ‘Great Turnaround’ or ‘Great Upheaval’, as it became known, represented a return to the principles of War Communism and, in practice, a second revolution. Because the new policies represented a clear departure from ideas that Stalin and others had been advocating for several years, and because his main party rivals were bitter opponents of collectivization in particular, he became deeply invested, both personally and politically, in their success. Eventually, Stalin would personally redraft the collectivization orders so as to implement them as radically and rapidly as possible.28

In the wake of Stalin’s visit, the Siberian OGPU realized that they had to ensure their leader’s success. Instead of waiting for contributions from the peasants as they had done in the past, they abandoned any pretence of rule of law, sent agents into the countryside, searched and arrested farmers and took their grain, just as they had in the days of the civil war. ‘Comrade Stalin gave us our motto,’ declared one local grain collector: ‘Press, beat, squeeze.’²⁹ They got results. Even before he had returned to Moscow, Stalin sent a telegram to his colleagues, declaring success: ‘We greet the Central Committee with 80 million poods [1.31 million metric tonnes] of grain for January. This is a great victory for the Party.’ February, he claimed, would be the ‘most important fighting month in Siberia’.³⁰

Buoyed by these reports, Stalin intensified the argument for collectivization at two tumultuous Central Committee meetings in the spring and summer of 1928. In the speeches he made at the time, it is clear that he was, in part, pushing hard for the policy change precisely because it was opposed by his remaining serious party rivals, especially Bukharin, whom he now denounced as a ‘Right-Opportunist’. Even apart from its ramifications in the countryside, the collectivization policy was an ideological tool that established Stalin as the indisputable leader of the party. Eventually, the acceptance of his policy would invest him with authority and legitimacy inside the party. His opponents would recant their dissent.31

In the spring and summer of 1928 the reverse was also true: Stalin used the internal party conflict in order to build up an ideological case for the collectivization drive. At the July plenum, he argued, infamously, that the exploitation of the peasants was the key to the industrialization of the USSR: ‘You know that for hundreds of years England squeezed the juice out of all its colonies, from every continent, and thus injected extra investment into its industry.’ The USSR could not take that same path, Stalin argued. Nor, he declared, could it rely on foreign loans. The only remaining solution was, in effect, for the country to ‘colonize’ its own peasants: squeeze them harder and invest this ‘internal accumulation’ into Soviet industry. To support this transformation, peasants would have to pay ‘a tribute’ so that the Soviet Union could ‘further develop the rate of industrial growth’:

This situation, one must say, is unpleasant. But we wouldn’t be Bolsheviks if we skated over this matter and closed our eyes to the fact that without this additional tax on the peasants, unfortunately, our industry and our country will not be able to manage.

As for the ‘emergency methods’ that were causing so much pain, these had already ‘saved the country from a general economic crisis … we would now have a serious crisis of the whole national economy, starvation in the cities, starvation in the army’. Those who opposed them ‘are dangerous people’. The once-lauded ‘tight link’ between the peasants and the working class was no longer necessary: ‘the only class which holds power is the proletariat’.³²

Stalin’s language was deeply rooted in his Marxist understanding of economics. He had arrived at the ‘solution’ of rapid collectivization not by accident, but after a careful logical process. He had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialize the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land. He had knowingly decided that they would have to pay ‘tribute’ to the workers’ state, and he knew that they would suffer in the process.

Was forced collectivization, accompanied by violence, really the only solution? Of course not. Other options were open to the Soviet leadership. Bukharin, for example, believed in voluntary collectivization and raising the price of bread.33 But Stalin’s understanding of Soviet agriculture, his fanatical commitment to his ideology and his own experiences – especially his faith in the efficacy of terror – made mass, forced collectivization appear to him inevitable and unavoidable. He would now stake his personal reputation on the success of this policy.

The New Economic Policy was not the only inconsistent Bolshevik policy, nor was it the only one to hit a crisis point in 1927. ‘Ukrainization’ also contained within itself a profound contradiction, which became obvious around this time. On the one hand, the policy was essentially instrumental: the Bolsheviks in Moscow created it in order to placate Ukrainian nationalists, to convince them that Soviet Ukraine really was a Ukrainian state, and to draw them in to Soviet power structures. Yet to succeed, Ukrainization could not appear to be instrumental: if Ukrainian nationalists were to become loyal citizens of the USSR, they needed to believe that Ukrainization was real.³⁴

In order to win over Ukrainian nationalists, the Soviet state was therefore obliged to appoint ethnic Ukrainians to leading positions in the country, to fund the teaching of Ukrainian, and to allow the development of an ‘authentic’ Ukrainian national art and literature that would be regarded as distinct and different from Russian or Soviet culture. But these actions did not placate the nationalists. Instead, they encouraged them to demand more rapid change. Eventually, they encouraged them to question the primacy of Moscow altogether.

The loudest noises of discontent came from the literary world, where ambitions were expanding rapidly. Both the Hart and Pluh groups, like the rest of the Soviet artistic avant-garde, survived only briefly. In January 1926 they were folded into a more explicitly political organization, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoï Literatury, known by its Ukrainian acronym, VAPLITE. The group’s leader, Mykola Khvylovyi, had joined the Bolsheviks during the civil war and even belonged briefly to the Cheka. But his identification with Ukraine afforded him some distance from the Moscow Bolsheviks, and he began to develop in a different direction. Eschewing provincialism, ‘backwardness’ and the peasantry, railing against the ‘servile psychology’ of his compatriots, Khvylovyi aspired instead for Ukraine to develop an urban literary culture. He sought to identify Ukraine with Europe, not Russia, and by 1925 he was willing to say so:

Since our literature can at last follow its own path of development, we are faced with the question: by which of the world’s literatures should we set our course? On no account by the Russian. This is definite and unconditional. Our political union must not be confused with literature. Ukrainian poetry must flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles … the point is that Russian literature has weighed down upon us for centuries as master of the situation, it has conditioned our psyche to play the slavish imitator …35

The Ukrainian artist Mykhailo Boichuk, a modernist who had been part of the revolutionary avant-garde, had come to a similar conclusion around this time. Ukraine should construct a ‘great wall’ on its border with Russia, as the Chinese had done, ‘a barrier even for birds’, so that Ukrainian culture stood a chance of developing by itself.³⁶

An echo of that language appeared in the Ukrainian press, which was becoming evangelistic about spreading the benefits of Ukrainization beyond the country’s borders. As we have seen, the state approved of the idea that Soviet Ukraine should begin to exercise influence on Ukrainian speakers abroad, particularly in Poland. But in 1927, Soviet Ukraine also began looking to exercise influence on Ukrainians in Russia, and in particular on those in Kuban, a province of the North Caucasus where Ukrainian speakers outnumbered Russian speakers by two to one, and three to one in the countryside. The republic’s government newspaper published a series of twelve articles on Kuban and the North Caucasus, describing the history of Ukrainian influence in the province and the warm feelings that Ukrainians in Kuban felt for their brethren in Ukraine.

The series of articles openly advocated Ukrainization, infuriating the Russophone communists who ruled Kuban. Soon after, they arrested and prosecuted a group of alleged saboteurs, accusing them of advocating the transfer of Kuban to Ukraine. One confessed, or was made to confess, that he had been inspired by articles in the Ukrainian press.37 Fears that the region might become ‘Ukrainianized’, and thus to the Bolsheviks politically unreliable, would have fatal significance a few years later.

Discontent was also simmering within the Ukrainian political class, which objected to the heavy-handed role Moscow continued to play in the affairs of the republic’s communists. In April 1925, less than two years after the first decree on Ukrainization, the Soviet Communist Party abruptly sacked the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Emmanuel Kviring, who had been an open opponent of Ukrainization, and replaced him with Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest colleagues. Although Kaganovich had been born in Kyiv province, he spoke Ukrainian poorly. He was also Jewish, had spent most of his career in Russia, and was perceived in Ukraine not as a native Ukrainian but as an advocate for the Russian Bolsheviks.

Ostensibly, Kaganovich arrived with a plan to speed up the process of Ukrainization. During his three years in charge of the Ukrainian Communist Party (he was replaced in 1928 by Stanislav Kosior) he would in practice continue to encourage ‘low’ Ukrainization – the elimination of the bureaucratic obstacles to the use of the language – because the Bolsheviks still thought that was necessary to keep Ukrainian speakers loyal to the regime. But his suspicion of ‘high’ Ukrainization – culture, literature, theatre – turned quickly into real antagonism, irritating his new colleagues. Soon after Kaganovich’s appointment, Oleksandr Shumskyi, the Commissar of Education, met with Stalin. He complained about the new Ukrainian party secretary and demanded the appointment of a ‘real’ Ukrainian in Kaganovich’s place. A few months later Shumskyi also complained to the Ukrainian Politburo about unnamed Ukrainian communists – ‘unprincipled and hypocritical, slavishly two-faced and traitorously sycophantic’ – who paid lip service to Ukraine but in truth would do anything to please the Russians in order to ‘get a position’.

Shumskyi’s confidence – in himself, his position, in Moscow’s commitment to Ukrainian culture – was remarkably high, given that the ground was already beginning to shift under his feet. As Kaganovich oriented himself in Ukrainian affairs, he grew increasingly alarmed by what he saw and heard. He was astonished to discover that Hrushevsky, a man who had ‘served in a series of governments’ – meaning non-Bolshevik ones – was still walking freely on the streets of Kyiv. Elsewhere in the USSR such people were long behind bars. The more aggressive writings of the Ukrainian literati, especially Khvylovyi’s call for Ukrainian poetry to ‘flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles’, shocked Stalin’s envoy too.38 So did the writer’s frequently repeated slogan, ‘Het vid Moskvy!’ (‘Away from Moscow!’). Kaganovich sent a few choice Khvylovyi quotations to Stalin, who was predictably outraged, denounced the ‘extreme views’, and fulminated against Comrade Shumskyi for failing to understand that ‘only by combatting such extremisms is it possible to transform the rising Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian social life into a Soviet culture and a Soviet social life’.³⁹

Stalin had no need to alert his other ally in Ukraine to his concerns, for he already shared them. By that time, Vsevolod Balytsky had run the Ukrainian OGPU for several years, mostly keeping his activities shrouded in mystery. Although in charge of what was technically a Ukrainian party organization, Balytsky kept quiet about his surveillance of leading cultural figures and politicians, never making regular reports to the Ukrainian Council of Ministers or to local administrators. He even blocked a propaganda film intended to laud the work of his agents, on the grounds that it would reveal too many secrets. He remained loyal not to the Republic of Ukraine but to the Communist Party leadership in Moscow, and he demanded the same of his subordinates: ‘If the order is given to shoot into the crowd and you refuse,’ he told them at one point, ‘then I will shoot all of you. You must conform without objection to my commands, I will permit no protests.’ At the same time Balytsky worked hard to improve their salaries and privileges, as well as his own. Presumably it was at about this time that he acquired the taste for jewellery and fine art, which would be discovered in his possession at the time of his death.40

By 1925, Balytsky had also convinced the Ukrainian Politburo to set up a commission to monitor the activities of ‘Ukrainian intellectuals’, particularly those linked to the Academy of Sciences. In 1926 the OGPU produced a report ‘on Ukrainian separatism’ that recommended close observation of anyone with past links to any ‘Ukrainian anti-Soviet movements’.⁴¹ The nationalists had stopped conducting an open struggle against the Soviet state, but that ‘does not mean that they have been fully reconciled to the existing situation and have sincerely abandoned their hostile intentions’.⁴² Perhaps, the authors mused, the nationalists had changed not ideology but tactics:

Their hopes to overthrow Soviet power failed. The nationalists were forced to accept Soviet power as an unavoidable fact. Therefore, a new battle tactic was forged. They will use the new weapon of ‘cultural work’ against Soviet power … In general, representatives of Ukrainian nationalism work without rest to embed nationalist feelings in the masses …⁴³

Kaganovich, who would have read all these reports, concluded that these nationalists, among them the former Borotbysts, had not ‘come over to our side’ because they were true Bolsheviks, but rather because they were ‘calculating that they would re-orient us’. The Soviet programme of Ukrainization had, he feared, failed to Sovietize Ukraine. Instead, it had emboldened the enemies of the USSR, turning them into a ‘hostile force’ that threatened Soviet society from within: by allowing Ukrainian nationalists to remain in power, the Bolsheviks had nurtured the seeds of a new opposition.⁴⁴

Balytsky, with the skill of a trained conspiracy theorist, detected an even deeper plot. He suspected that the Ukrainian nationalists were not merely enemies: they were also traitors, a ‘fifth column’ that had infiltrated its way into the Soviet system on behalf of foreign powers. In a report entitled ‘On the Strength of the Counter-Revolution in Ukraine’, he traced the origins of this secret force to the coup carried out by Piłsudski in Poland in May 1926. ‘Anti-Soviet elements’ in Ukraine had, he explained, ‘seen in the figure of Piłsudski an old ally of Petliura’, and had been inspired once again to fight for the bourgeois-nationalist cause. The destruction of this elaborate plot would require a ‘vast operation to strangle anti-Soviet Ukrainian activity’.45

As 1926 turned to 1927, the vast operation began. Stalin kicked off a wave of attacks on Shumskyi, denouncing him by name. One by one the other members of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee also denounced Shumskyi, censured him and insulted him, both at party meetings and in the press. He had to resign as Commissar of Education, and from a host of other institutions as well, including the orthographic commission tasked with writing the Ukrainian language dictionary. Khvylovyi was also attacked and expelled from VAPLITE; the literary organization was forcibly dissolved and replaced with a more ‘pro-Soviet’ – in other words controlled and penetrated – union of proletarian writers, the All-Ukrainian Union of the Workers of Communist Culture. ‘Shumskyism’ and ‘Khvylovyism’ became buzzwords for dangerous nationalist deviations. In subsequent months and years association with either one of them became toxic.

The attacks on Shumskyi and Khvylovyi were only the loudest manifestations of the political pressure that began to affect other Ukrainian intellectuals as well. Hrushevsky, under heavy surveillance since his return to Kyiv, began to have trouble getting his books published.⁴⁶ Suddenly, he encountered difficulties in travelling abroad – the informers watching him were convinced he was planning to defect – and an OGPU plot would soon prevent him from becoming president of the Academy of Sciences.⁴⁷

The OGPU also stepped up its surveillance campaign. One of its informers heard a Ukrainian professor predicting a war between the Soviet Union and Poland and arguing, allegedly, that Ukrainians should ‘use the conflict to strengthen themselves’. A further informer claimed that another professor believed that ‘Ukrainization’ would raise national awareness to such an extent that soon – within two or three years – Ukraine would separate itself from Russia. The OGPU also recorded Ukrainian intellectuals worrying that the republic would soon fall into the hands of ‘foreign’ elements – that is, Russians and Jews.⁴⁸ These accusations filtered into the language of the leadership. At a special plenum in the spring of 1927, Skrypnyk, who had now replaced Shumskyi as Commissar of Education, echoed the general paranoia about foreign enemies and denounced both Shumskyi and Khvylovyi for collaborating with ‘fascist’ Poland.49

By the end of 1927, Balytsky was ready to proclaim the existence of a broader conspiracy: in Ukraine the Communist Party was facing opposition of an unprecedented kind. Acting both openly and subversively, people with links to anti-Bolshevik parties were working inside Soviet institutions in order to hide their true allegiance. Many remained in contact with ‘foreigners’ who were actively seeking to launch a counter-revolution, just as they had done in 1919.

Not accidentally, this wave of accusations coincided with the food shortages and discontent of 1927, as well as the ten-year anniversary of the revolution. Someone, after all, had to be blamed for the slow pace of Soviet growth – and it would not be Stalin.

In 1927 the OGPU had begun looking for a ‘case’ that could launch a new campaign against the saboteurs and foreign agents who were allegedly holding back the USSR. In the spring of 1928 they found one. In the Russian town of Shakhty – just to the east of Ukraine, in the North Caucasus, on the edge of the Donbas coal basin – the OGPU ‘discovered’ a conspiracy of engineers who allegedly were aiming to destroy the coal industry, in league with manipulative foreign powers. A few of them had indeed come from abroad and in due course more than two dozen German engineers were arrested, along with similar numbers of Soviet colleagues. The secret police also believed they would find connections between members of the workforce and the former owners of factories who had lost their property in the revolution and were supposedly plotting to get it back, as well as links to other foreign powers, including Poland.

The result was an elaborate show trial, the first of many. Dozens of foreign journalists attended the court in Shakhty in southwest Russia every day, along with the German ambassador and other prominent guests. The chief prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko – an advocate of ‘socialist justice’, the theory that politics matter more than rule of law – lectured the spellbound audience about the ‘vampires’ who had sucked the blood of the working class. ‘This was Revolutionary Justice,’ wrote Eugene Lyons, ‘its flaming eyes wide open, its flaming sword poised to strike.’50 Not all of the testimony went quite the way it was supposed to. One of the witnesses, Nekrasov, failed to appear. His lawyer explained that Nekrasov ‘was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a padded cell, where he screamed about rifles pointed at his heart and suffered paroxysms’.⁵¹ One of the German engineers openly declared he had made his ‘confession’ only under duress.⁵² Nevertheless, five of the engineers accused of ‘wrecking’ were sentenced to death, and forty-four received prison sentences. Newspapers across Russia covered the trial in great detail. Party functionaries everywhere got the message: if you don’t obey, this too can be your fate. In practice, ‘the Shakhty engineers were essentially on trial not as individuals but as members of a class’.⁵³ Anyone with education, expertise, technical experience was now under suspicion.

Because so many foreigners were involved, the Shakhty trial enjoyed huge notoriety abroad. Foreign diplomats rightly interpreted it as a signal that the New Economic Policy had been abandoned and that bigger changes were coming. But inside the Soviet Union almost as much attention was paid to a second show trial: that of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukraïny or SVU, an organization which seems to have been entirely fictional. A group with a similar name had been founded in Lviv in 1914 – it later developed small branches in Vienna and Berlin before fading away – and had propagated the Ukrainian cause among prisoners of war. But the Soviet version was invented by Balytsky’s Ukrainian OGPU. The goal was clear: the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals who might secretly harbour a belief in Ukrainian independence, and the destruction of that belief once and for all.⁵⁴

The SVU trial was just as well prepared as the Shakhty trial, and had equally broad aims.⁵⁵ The first arrests were made in the spring of 1929. Eventually, the OGPU detained 30,000 people – intellectuals, artists, technical experts, writers and scientists – and publicly tried forty-five of them at the Kharkhiv Opera House in the spring of 1930. The most prominent was Serhii Yefremov, a literary critic, historian, vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a former deputy chairman of the Central Rada. Yefremov had already been under public attack for many months, on the grounds that he had published an article in a Ukrainian-language newspaper based across the Polish border in Lviv. Others on trial included professors, lecturers, editors, laboratory assistants, as well as linguists, doctors, lawyers, theologians and chemical engineers.56 Several others had also been Central Rada politicians; nearly half were either priests or the sons of priests.⁵⁷

Teachers and students were particular targets. Among them was the director of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Labour School No. 1, which had so assiduously organized its curriculum around the verse of Ukraine’s national poet. The director and four of his colleagues were arrested on the grounds that they had supposedly excluded the children of Jews and workers from the school, had catered exclusively to the ‘bourgeois nationalists’, and had collected funds for a monument to Petliura. Leaders of student organizations, including some that had allegedly recruited kulak children by reading Shevchenko’s poetry, were also arrested and tried. The state seemed to fear that many Ukrainians would be seduced by nationalist poetry, a paranoia that would last until the 1980s.⁵⁸

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was another target. Its success – at its height it had 6 million followers and thirty bishops – had inspired suspicion. Balytsky’s secret police had picked up ‘clues’ about the Church’s real nature. Informers had reported, for example, that Church leaders secretly told peasants to stay faithful to the Ukrainian cause.⁵⁹ During the SVU trial the state openly accused the Church of preparing a revolt:

the Ukrainian counter-revolution defeated on the battlefields of the civil war hid in the underground and began to organize partisans, to undermine the construction of Soviet power and to launch an uprising against the worker-peasant state. One of the most important roles in this uprising was to be played by the Autocephalous Church, created by the leaders and ideologists of the Petliura movement.⁶⁰

Two Church leaders – brothers, one of them a former member of the Central Rada – were among the group of accused at the SVU trial. Thousands of others, priests as well as ordinary believers, were swept up in the mass arrests that followed.

The occupations of the other defendants varied widely. The state clearly wanted the group to represent a broad swath of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia, in order to slander as many of them as possible. The indictment accused the SVU of plotting the overthrow of Soviet power in Ukraine, ‘with the assistance of a foreign bourgeois state’ – Poland – so as to ‘restore the capitalist order in the form of the Ukrainian People’s Republic’. During the trial the journal Bilshovyk Ukraïny (Ukrainian Bolshevik) put it even more bluntly: ‘the proletarian court is examining a case not only of the Petliurite scum, but also judging in historical retrospect all of Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. One of the defendants, a student named Borys Matushevsky, later recalled hearing similar language from his interrogator. ‘We have to put the Ukrainian intelligentsia on its knees, this is our task – and it will be carried out; those whom we do not [put on their knees] we will shoot!’61

Stalin personally helped write the trial scenario, sending memoranda about it to the Ukrainian leadership. In one of them he expressed a particular paranoia that would repeat itself many years later, during the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ investigations of the early 1950s. ‘We think that not only the insurgent and terrorist actions of the accused must be enlarged upon during the trial,’ he wrote to the Ukrainian communist leadership, ‘but also the medical tricks, the goal of which was the murder of responsible workers.’ That order resulted in the arrest of Arkadii Barbar, a well-known Kyiv physician and professor of medicine. No evidence was produced against him, even during the trial. But Stalin’s desire to punish ‘the counter-revolutionary part of the specialists who seek to poison and murder communist patients’ was all that mattered.⁶²

The trial itself was farcical. The case against Yefremov derived almost entirely from notes in his diary, whose existence was revealed to the police by another defendant. But although it contained a few entries that sniped at some of Ukraine’s communist leaders, the diary didn’t mention a clandestine organization at all. It contained no evidence of foreign contacts or revolutionary conspiracies. Yefremov nevertheless ‘confessed’, after being told that there was no other way to save his wife from arrest and torture. An informer placed in his cell reported back on his behaviour:

Yefremov returned from the interrogation very upset and to my question, ‘How’s it going?’ he replied: ‘I have never been in such a loathsome and pitiful and stupid state. It would be better if they took me right away and finished me off than this torment every day with their interrogations … I would be very glad if there truly had been such an organization with all those people and details they are attaching to it today. Then I would say everything and that would be the end of it … But here I have to tell them about details about which I know nothing …’ It should be added that here during this conversation Yefremov was very upset, completely exhausted, and spoke with tremor in his voice and tears in his eyes.63

In the end Yefremov wrote a 120-page confession of his ‘crimes’; he repeated the same invented stories during the Kharkiv Opera House show trial. Others did the same. A Ukrainian writer, Borys Antonenko, later said of another defendant that ‘even if one were to believe all of his statements, during the trial he looked like an operetta chieftain without an army and fellow thinkers’. Another called the trial ‘a theatre within a theatre’. The writer Kost Turkalo, possibly the only defendant to survive the trial, his subsequent imprisonment and the Second World War, later described the scene:

It began with the interrogation of the defendants, each of them being given a chance by the presiding justice to say whether he had received a copy of the bill of indictment and, if so, whether he pleaded guilty or not. When all had been put through this ordeal, the justice began to read publicly the whole of the bill of indictment, the reading continuing for more than two days, because the bill was a 230-page book. This book was also given a special name by the defendants, they called it the ‘libretto of the grand SVU opera’ … Everyone was perfectly aware of the court’s attitude. It was plain that all details of the trial and its final outcome were planned ahead, and that it was necessary only for propaganda purposes abroad and for the fanatical party followers and some deluded citizenry at home.⁶⁴

All of the defendants were ultimately found guilty. Most received Gulag or prison sentences, and many were later shot during a wave of prison executions in 1938. But the purge didn’t end there. Between 1929 and 1934 the OGPU in Ukraine would ‘discover’ three more nationalist conspiracies: The ‘Ukrainian National Centre’ (Ukraïnskyi Natsionalnyi Tsentr, or UNT), the ‘Ukrainian Military Organization’ (Ukraïnska Viiskova Orhanizatsiia, or UVO) and the ‘Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ (Orhanizatsiia Ukraïnskykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN). The UVO and OUN were real organizations – both were active across the border in Poland, where they resisted Polish rule in western Ukraine – but their influence in Ukraine was vastly exaggerated. All these cases kept acquiring new aspects, and were eventually twisted to include anyone whom the political police wanted to arrest, right to the end of the 1930s.65

Like the SVU investigation, these cases also had support at the highest levels, and the incentive to expand them was strong. OGPU officers who ‘discovered’ nationalist conspiracies in Ukraine received promotions. In the spring of 1931 those who specialized in these issues received their own special department within the secret police, the Secret Political Department of the OGPU in Ukraine (the sekretno-politychnyi viddil, or SPV). The SPV then created special sections to monitor the Ukrainian Academy of Science, to track the 60,000 Ukrainians who had moved to the USSR from Poland, and to look into a huge range of literary groups and publishers, university professors, high-school teachers and other ‘suspicious’ groups as well. In 1930 the OGPU even announced that it had discovered a conspiracy of ‘counter-revolutionary veterinarians and bacteriologists’ who were allegedly poisoning wells and murdering livestock.⁶⁶

Each of these cases was accompanied by a substantial public disinformation campaign. From 1927 onwards the Soviet press was filled with slogans denouncing the ‘Ukrainian counter-revolution’ and ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’. The public campaigns were intended to affect their victims, and they did: public shaming played an important role in the campaign to ‘break’ arrestees and get them to confess to crimes they had not committed – and, of course, to silence and terrify everyone who knew them. In the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred any criticism of the Communist Party or any of its policies, including its agricultural policies, could be used as evidence that the critic was a nationalist, a fascist, a traitor, a saboteur or a spy.⁶⁷

At a great distance in space and time, the problem of Ukrainian national aspirations might appear to be quite different from the problem of resistance to Soviet grain procurement. The former involved intellectuals, writers and others who felt continued loyalty to the idea of Ukraine as an independent or even semi-independent state. The latter concerned peasants who feared impoverishment at the hands of the USSR. But in the late 1920s there is overwhelming evidence to show that the two became interlinked, at least in the minds of Stalin and the secret police who worked with him.

Famously, Stalin had explicitly linked the ‘national question’ and the ‘peasant question’ more than once. In his memorable 1925 speech he had declared that ‘the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army’. In the same lecture he also chided a comrade for failing to take this dangerous combination seriously, for refusing to see the ‘profoundly popular and profoundly revolutionary character of the national movement’.68 Although he did not specifically mention Ukraine by name, Ukraine was the Soviet republic which, at the time, had the largest national movement and the most numerous peasantry, as Stalin well knew.

Even in his theoretical comments, in other words, Stalin saw the danger of ‘peasant armies’ united behind a national banner. His Bolshevik colleague Mikhail Kalinin made the same point, though Kalinin also repeated a solution offered by the advocates of collectivization: turn the peasants into a proletariat. That way they would lose their attachment to a particular place or nation: ‘The national question is purely a peasant question … the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers … which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.’⁶⁹

In practice, the OGPU also anticipated a specific danger to the Soviet state from the Ukrainian peasantry, one that was not theoretical at all. Under economic pressure, the peasants had erupted in revolt in 1918–20. Now, as collectivization loomed, the same provinces were about to be put under economic pressure again. Unsurprisingly, the OGPU feared a repeat of those years, so much so that its officers, echoing Stalin, also began using language lifted straight out of the civil war era.⁷⁰

In a certain sense the OGPU’s fears were well founded. Among other things, its tasks included the regular collection of information on the ‘political moods’ and opinions of ordinary people. It was therefore well aware of how much the new policies on grain collection – essentially a revival of the old ones – would be loathed by those upon whom they were about to be inflicted, especially in Ukraine.

The OGPU were equally aware of discontent among educated Ukrainians in the cities, and they feared the connection between the two disgruntled groups. In 1927 the OGPU reported, among other things, that a former Ukrainian Communist Party member of the Central Committee had been overheard denouncing Moscow’s ‘colonialist’ policies towards Ukraine.71 They observed a ‘chauvinist’ crowd caught up in ‘national-independent’ feelings present yellow and blue flowers – the colours of the Ukrainian flag – to two famous Ukrainian musicians after a concert in Odessa.⁷² The OGPU took note of an anonymous letter mailed to a newspaper that described the peasants as ‘slaves’ who were oppressed beneath the ‘Muscovite-Jewish boot’ and the ‘Tsars from the Cheka’. The same letter warned the editorial board not to read too much into the nation’s silence: the Ukrainians had not ‘forgotten everything’.⁷³ Police informers in Zhytomyr even heard teachers complaining that Ukrainian food and resources were being sent to Russia. The teachers agreed that the peasants would surely revolt against such practices: ‘It’s only necessary to find leaders from among the peasants themselves, in whom the peasant masses could believe.’⁷⁴

Even more worrying was the evidence that some peasants, frightened by the constant drumbeat of war propaganda, were hoping that an invasion might save them from a new round of grain requisitions. Rumours that the Poles were soon to cross the border inspired peasants in the village of Mykhailivka to start stockpiling food, emptying the local cooperative shop of its provisions. A local newspaper printed a letter describing the panic:

Everyone is crying, and reports arrive as if by telegraph: ‘The Poles are already in Velykyi Bobryk!’ ‘Bobryk has already been taken!’ ‘They are advancing directly on Mykhailivka!’ No one knows what to do – flee or stay.⁷⁵

Secret police reports recorded peasants telling one another that ‘in two months the Poles will arrive in Ukraine, and that will be the end of grain requisitions’ or that ‘We have no grain because the authorities are shipping it to Moscow, and they are shipping it out because they know that they will soon lose Ukraine. Well, never mind, the time is coming for them to take to their heels.’ Polish, German and Jewish residents of Ukraine meanwhile began plotting to leave. ‘The Germans in Russia are outcasts; we need to go to America’, members of that minority told one another: ‘It is better to be a good farmer in America than a bad one in Russia and be called a kulak.’ Ethnic Poles were reportedly excited by news that the Polish army was conducting military exercises across the border, and taking ‘malicious pleasure at the prospect of an impending change of government’.76

Knowing or at least guessing at what was to come after collectivization, the secret police expected opposition to increase among urban Ukrainians as well as peasants. Their ideology anticipated this resistance: as the class struggle intensified, the bourgeoisie would naturally fight even harder against the revolution. The OGPU knew it was their job to ensure that the revolution triumphed nevertheless.

In October 1928 two senior OGPU officers, Terentii Derybas and A. Austrin, tried to sketch out the nature of the problem in a wide-ranging report for their superiors, entitled ‘Anti-Soviet Movements in the Countryside’. They started by recounting the searing experiences of the civil war all across the USSR, which had forged so many of their careers. ‘In the history of the struggle of the organs of the Cheka-OGPU against counter-revolution, the fight against counter-revolutionary manifestations in the countryside played a significant role,’ they began. The two officers went on to recall how the ‘kulaks and the rural bourgeoisie’, led by anti-Soviet parties, had fought the Bolsheviks during the ‘kulak uprising’ of 1918–19 – in other words, the great peasant revolts led by Petliura, Makhno, Hryhoriev and others. They observed that these peasant movements had subsided during the early 1920s; but they also suspected that they were again gathering strength, taking new forms and using new slogans. In short, the old peasant uprising might return in a new form.

The officers had observed, or said they had observed, a new phenomenon: ‘urban anti-Soviet intelligentsia’ were making greater efforts than ever before to link up with ‘anti-Soviet movements of the kulaks’. Thanks to this expanding relationship between the city and the countryside, they wrote, little cells of opposition had emerged around the country – even within the ranks of the Red Army. The officers were particularly worried by the periodic calls for a peasants’ trade union, or for a class-based peasant party – a counterpoint to the workers’ party – which the OGPU’s informers now heard, or thought they had heard, with alarming frequency all across the Soviet countryside. They had counted 139 calls for a peasants’ union in 1925. In 1927 the number had risen to 2,312.

Despite the fact that Symon Petliura himself was now dead – murdered two years earlier by an assassin’s bullet in Paris – the memory of how his forces had once conquered Kyiv, backed by Polish forces, was never far from the two officers’ thoughts:

Notably reanimated in recent days are the Petliurists, who are trying to make Ukraine into a beachhead for a future imperialist campaign in the USSR. There is no doubt that the government of Piłsudski stands behind the Petliurist UNR [Ukrainian People’s Republic movement] but it would be incorrect to explain the revival of Petliurists in the Ukrainian Republic as simply an intrigue of the Polish government and UNR. The Petliurists, promoting chauvinist and anti-semitic slogans and attracting the masses with the existence of an independent [Ukrainian national] republic, can become an organizational centre which can unite a wide range of anti-Soviet organizations in the villages and among the urban petit-bourgeoisie under a unified national flag, in order to carry out a joint attack on Soviet power.77

Even with hindsight it is impossible to judge the veracity of this report. Links between anti-Soviet intellectuals and anti-Soviet peasants in Ukraine may well have been a significant phenomenon, and calls for a peasants’ union may also have been spreading. Certainly the secret police reports include multiple examples of political ferment. In late 1927 the newspaper Vesti received an anonymous letter from the ‘Farmers’ Union of Ukraine’, sent from a fake address in ‘Petliura Street, Kyiv’, declaring ‘we can no longer bear the rule of communists’. The letter ended with a verse from the Ukrainian national anthem, ‘Ukraine has not died yet’. At about the same time the OGPU found leaflets floating around Ukraine, allegedly printed by the ‘Ukrainian revolutionary committee’, a body that called on the peasants to prepare themselves for the ‘day when the rule of the Moscow Bolsheviks will end’ and the Ukrainian People’s Republic would return.78

But these theories could also have been produced or pumped up by the OGPU’s collective imagination. Some of the parties and leaflets may also have been produced by the secret police themselves. One of their techniques, learned from their tsarist predecessors, was to create fake opposition movements and organizations designed to tempt potential dissidents into exposing themselves by joining them.

Still, even if these beliefs in a city-country conspiracy were paranoid, they were not illogical. The Bolsheviks’ own experience of revolution taught them that revolutions emerge from the link between intellectuals and workers. So why shouldn’t a new revolution now emerge from the link between Ukrainian nationalist-intellectuals and peasants? And why mightn’t such a movement grow very quickly? After all, that was roughly what had happened in 1919, when the peasant rebellion, seemingly coming from nowhere, had exploded all across Ukraine. Some of the leaders of that movement had certainly had national aspirations, and their rebellion had indeed paved the way for a foreign ‘imperialist’ invasion.

At the beginning of 1928 the two OGPU officers writing this ponderous essay clearly remembered these events, the tenth anniversary of which was so near. Armed with daily reports of ‘anti-Soviet’ whispers, leaflets and worse, they had to assume that the danger of another explosion in Ukraine was real. Having anticipated the rise of urban-rural nationalism, the OGPU investigated it, sought it out, and recorded the evidence, real or false. Even before the collectivization drive had properly begun, in other words, the Soviet secret police and Soviet leadership already perceived any Ukrainian resistance to grain collection as evidence of a political plot against the USSR.

Very quickly, the OGPU’s expectations were fulfilled: all across the USSR peasants objected to the confiscation of their property, arbitrary arrests, the criminalization of ‘grain hoarding’ and the imposition of fines. Reports of resistance flooded in from Siberia and the North Caucasus as well as Ukraine, everywhere where ‘emergency methods’ were applied with vigour. ‘Moscow,’ recalled Eugene Lyons, ‘buzzed with rumors of localized rebellion in the Kuban, Ukraine, and other sections … When the press was permitted to speak more openly, many of the rumours appeared to be true. From all sections of the country came reports of local communists, visiting grain agents and tax collectors assaulted and murdered.’79 In some places anger led to real violence. In January 1928 the OGPU arrested six people in a town near Odessa for beating up the secretary of a collective farm. Another group of rebels were arrested in southern Ukraine for thrashing a tax collector.⁸⁰

For some Ukrainians this was not resistance, but rather a struggle for survival. The harvests of 1928–9 were poor. Fluctuating weather and rain during the harvesting season meant that the quantity of grain produced in the winter and spring harvests was well below average. As in 1921, political pressure meant that peasants had very little grain in reserve. Food once again became scarce, especially in the steppe region of southeastern Ukraine – but grain collection continued at the same pace. At least 23,000 people died directly of hunger in the scarcely remembered smaller famine of 1928–9, and another 80,000 died from disease and other knock-on effects of starvation.⁸¹

In many ways, this smaller famine was a ‘dress rehearsal’, marking a transition point between the disaster of 1921 and the larger famine of 1932–3. The Soviet Union did not call for international involvement, as it had in 1921. Nor did Moscow provide grain or other food aid. Instead, the USSR left the problem to the Ukrainian communists to solve. In July 1928 the Ukrainian government did create a republican commission to help ‘victims of the famine’. The commission granted loans to peasants for the purchase of seeds (which had to be paid back), provided some food aid (in return for public work), offered some meals and medical assistance to children. But news of the famine was kept to a minimum. In about a third of cases death certificates for victims of starvation listed other causes. And at no point in 1928–9 did anyone in the leadership question whether the ‘emergency methods’ themselves were the source of the problem.⁸²

Instead, throughout 1928 the OGPU continued to search for evidence of counter-revolutionary activity. Its officers noted the discovery of ‘anti-Soviet leaflets’ in several parts of rural Ukraine, produced by ‘Petliura-friendly circles’. They recorded ‘anti-Soviet’ comments in the Ukrainian countryside. ‘It’s better to burn your bread rather than give it to the Bolsheviks’, one peasant was heard to declare.83 The Soviet leadership believed that many Ukrainians were preparing for outside invasion, and the Ukrainian OGPU was happy to provide them with evidence. Balytsky told Kaganovich in the summer of 1928 that internal dissent in Ukraine was by definition connected to foreign actors:

One may consider as established the circumstance that the degree of activity of internal chauvinist elements corresponds directly to the complexity and acuteness of the USSR’s international status. They proceed from the fundamental thesis that the breakup of the USSR is inevitable, and with this catastrophe Ukraine will be able to gain independence.⁸⁴

Worse, there was evidence of discontent among Red Army troops in the Ukrainian military district, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Knowing how poor the conditions were for their families, they talked about abandoning their units, joining partisan groups, even fighting for peasants’ rights. The historian Lyudmyla Hrynevych has compiled a striking list of overheard complaints, all made in May 1928:

‘In the event of war, the forests will be overflowing with bandits’ (80th Infantry Division)

‘As soon as war breaks out, all these organizations will fall apart, and the peasantry will go to fight for its rights’ (44th Infantry Division)

‘In the event of war, we will turn our bayonets against those who are flaying the skin off the peasants’ (51st Infantry Division)

‘As soon as war breaks out, we will throw down our rifles and scatter to our homes’ (Communications Company of the 17th Infantry Corps)⁸⁵

Because the ‘political mood’ in Ukraine was thought to be so bad, in 1928 the OGPU also began to monitor closely anyone who might potentially become the leader of a peasant uprising or a Ukrainian liberation movement. An informer reported that Hryhorii Kholodnyi, head of the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language, told colleagues he believed the police were arresting anyone who had close ties to the villages or who was well regarded among the peasantry. His comments triggered a search for precisely the kind of person that Kholodnyi described. And thus did one of the victims’ hypotheses about the wave of arrests become one of the OGPU’s working theories. Kholodnyi was eventually arrested himself as part of the SVU case. He spent eight years in the Gulag before being shot in 1938.86

But the OGPU now identified another potential scapegoat: the Ukrainian Communist Party itself. While Stalin was in Siberia in 1928, Molotov made a similar trip to Ukraine. Upon his return to Moscow, he told the Politburo that the news was not good. Ukraine – which, Molotov observed, accounted for 37 per cent of the entire grain collection plan for the Soviet Union – was already collecting less and less grain every month. He blamed not just the kulaks and speculators, but the Ukrainian communists. The Ukrainian Party, he complained, had underestimated the grain deficit. ‘Elementary discipline’ was lacking in the provinces. Local officials were setting their own grain collection targets, regardless of the ‘all-Union’ targets and requests sent from Kyiv. Some of these local officials didn’t even seem to care about his visit, Molotov observed with all the outrage he could muster: they had evidently decided these ‘emergency measures’ amounted to a ‘mini-storm’ that would soon pass.⁸⁷

The idea that some local communist parties were more than merely ineffective also began to appear in OGPU reports soon afterwards. Another account spoke of ‘khvostism’ – from the Russian for ‘tail’, meaning to be behind events – and ‘inactivity’ among party members. It also accused them of offering ‘incorrect explanations of the goals of the [grain procurement] campaign’ and harbouring unwarranted sympathy for kulaks. Some lower-level officials, the report stated, were actually refusing to procure grain or carry out any orders at all.⁸⁸ OGPU informers even recorded the grumblings of Marchenko and Lebedenko, two local officials. The former objected to Molotov himself. The man was a Russian who lived in Moscow, Marchenko grumbled: his visit was evidence that the Ukrainian Republic was nothing but a ‘fiction’, and that the Ukrainian communists were mere puppets. Lebedenko went further: ‘The Bolsheviks have never robbed Ukraine as thoroughly and as cynically as they do now. Without question, there will be famine …’89

Instead of addressing the problem, the Soviet Communist Party sought to eliminate the dissidents. In November 1928 the state conducted a purge of the komnezamy, the committees of poor peasants, kicking out those members who were insufficiently enthusiastic. Purges of the Ukrainian Communist Party also took place that year. These were not the lethal purges of 1937–8; the point was not to kill people, but to eliminate potential troublemakers, and to create the atmosphere of insecurity and tension that would persuade party members to carry out the difficult task of collectivization in the months to come.⁹⁰ In practice, Moscow was also accumulating the evidence it might need in the future. Collectivization was coming. And if it failed in Ukraine, Moscow could force the Ukrainian Communist Party to shoulder the blame.

Wild rumours now swept across the countryside. Ukrainians were afraid of a new wave of requisitions, famine, economic collapse, or war. The peasants told one another that the grain requisitions had become harsher because the Soviet Union owed money to foreign governments. Many started to bury their grain underground. Some refused to sell anything for paper money. Others began hoarding whatever goods they could buy.⁹¹ In this atmosphere – of conspiracy, hysteria, uncertainty, suspicion – collectivization began.