7

Collectivization Fails, 1931–2

We could lose Ukraine …

Stalin to Kaganovich, August 19321

The secret policemen triumphed. Although the protests slowed the progress of collectivization, the state fought back with mass arrests, mass deportations, mass repression. The Communist Party waited – and then pressed ahead. The temperate language of Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with Success’ article turned out to be just that: language. The same policies continued, and even grew harsher.

In July 1930, just a few months after the angriest ‘March fever’ protests, the Politburo itself set new targets: up to 70 per cent of households in the main grain-growing regions, Ukraine among them, were to join collective farms by September 1931. In December 1930, eager to prove their enthusiasm, Politburo members raised that same target to 80 per cent of households.² A Central Committee resolution again confirmed that in certain regions – Ukraine, as well as the Northern Caucasus and the Lower and Middle Volga provinces – the achievement of this goal would require the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.³

All through the subsequent autumn sowing and the winter harvests, and again during the spring sowing and summer harvest – pressure on the peasants continued. Taxes on peasants who remained on their own land remained high. Deportations to the fast-expanding camps of the Gulag increased. Food shortages became permanent. In the summer of 1930 secret police reports again identified the first signs of starvation, as people once more began to suffer from diseases caused by hunger. A driver weakened by lack of food fell from his tractor in one Ukrainian village; in another, people were beginning to swell with hunger. In the course of a few months 15,000 peasants in the North Caucasus abandoned their farms to look for work in the cities. In Crimea people began eating horse feed, which made them ill.4

Threatened by violence and afraid of hunger, hundreds of thousands of peasants finally relinquished their land, animals and machines to the collective farms. But just because they had been forced to move, they did not become enthusiastic collective farmers overnight. The fruits of their labour no longer belonged to them; the grain they sowed and harvested was now requisitioned by the authorities.

Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives. Like the serfs of old, they were forced to accept a special legal status, including controls on their movement: all collective farmers, kolkhozniks, would eventually need to seek permission to work outside the village. Instead of deciding when to reap, sow and sell, kolkhozniks had to follow decisions made by the local representatives of Soviet power. They did not earn regular salaries but were paid trudodni or day wages, which often meant payment in kind – grain, potatoes or other products – rather than cash. They lost their ability to govern themselves too, as collective farm bosses and their entourages supplanted the traditional village councils.

As a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible. Farm machines were not maintained and frequently broke down. In August 1930 some 3,600 tractors out of 16,790 in Ukraine were in need of repair. The problem was cynically blamed on ‘class struggle’ and ‘wreckers’ who were allegedly sabotaging the farm machinery.⁵

Even when peasants did sow and till the fields, they often did their work without the care and enthusiasm they had shown in the past. Collective farms produced dramatically less than they could or should have done. Everyone tried to borrow or take from the collective as much as possible: after all, the state’s grain belonged to ‘no one’. Men and women who would never have considered stealing in the past now had no compunction about taking from state organizations that no one owned or respected. This form of ‘everyday resistance’ was not unique to the peasantry.6 Working as little as possible, stealing public property, failing to care for state-owned equipment and machinery – these were the methods by which underpaid, underfed and unmotivated Soviet workers of all kinds got along.

Peasants also continued to abandon the collective farms for work in the cities – the OGPU quoted one saying ‘it’s impossible to tolerate this any more’. They divided up the land or the harvested grain among themselves instead of sharing it out with others. In a few places the authorities observed that kulaks ejected from their own farms banded together to form what the authorities called ‘kulak collectives’. Working together, they ‘tried to win sympathy from the local population and to demonstrate their superiority to the other collective farms’. This too was seen as a form of anti-Soviet activity.⁷

Attacks on shops and grain warehouses continued too. In May 1930 a crowd of several thousand people – mostly women – from outside Odessa swarmed into the city and attacked several state-run grocery stores as well as a restaurant. Mounted policemen were sent in to restore order, and several arrests were made. The unrest was significant enough to appear in the reports of both the Turkish and the Japanese consuls in Odessa – and those reports were significant enough to alarm the OGPU. Although the police had responded promptly, the Japanese observed, ‘the general atmosphere in the town remains agitated’.⁸

Nevertheless, the summer of 1930 seemed, from the perspective of Moscow, to mark a moment of victory. Despite the evidence of suffering and the reports of chaos, the illusion that collectivization would still be a ‘success’, dizzy or otherwise, persisted through the end of 1930. There are many arguments about whether the published figures for that year – and indeed subsequent years – were real, falsified, or simply mistaken. But there is no question that the state claimed, and Stalin appears to have believed, that 1930 was a high point. The official statistics decreed that 83.5 million tonnes of grain had been collected in 1930, a notable rise over 1929 – a year of famine and bad weather – when the comparable figure was 71.7 million tonnes.9 Convinced that collectivization was now on the path to success, the Kremlin made what would turn out to be a disastrous and callous decision: to increase the export of grain, as well as of other food products, out of the Soviet Union in exchange for hard currency.

Grain export was of course not new. As we have seen, in 1920 the Bolsheviks had reckoned grain to be one of the safest goods to sell to the West, since doing so required no interaction with ‘capitalists’.¹⁰ Nor was it the only source of hard currency. Funds also came in from the sale of art, furniture, jewellery, icons and other objects confiscated from ‘the bourgeoisie’ and the Church. In July 1930 the state also opened the ‘Torgsin’ chain of hard currency shops (from torgovlia s inostrantsami or ‘trade with foreigners’), originally created to attract foreign visitors forbidden to spend foreign money elsewhere but later accessible to Soviet citizens. Goods in them were available to those who had tsarist-era gold coins; during the famine they would become a means of survival for peasants who had saved gold objects or even had foreign currency transferred to them from relatives abroad.¹¹

But grain was still the most lucrative export, especially since the timber trade had run into trouble; reports (which were accurate) that convict labour produced Soviet timber had led to calls for boycotts in a number of Western countries. The level of grain exports duly rose throughout the 1920s. Britain bought 26,799 tonnes of wheat from the USSR in 1924; by 1926–7 that had risen to 138,486 tonnes. Exports to Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands grew as well. Between 1929 and 1931, Soviet grain exports to Germany tripled.¹²

As exports rose, the Soviet leadership perceived that they brought more than just hard currency. Foreshadowing the future Soviet (and Russian) use of gas as a weapon of influence, the Bolsheviks also began asking for political favours in response to large shipments of relatively low-priced grain. In 1920 they demanded that, in exchange for grain, the Latvians recognize the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. In 1922 the Soviet government told the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that unless Britain signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, it would cut off the supply of grain to British markets. Some speculate that in the late 1920s the Soviet Union began dumping grain at low prices for geopolitical reasons: Stalin hoped to damage Western capitalism. By 1930 one German newspaper was arguing for trade barriers to stop the flood of ‘cheap Russian produce’. At a League of Nations gathering in 1931 the Soviet Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, smugly boasted that ‘I am enjoying a special status here thanks to the fact that the country I represent not only does not suffer from economic crisis, but is on the contrary living through an unprecedented moment in its economic life.’13

The desire to maintain this ‘special status’ was intense, but domestic pressure for more imports was enormous as well. In the cities and on new building sites, Stalin’s drive for industrialization was intensifying. To meet the extraordinarily ambitious targets of the first Five Year Plan, Soviet factories urgently required machines, parts, tools and other things available only for hard currency. In a letter to Molotov in July 1930, Stalin was already writing of the need to ‘force the export of grain … this is the key’. In August, fearing that American grain would soon flood the market, he again urged speed: ‘if we don’t export 130–150 million poods [2.1–2.4 million tonnes] our currency situation may become desperate. Once again: we must force the export of grain with all of our strength.’¹⁴

Elsewhere Stalin spoke of the risk that a lack of hard currency posed to the metallurgical and machine-building industries, and of the need to obtain a foothold in the international market. He also railed against the ‘know-it-alls’ in the export department who advised waiting for prices to rise, and who should be thrown out by the scruff of their necks: ‘to wait, we would need currency reserves. And we haven’t got any.’¹⁵ In September 1930, Anastas Mikoyan – now Commissar for Internal and External Trade – wrote a note to the head of the grain export enterprise, urging him to conclude longer-term export agreements with European companies, although this would mean ‘holding back some reserves for them’.¹⁶ A few weeks later the Politburo discussed increasing food exports to fascist Italy, and even taking credit from Italian banks to finance them.¹⁷

The result of this urgent policy directive would be a far higher rate of grain export in 1930 – 4.8 million tonnes, up from 170,000 tonnes in 1929 – and an even higher rate in 1931, 5.2 million tonnes.18 These numbers were a relatively small fraction of the more than 83 million tonnes, with higher totals in future, that Stalin believed should be harvested. But when less than that came in, they represented food that would not be available to Soviet citizens – and certainly not to the peasants who produced it.

The optimism that followed the 1930 summer harvest did not last. The autumn sowing season was delayed by the general confusion – peasants were still joining, leaving and rejoining the collective farms – and by uncertainty over who controlled which pieces of land. The spring sowing of 1931 was hampered by shortages of horses, tractors and seeds. Worse, the spring was cool, and there was less rain than in some other years, especially in the east. The Volga region, Siberia and Kazakhstan all suffered from bouts of drought, as did central Ukraine. By itself the weather might not have created a crisis. But, as in 1921, poor conditions combined with the chaos of Soviet policy meant that farmers could not produce what the state demanded from them. Some were already finding it difficult to produce enough even to feed themselves.¹⁹

By the summer of 1931 bureaucrats and activists at all levels were once again warning of trouble to come. The OGPU in Ukraine predicted the loss of a ‘significant part of the harvest’. Aside from the weather problems, their report described unprepared storage containers, as well as tractors and other machinery in poor condition: ‘In not a single region have district plans been brought to individual villages and collective farms … No mass-educational work or organizational preparation for the harvest has been conducted at the local level.’²⁰ Multiple reports – some sent directly to Stalin – described the poor working practices of the collective farms and their inefficient methods.²¹

Throughout the summer and autumn a flurry of letters and directives circulated in Moscow and Kharkiv, all expressing the fear that grain collection would go badly, especially in Ukraine – or even that Ukrainian peasants would not sow at all. On 17 June, Stalin and Molotov sent out an order, jointly signed, demanding that the Ukrainian leadership ensure that ‘unsown fields be sown’, and bluntly calling on the Ukrainian Communist Party to mobilize all existing resources: ‘Please inform us of the results by June 25th.’22

But the situation was not better by that date, or even by the autumn. By September it was already clear that the 1931 harvest would be smaller than that of the previous year, not larger as expected.²³ The Soviet leadership was particularly concerned that the country would not meet its export quotas. In the middle of the month Molotov sent a secret telegram to the Communist Party leaders in the North Caucasus, declaring that grain collection for purposes of export was proceeding ‘disgustingly slowly’.²⁴ By late autumn it was clear that grain collection all across the USSR would fall short of the targets; the official harvest total for 1931–2 would eventually come to 69.5 million tonnes, instead of the 83 million-plus expected.²⁵

Soviet exports would be hit if the numbers didn’t rise. Worse, people in the cities would once again have no bread. The leader of Kyiv province had already written a begging letter to Mikoyan, who was at the time the People’s Commissar of Trade: ‘For two weeks we haven’t distributed any rationed meat, no one brings us any fish, potatoes only sometimes.’ As a result, ‘the mood of the workers is agitated; the rural poor have no bread. Industrial productivity is on the edge of a serious crisis.’ Please, he asked, could someone ‘supply Kyiv quickly with bread according to the established norms’.²⁶ In Moscow no meat was available at all.²⁷

Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages. Stalin himself had received reports explaining exactly what was wrong with the collective farms, describing their inefficiency in great detail. One official from the Central Black Earth province even wrote him a daring defence of private property: ‘How to explain this enormous drop in collective farm production? It’s impossible to explain it, except to say that the material interest in and responsibility for the losses, and for the low quality of work, don’t affect each individual collective farmer directly …’²⁸

The missing feeling of ‘responsibility’, destroyed by collectivization, would plague Soviet agriculture (and indeed Soviet industry) as long as it existed. But although this was already clear as early as 1931, it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself. He had staked his leadership of the party on collectivization and he had defeated his rivals in the course of fighting for it. He could not be wrong. A large chunk of the Central Committee plenum in October was therefore devoted to a search for alternative scapegoats. Since Stalin could not be responsible, and since senior party officials did not want to be, responsibility for the looming disaster was again sought further down the hierarchy.

Echoing the ‘Dizzy with Success’ accusations, Stanislav Kosior – since 1928 the General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, as well as a member of the Soviet Politburo – blamed the lower levels of the party hierarchy for the harvest failures. Ukrainian officials, he explained, had gone into the rural districts. They had personally talked to the directors of the machine tractor stations. They had directly accused them of failing to put their energy into collecting grain. But even so, many had ‘fallen captive’ to the idea that the state’s demands for grain were too high. For they had returned to Kharkiv and Moscow from their sojourns into the countryside with the wrong message for the leadership: the peasants were very hungry and needed more food.

As a good Bolshevik, Kosior could only see this demand in conspiratorial terms. ‘Even our communists and often our twenty-five thousanders had come to believe the fiction about hungry peasants,’ he declared. Worse, ‘among the twenty-five thousanders there has appeared a whole array of alien elements’. The result: ‘Not only did they not fight, not only did they fail to organize the collective farm masses in the struggle for bread against the class enemy, they often followed along with this peasant mood, sometimes out of gullibility, and sometimes consciously.’ Suspect party members had already been expelled from the Ukrainian Communist Party: ‘In the countryside we need genuine Bolsheviks, who will fight for the construction of socialism, for the collective farm, for the interests of our Soviet state, and not for kulak nonsense.’29

As they so often did when their policies failed, the authorities also blamed ‘sabotage’. During the Shakhty trial in 1928 they had focused on mining engineers in order to explain production failures in heavy industry. Now they sought agricultural specialists to blame. In the spring of 1931 secret police operatives in the western Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia disclosed and eliminated a ‘saboteur counter-revolutionary organization’, the ‘Peasants’ Labour Party of Podolia’. Most of the sixteen people arrested for ‘organized acts of sabotage in all sectors of agriculture: planning, land administration, crediting, machine supplies etc’ were agronomists. Most had been members of the Podolian branch of the All-Ukrainian Agricultural Society, an institution set up in the more optimistic year of 1923. Now they stood accused of seeking the ‘overthrow of Soviet rule and the establishment of a bourgeois democratic republic’.

Although none of their biographies appeared obviously counter-revolutionary, they were educated people who had connections in both town and country – precisely the category of suspect that interested the OGPU most. Stepan Cherniavsky was an agronomist who had been working for the Ukrainian government since the days of Petliura, and had been chairman of the Podolia Land Office. Iukhym Pidkui-Mukha had been secretary of the same organization. Ivan Oliinyk had been a professor at the Agricultural Institute in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Others worked on agricultural credit issues or as experts in various fields of agriculture and husbandry. Not only could this educated, accomplished group be blamed for the multiple agricultural failures, its members could also be plausibly accused of spreading counter-revolutionary ideas among the rural peasants in the countryside. The trial was heavily covered by the Soviet press; most of the accused would spend between three and ten years in the Gulag.30

This search for scapegoats was effective, but only in a narrow sense: the arrest of the ‘enemy’ agronomists and the expulsion of some party members helped explain Ukraine’s failure to meet its quotas, at least to the rest of the party, but it did not produce more grain. Angry telegrams from Moscow did not produce more grain.³¹ Nor did Mikoyan’s declaration, in October 1931, that the year’s plan still had to be fulfilled, whatever the weather, so any regions unaffected by drought should contribute more. This was perhaps unfair, as even he conceded – ‘people are working hard … and now we demand more’ – but it hardly mattered, since this order could not make more bread appear on the shelves either.³²

Both threats and persuasion were failing. That left coercion – and in December 1931, Stalin and Molotov made coercion the policy: collective farms that had not met their grain quotas would have to repay any outstanding loans, and return any tractors or other equipment that had been leased to them from the machine tractor stations. Their spare cash – including that intended to buy seeds – would be confiscated. Molotov, dispatched to Kharkiv to explain the new rules, showed little mercy. He pushed aside any complaints about bad weather and a poor harvest. The problem was not lack of grain, he told the Ukrainian party leaders: the problem was that they were incompetent. They were badly organized, they had failed to mobilize, and they had not managed to collect as much grain as they should have done. In the districts he harangued collective farm leaders, calling them ‘agents of the kulaks’. He repeated Stalin’s threat to take away their tractors while at the same time dangling the promise of more manufactured goods for farms that met the state targets. Upon returning to Moscow, Molotov and Stalin sent another missive to Kosior, who was on vacation in Sochi. They ordered him back to Ukraine and demanded that he force the republic to meet the grain requirements as planned.33

In the wake of this acrimonious meeting, the Ukrainian Politburo met again at the end of December. Once more the Ukrainian communists paid lip service to the Five Year Plan. They agreed to collect 8.3 million tonnes of grain, although everyone in the room must have known that it was impossible. They declared that they themselves would go out to the villages to supervise the procurement, although each one of them must have known that would make no difference either. To increase the efficiency of the whole operation, they reorganized Ukraine into six collection districts, and put a single party leader in charge of each one. All of them must have felt deep anxiety about the task ahead.

Perhaps they were reassured by the news that each district boss would receive emergency powers, including the power to sack anyone who stood in the way of fulfilling the plan: anyone who failed would be able to place some of the blame, yet again, on scapegoats.³⁴ But at the same time the stakes were raised. The harvest had been unsatisfactory in the Urals, the Volga, Kazakhstan and western Siberia. That meant the Ukrainians and others in the western USSR would have to collect not only their original grain quota, but also an extra amount of seed grain, to be used for spring planting in other regions. To an impossible quota, in other words, the state had added an even more impossible new demand.35

In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the USSR. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity. Visiting the Moldovan autonomous republic that was then part of Ukraine, a Pravda correspondent was shocked to discover the lengths to which grain procurement officials would now go.³⁶ In a private letter to a colleague, he wrote of ‘openly counter-revolutionary attacks’ on the peasantry: ‘The searches are usually conducted at night, and they search fiercely, deadly seriously. There is a village just on the border with Romania where not a single house has not had its stove destroyed.’

Worse, anyone found in possession of any bread or grain at all – even the poorest of peasants – was dragged from his or her home and stripped of their possessions, just as had happened to the kulaks in the months before. But this was unusual: ‘Very rarely did they find a more or less solid amount, usually the searches finished with the confiscation of the very last few pieces of bread in the smallest possible amount.’³⁷ No one in authority questioned the wisdom of this behaviour: the fact that the OGPU and Communist Party officials allowed journalists, even those loyal to the regime, to observe the confiscation of grain meant that, at the highest levels, they were convinced of the legitimacy of what they were doing.

Local party leaders, their careers on the line, organized groups of activists and sent them, village by village, to begin confiscating whatever grain they could find. A peasant in the village of Sobolivka, in the western part of Ukraine, wrote to his Polish relatives describing how this worked:

The authorities do as follows: they send the so-called brigades which come to a man or a farmer and conduct a search so thorough they even look through the ground with sharp metal tools, through the walls with matches, in the garden, in the straw roof, and if they find even half a pood, they take it away on the horse wagon. This passes for life here … Dear brother Ignacy, if it is possible, I ask you to send me a package, as it is very needed. There is nothing to eat and one must eat.38

All these methods recalled the events of the past: in the days of ‘War Communism’ the Red Army had searched peasants’ property with similar violence, and with similar disregard for their lives. But they also foreshadowed the immediate future: these were the first of what would be thousands of many intense, destructive searches, conducted by activists all across Ukraine a year later, in the winter of 1932–3. The use of violence, the smashing of walls and furniture in search of hidden grain – these were a harbinger of what was to come.

The pockets of real starvation all across the USSR were an ominous warning too. Reports from the Volga district, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan already spoke of starving children, people too weak to work, whole districts deprived of bread. In Ukraine the situation of several villages in Odessa province was so dramatic that in March the local party leaders in Zynovïvskyi district sent a medical team to investigate. The doctors were stunned by what they found. In the village of Kozyrivka half the inhabitants had died of hunger. On the day of their visit 100 households remained out of 365, and the rest ‘are emptying’: ‘Quite a few of the remaining huts are being taken apart, the window and door frames are being used as fuel.’ The family of Ivan Myronenko – seven people, including three school-age children – were surviving ‘entirely on carrion’. When the team entered their hut, the Myronenkos were eating boiled horsehide together with a ‘stinking yellow liquid’ made from the broth. Nearby, the inspectors met the Koval family that had four children. On entering the hut, they found Maria Koval boiling the bones of a dead horse. An elderly woman lay on a bed, asking for medicine ‘in order to die more quickly’.³⁹

In the village of Tarasivka the situation was not much better. Here the number of households had halved, from 400 to 200. Corpses lay on the street, as there was no one to bury them. The medical team was told that this had become normal in villages where corpses sometimes went untouched for three or four days. The doctors visited a home where the father was ‘yellow, emaciated, barely able to stand on his feet’.40 With equal horror the group reported that provincial, district, village and party officials ‘try not to notice the incidence of starvation, and try not to speak about it’. The local leaders were actually ‘hiding’ the rising mortality. This too was a pattern that would soon be repeated.⁴¹

The OGPU in Ukraine had no illusions about what was happening. In the first quarter of 1932, their operatives recorded that eighty-three Ukrainians had become swollen with hunger, and that six had died. Informers also reported on sporadic food shortages in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Vinnytsia provinces. Horses were observed to be dying at a high rate too; across Ukraine their numbers had dropped by more than half since collectivization.⁴² The leaders of one collective farm jointly informed party authorities that they were losing up to four horses a day to starvation and overwork. Worse, they were unable to prevent the peasants from eating them. ‘We have several times warned the kolkhozniks not to eat the carcasses, but they answer: “We’re going to die anyway from hunger, and we’ll eat the carcasses, even those of infected cattle. You can shoot us if you want.” ’⁴³

Letters flooded into the party offices, and especially to Stalin. ‘It’s horrible, having children and not being able to raise them in civilized conditions – better not to have them,’ one woman wrote to him from Nyzhniodniprovsk.⁴⁴ A party member wrote of collection teams entering the huts of poor and middle peasants who had ‘filled all of their grain requisition obligations’, yet taking all the rest of their grain, ‘leaving nothing to eat, nothing for the fall sowing’.⁴⁵ Another wrote:

Dear Stalin,

Please answer me, why are the collective farmers on the collective farms swelling with hunger and eating dead horses? I got a holiday and went to Zynovïvskyi district, where I saw for myself how people are eating horses …⁴⁶

In the spring of 1932 secret police informers also began, for the first time in a decade, to use the word ‘famine’ in describing the situation in Ukrainian villages.⁴⁷ The republican government in Kharkiv also began to act as if it understood that the threat of hunger was very real. Government grain warehouses released more than 2,000 tonnes of millet in April, to help those ‘in the most difficult situations’.48 A month later the Kyiv provincial government discussed the provision of extra food to thirty districts, particularly for the children.⁴⁹ They also decided to send emergency grain supplies immediately to two districts where the need was extreme.⁵⁰

The sense of impending crisis affected the foreigners living in Ukraine too. The Polish consul in Kyiv cabled to Warsaw his observations of ‘severe food shortages’ in many villages. He had seen people collapsing on the streets from starvation in Vinnytsia and Uman.⁵¹ The German consul reported that he had received appeals from members of the German minority, who were petitioning to be recognized as citizens in order to emigrate: ‘There is not enough bread, villagers are forced to eat unacceptable ersatz [food] … villagers who are underfed at the collective farms and workers whose rations are insufficient are begging for food.’⁵²

Given the scale of the food shortages it was hardly surprising that the peasants balked, that spring, and, as in 1921, refused to sow their land: if they planted their last remaining kernels of seed grain, then they would have nothing to eat. They must also have known that whatever they did manage to grow would be confiscated. In April 1932 the OGPU raised the alarm: more than 40,000 households were not going to plant anything at all.⁵³ As hunger spread, many were too weak to work in the fields. The empty fields were no secret: Visti VUTsVK, the main newspaper of the Ukrainian republican government, openly reported that only about two-thirds of Ukrainian fields had been sown that spring.⁵⁴

No unbiased observer, at that moment, could possibly have believed that Ukraine had any chance of meeting Moscow’s demands for grain that year. The food supply was clearly going to drop. The grain for export was not going to materialize. And many, many people were going to starve.

In the spring of 1932 a few high-ranking Ukrainian communists finally gathered the courage to call for a drastic change of direction. In February, Hryhorii Petrovskyi – an ‘Old Bolshevik’, a party member since before the revolution, member of the Ukrainian Politburo and chairman of Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet – wrote a short letter to his colleagues. He did not name scapegoats, and did not seek to explain away shortages as ‘temporary’ or imaginary. Instead, he observed the lack of food in ‘not only villages but also working-class towns’ all across Ukraine, in Kyiv and Vinnytsia provinces as well as Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv.

Petrovskyi made a list of suggestions: write a letter to the Central Committee, describing the ‘drastic shortages of produce for the population and feed for livestock’; ask it to halt grain collections in Ukraine and restore free exchange of goods ‘according to the law’; call upon the Red Cross and other emergency relief organizations to pool their resources, as they had in 1921, in order to rescue people in the worst affected areas, especially children; mobilize organizations within the Ukrainian republic to help out famine-struck regions. Bluntly, he declared that the Soviet state should expect to collect nothing in Ukraine at all in 1932. In order to feed hungry Ukrainian peasants, any food harvested should remain inside the republic.55

The Ukrainian party leadership heeded Petrovskyi’s call. In March, reversing their earlier statements, party officials abruptly told local leaders to stop collecting grain. Despite having not met the spring quotas, the peasants should concentrate on sowing the next season’s crop.⁵⁶ Encouraged by these signs from the top, several Ukrainians officials lower down the hierarchy refused to comply with demands from other republics and other state institutions for Ukrainian grain. One official, having been asked to send 1,000 tonnes of grain to the Urals, wrote back that this was ‘impossible’. A request to send beans and peas was refused as well.⁵⁷

The ensuing arguments – within the Moscow leadership, the Ukrainian Communist Party in Kharkiv, and between Moscow and Kharkiv – were murky and guarded, even confusing and contradictory. The potential for widespread famine was by now well understood on all sides. But, again, Stalin’s personal responsibility for the collectivization policy – he had conceived and argued for it, backed and stood by it – was perfectly well understood too. To oppose it openly, let alone imply that it had somehow failed, sounded like a criticism of the leader himself. Everyone knew that the provision of food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure – yet if the Ukrainian peasants were not spared their grain and encouraged to sow their crops, everyone also knew that catastrophe would follow.

Different leaders tried different strategies, choosing their words carefully. On 26 April, Kosior wrote a long, exceedingly cautious letter to Stalin on the general situation in the Ukrainian countryside, rather downplaying the problems. He had, he said, just been to visit several of the southern districts. Despite all the negative reports he was certain that the 1932 harvest would surpass that of the previous year, mostly because the weather had improved. Contradicting his colleagues’ fearful missives, he declared that ‘all conversation about “famine” in Ukraine must be categorically abandoned’. Yes, ‘serious mistakes had been made in carrying out the grain collection’ in a few provinces, but he expected them to be rectified. Kosior also conceded that there had been some ‘incidents’ in Kyiv province, where certain protests of a ‘Petliurite’ character had taken place: hungry peasants were refusing to sow any grain. But he assured Stalin that all was well. The state had offered a bit of food aid to those provinces, including some millet, corn and horse feed. This little hiccup prompted him to ask for a favour: because of these small disruptions, some ‘extra help’ might be useful in some other parts of Ukraine. For this ‘we will be obliged to turn once again to the Central Committee’.58

Kosior was delicately asking for food aid, in other words, but only for a few districts, only in a limited quantity, and only because some counter-revolutionaries had disrupted the sowing season with their political protests. He and other Ukrainian communist leaders had reason to believe that Stalin would look favourably upon such carefully worded requests. Throughout the spring of 1932 the Soviet leader had several times seemed open to changing the policy. He told Kaganovich that more industrial goods ought to be made available to peasants, the better to inspire them. He had offered some small shipments of cereals in April to ease the food shortages.⁵⁹ Even as exports to Western countries continued, he had authorized secret purchases of corn, wheat and other grain from the Far East and Persia, demonstrating that he knew there were shortages inside the USSR.⁶⁰ He had backed a Politburo decision to authorize another small shipment of grain to Odessa province.⁶¹ Stalin had even toyed with the idea that the grain procurement plans all across the USSR were ‘too mechanical’ and ought to be adjusted for regional weather and other local factors. Both Kaganovich and Molotov would reiterate that point later in the summer.62

But in April his tone shifted: Stalin had received some alarming material on the political situation in Ukraine. The archives don’t record exactly what it was he read, though it is possible to guess. Perhaps it was the ‘Petliurite’ protests to which Kosior alluded, or a report from the Pavlohrad district. Perhaps it was a report on the mood within the Communist Party itself. Balytsky’s OGPU was diligently collecting informers’ reports from the countryside, recording in particular the dissatisfaction of party members, their dislike of collectivization, and their resentment of Moscow. Later that autumn he would present Stalin with a list of angry remarks from Ukrainian party officials, reported by informers, and descriptions of party members turning in their party cards; it may be that Stalin saw something similar that spring. Whatever it was, Stalin lashed out on 26 April in a letter to Kosior: ‘Judging from this material, it seems that in several places in Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist. Is this really true? Is the situation in the countryside really that terrible? Where are the GPU organs, what are they doing? Could you verify this case and report back to the Central Committee on what measures you’ve taken?’⁶³

Prompted by whatever had provoked his note, Stalin immediately withdrew the millet and other food aid to Ukraine. He also demanded that the Ukrainian Communist Party maintain its policy of confiscating tractors and other equipment from underperforming farms. He did not want any generous gestures to be misinterpreted as an independent action of the Ukrainian leadership, and he certainly didn’t want them to be seen as a ‘demonstration against Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party’.⁶⁴ He was deeply concerned about the Ukrainian party’s reliability. Using language that illustrates how far the Soviet state had gone in the direction of personal tyranny, he told Kaganovich and Molotov that the local leaders were insufficiently loyal. ‘Pay serious attention to Ukraine,’ he wrote to both of them on 2 June: ‘[Vlas] Chubar [head of the Ukrainian government], through his rotten and opportunistic nature, and Kosior, through his rotten diplomacy … and his criminally light-minded attitude to affairs, are completely ruining Ukraine. These comrades are not up to leading today’s Ukraine.’65

These ‘rotten’ and reviled leaders did nevertheless make one last appeal. On 10 June, Petrovskyi wrote the frankest letter of all. He had just been to visit several rural districts where people were beginning to starve. He had faced down the starving peasants himself:

We knew beforehand that fulfilling state grain procurements in Ukraine would be difficult, but what I have seen in the countryside indicates that we have greatly overdone it, we have tried too hard. I was in many villages and saw a considerable part of the countryside engulfed in famine. There aren’t many, but there are people swollen from starvation, mainly poor peasants and even middle peasants. They are eating food scraps from the bottom of the barrel, if any are available. During big meetings in the villages, the peasants of course curse me, old women cry and men sometimes do also. Sometimes the criticism of the worsening situation becomes very deep and broad – Why did they create an artificial famine? After all, we had a good harvest. Why did they take away all of the sowing seeds? That did not happen even under the old regime. We didn’t have that even under the old regime. Why are Ukrainians forced to make treacherous journeys to find bread in less fertile regions? Why isn’t bread being brought here? and so on … It’s difficult, in these conditions, to offer an explanation. You obviously condemn those who committed excesses, but generally feel like a carp squirming on a frying pan …⁶⁶

Theft was increasing in the villages, Petrovskyi explained. In the shops he had been unable to buy bread, sugar or anything else. Prices were rising, and ‘speculation’ was spreading. Local offices were refusing to sell train tickets, and they didn’t know why. Each one of these facts was ‘being used against the party, and against the collective farms’, he wrote, and he finished with a plea for aid: ‘To conclude, I ask again that you consider all methods and resources available to provide urgent food aid to Ukrainian villages, and to supply buckwheat for sowing as quickly as possible, in order to make up for what has not been sown.’⁶⁷

On the same day Chubar, the Ukrainian leader, also wrote a long letter to Stalin and Molotov, describing the poor spring harvest and the pockets of famine: ‘It is now possible to count at least 100 districts in need of food aid.’ Like Petrovskyi, Chubar had been in the countryside. Like Kosior, he avoided putting direct blame on state policy, instead attributing the crisis to the ‘poor planning and management’ of the harvest. But he was absolutely clear about what was happening: ‘In March and April, there were tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people dying from famine in every village; children abandoned by their parents and orphans appeared. District and provincial governments provided food relief from internal reserves, but growing despair and the psychology of famine resulted in more appeals for help.’

He came to the same conclusion: It was time to end the ‘unrealistic’ grain procurement policies. ‘Even some of those collective farms which had already fulfilled their quota received demands to fulfill it a second or even a third time.’68

Kaganovich forwarded the two letters to Stalin. He told him that he found Chubar’s note to have a more ‘businesslike and self-critical character’. Petrovskyi’s letter by contrast, contained an element of ‘rot’. Kaganovich particularly disliked the Ukrainian leader’s criticism of the Soviet Communist Party and, by implication, of Stalin. Nevertheless, he supported their request: it was time to offer some help to Ukraine.⁶⁹ Molotov also wrote to Stalin and suggested that Soviet grain exports might, for a time, be curtailed, so as to provide Ukraine with some food aid.⁷⁰

Stalin argued back. From the tone of his letter it is clear that he could not (or did not want to) believe that there really was insufficient grain in Ukraine:

I did not like the letters from Chubar and Petrovskyi. The former spouts ‘self-criticism’ in order to secure a million more poods of bread from Moscow, the latter is feigning sainthood, claiming victimization from the [Central Committee] in order to reduce grain procurement levels. Neither one nor the other is acceptable. Chubar is mistaken if he thinks that self-criticism is required for securing outside ‘help’ and not for mobilizing the forces and resources within Ukraine. In my opinion, Ukraine has been given more than enough …⁷¹

Stalin was of course talking about ‘giving’ grain to Ukraine that had been taken from the country in the first place. But no one challenged him. On 16 June, Kaganovich once again wrote to Stalin that ‘This year’s harvest campaign will be especially difficult, particularly in Ukraine. Unfortunately, Ukraine is not sufficiently prepared for it.’72 But he did not speak, as his Ukrainian colleagues had done, of sending mass food aid.

Instead, in the summer of 1932, the policies that could have prevented mass famine in Ukraine were quietly abandoned. Some grain was granted to Kyiv and Odessa, though not as much as had been requested. No horses or tractors were included.⁷³ Kosior told local party bosses that there was enough to help just ‘twenty districts’ – out of more than 600: ‘Quickly inform by telegram which districts in your province should be on that list.’⁷⁴

Even as hunger spread, the state continued to issue plans and orders designed to maintain the export of grain abroad. In March 1932, Moscow told Kharkiv that Ukrainian officials would be ‘made personally responsible for the export of rye from the Odessa port’. The Council of People’s Commissars urged all enterprises involved in export to improve the quality of their barrels and containers and the storage for goods heading abroad.⁷⁵ To Ukrainians watching food leaving their hungry republic, the export policy seemed crazy, even suicidal. Mykola Kostyrko, an engineer who lived in Odessa at the time, remembered ‘foreign vessels’ coming into the port: ‘they exported everything in order to get foreign capital for the “needs of the state” to buy tractors and for propaganda abroad’. At one point, he remembered, longshoremen in Odessa refused to load pigs onto a ship. A detachment of Red Army soldiers was sent to do it for them.⁷⁶

An employee of the Italian consulate in Odessa also recorded widespread anger at the export policy: ‘there is no [vegetable] oil here, even while oil, and seed used for its production, are being sent abroad’.⁷⁷ Public anger at the exports was no secret to the Communist Party either. In April 1932 the Ukrainian party leadership had agreed never to discuss the matter publicly, as it would only create ‘unhealthy moods’.⁷⁸ By the year’s end export levels did fall dramatically – from 5.2 million to 1.73 million tonnes.⁷⁹ The value to the state dropped dramatically as well, from 203.5 million rubles in 1931 to 88.1 million in 1932.⁸⁰ But the shipments abroad never stopped altogether.

The mood inside the party itself did not improve either. In July, Molotov and Kaganovich again arrived in Ukraine, with the goal once more of overriding any remaining objections. They had direct orders from Stalin, who wrote to them on 2 July, repeating his concerns about Ukraine and its leadership: ‘Pay more serious attention to Ukraine. Chubar’s deterioration and opportunistic nature, Kosior’s rotten diplomacy … and a criminally reckless approach to affairs will lose Ukraine in the end.’81

They used the Third Party Conference – a grim affair – to make their point. All the Ukrainians present objected, as far as they dared, to the quota assigned to their country. Some local leaders were quite blunt. The first secretary of a district in the Kharkiv province pointed out that, thanks to the absence of reserves and seed grain, there were ‘food shortages’ in his area.⁸² One of his counterparts in Kyiv province complained even more bluntly that the collection brigades doomed peasants to death: the party, he said, was guilty of ‘distortions’ in its agricultural policy.⁸³ A comrade from the Melitopol district complained that the central plan often did not bear any relationship to the situation of specific collective farms and that the centre seemed to prepare plans without consulting the local peasants.⁸⁴ Roman Terekhov, from Kharkiv province, declared that every district knew perfectly well that the plans were badly made, that work was poorly organized, and that ‘huge losses’ had resulted, leading to ‘food shortages’ in at least twenty-five districts.⁸⁵

Although he didn’t repeat his call to end the grain procurement policy altogether, Mykola Skrypnyk, the Commissar of Education, was also quite blunt. Ukraine simply could not and would not produce the requisite amount of grain. The plan would not be fulfilled: ‘this is a huge, shameful failure’.⁸⁶ Both Petrovskyi and Chubar spoke of ‘shortages’ and ‘failures’ as well.⁸⁷ What they were asking for, however, was a reduction in the amount of grain Ukraine was required to produce.

Molotov and Kaganovich refused to yield. Molotov told the Ukrainian communists that they had become ‘whisperers and capitulators’.⁸⁸ Later, the two men told Stalin that they had turned down a Ukrainian resolution calling for lower quotas: ‘We categorically rejected a revision of the plan, demanded the mobilization of party forces to combat losses and the squander of grain and to invigorate collective farms.’⁸⁹ The result was that instead of pulling back, the conference passed a resolution recognizing as ‘correct’ the unrealistic, impossible 5.8 million tonne (356 million pood) plan, and resolved to ‘adopt it for unconditional fulfilment’.90

Molotov and Kaganovich also described the mood of the Communist Party leadership in Kharkiv as ‘more favourable’ than they had anticipated, by which they seem to have meant that the Ukrainians were still amenable to taking orders.⁹¹ Carefully, the two men suggested to Stalin that the seriousness of the situation remain concealed: ‘In order not to give any information to the foreign press, we have to publish only modest criticism in our own press, without any information about the situation in the bad districts.’⁹² Accordingly, the official line remained positive. A few weeks after the conference, the Soviet government and the Communist Party jointly declared ‘complete victory’ in agriculture. The ‘bourgeois theory’ that the USSR would have to revert to capitalism and markets had been ‘battered and smashed into dust’.⁹³

There is no doubt that Stalin knew, by this point, that 5.8 million tonnes was an unrealistic figure. On 25 July he told Kaganovich that he intended to allow the ‘suffering’ collective farms in Ukraine to get by with reduced quotas. He had, he wrote, avoided speaking of a reduction in grain collection before, because he wanted to avoid ‘demoralizing’ the Ukrainians further or disrupting the harvest. He intended instead to wait until later to make the announcement, hoping to ‘stimulate’ the peasants during the harvest season – and to appear benevolent – by offering a small reduction of 30 million poods (490,000 tonnes) or ‘as a last resort’ (those words were underlined) 40 million poods (655,000 tonnes). Kaganovich wrote back in agreement: ‘Now is not the time to tell the Ukrainians’ about the decrease. It was better to let them worry about meeting an impossible demand.⁹⁴

Before this game could play itself out, Stalin was once again distracted by bad news from across the Soviet Union – and some especially bad news from Ukraine. All through the summer, the OGPU had been reporting growing levels of theft. People were stealing from railroads, shops, enterprises, and above all from collective farms. This was hardly surprising: collective farm workers (and factory workers too) often felt that state property belonged to no one and so there was no harm in taking it. More to the point, they were very hungry. That’s the clear implication of a report the OGPU filed in July, describing a worrying trend: many peasants were beginning to harvest grain prematurely, and secretly, and then keeping it for themselves. One report came from Central Volga province:

On the night of 9 July, five women were found in the fields cutting the ears of wheat. When an attempt was made to detain the women, they fled in different directions. The guard fired twice with a hunting gun. One of the collective farm women who fled was severely wounded (she died several hours later) …

On that same night, in the same village, a watchman also discovered a crowd of ‘fifteen thieves on horseback with sacks of stolen grain’. This group of ‘thieves’ fared better than the five women. After they put up violent resistance, the watchman took fright and escaped.95

As so often in the past, Stalin found a political interpretation for these acts of desperation. On vacation in Sochi – having travelled on a ‘train well-stocked with fine provisions’ – he wrote several letters to Kaganovich on the subject.⁹⁶ The two of them confirmed one another’s views. The state and its policies were not a danger to the starving peasants – but the starving peasants were a great danger to the state. ‘Kulaks, the de-kulakized and anti-Soviet elements all steal,’ Stalin told Kaganovich. ‘Crime must be punished with ten years or capital punishment’, and there should be no amnesty: ‘Without these (and similar) draconian socialist measures it is impossible to establish new social discipline, and without such discipline it is impossible to strengthen and defend our new order.’⁹⁷

A few days later, in another set of letters to Kaganovich and Molotov, he elaborated further, clearly having thought about the matter some more during his seaside holiday. A new law, he now worried, was an insufficient deterrent. In order to get people to stop stealing food, the law must be supported by a propaganda campaign fully grounded in Marxist theory. Capitalism had defeated feudalism because capitalism ensured that private property was protected by the state; Socialism, in turn, could defeat capitalism only if it declared public property – cooperative, collective, state property – to be sacred and inviolable too. The very survival of socialism might well depend on whether or not the state could prevent ‘anti-social, kulak-capitalistic elements’ from stealing public property.⁹⁸

Stalin’s obsessive belief in Marxist theory once again triumphed over what he would have called ‘bourgeois morality’. On 7 August 1932 the USSR duly passed an edict draconian even by Soviet standards. It began with a declaration:

Public property (state, kolkhoz, cooperative) [is] the basis of the Soviet system; it is sacred and inviolable, and those attempting to steal public property must be considered enemies of the people … the decisive struggle against plunderers of public property is the foremost obligation of every organ of Soviet administration.

It continued with a definition, and a conclusion:

The Central Executive Committee and Soviet of People’s Commissars of the USSR hereby resolve …

1) To regard the property of kolkhozes and cooperatives (harvest in stores, etc.) as tantamount to state property.

2) To apply as a punitive measure for plundering (thievery) of kolkhoz and collective property the highest measure of social defence: execution with the confiscation of all property, which may be substituted … by the deprivation of freedom for a period of no fewer than ten years.99

The theft of tiny amounts of food, in other words, could be punished by ten years in a labour camp – or death. Such punishments had hitherto been reserved for acts of high treason. Now, a peasant woman who stole a few grains of wheat from a collective farm would be treated like a military officer who had betrayed the country during wartime. The law had no precedent, even in the USSR. Only a few months earlier, the Russian republican Supreme Court had punished a person who had stolen wheat from a collective farm field with just one year of forced labour.¹⁰⁰

As Stalin wished, an educational press campaign followed. Two weeks after the decree, Pravda published an account of the case of ‘the female kulak Grybanova’, who had been stealing grain from the fields of the ‘Red Builder’ collective farm. She was sentenced to be shot. The Ukrainian press reported in detail on three cases tried in Odessa, including an account of a husband and wife who were both shot for ‘pilfering’.¹⁰¹ Other published stories included the case of a peasant shot for possessing a small quantity of wheat gleaned by his ten-year-old daughter.102

This extraordinary law took an extraordinary toll. By the end of 1932, within less than six months of the law’s passage, 4,500 people had been executed for breaking it. Far more – over 100,000 people – had received ten-year sentences in labour camps. This preference for long camp sentences over capital punishment, dictated from above, was clearly pragmatic: forced labourers could get to work on the Gulag system’s vast new industrial projects – mines, factories, logging operations – that were just getting underway.¹⁰³

In subsequent weeks and months, thousands of peasants flooded into the camp system, victims of the 7 August law. According to official figures (which do not reflect all arrests), the number of Gulag inmates nearly doubled between 1932 and 1934, from 260,000 to 510,000. The camp system had neither the resources nor the organizational capacity to cope with this huge influx of people, many of whom arrived already emaciated by hunger. As a result, deaths in the Gulag also climbed from 4.81 per cent in 1932 to 15.3 per cent in 1933.¹⁰⁴ Others may have been saved by their incarceration. Years later, Susannah Pechora, a Gulag prisoner in a later period, recalled meeting a fellow prisoner, a former peasant. Upon being given her meagre daily ration, the woman sighed and stroked the small, hard chunk of bread. ‘Khlebushka, my little bit of bread,’ she purred, ‘and to think that they give you to us every day!’¹⁰⁵

Theft was not Stalin’s only concern in the summer of 1932. Soon after passage of the 7 August law, he received a startling document from the Ukrainian secret police. The historian Terry Martin, the first to identify its significance, has called this document ‘extraordinary and unique’.¹⁰⁶ Stalin may have seen comparable reports before. This one may have been similar to the material that had caused his outburst in April, when he had demanded to know whether ‘Soviet power has ceased to exist’ in some parts of Ukraine. But this time, with a new food crisis building, his reaction was even harsher.

Normally, the OGPU sent Stalin reports written in careful prose and filled with stock phrases about enemies and conspiracies. But in August 1932 the Ukrainian secret police sent him a straightforward set of quotations without commentary. The quotations were all collected from informers and attributed to Ukrainian party members operating at district level, all of whom were bitterly opposed to the grain requisition campaign. Normally, this kind of raw material would serve as the basis for a more elaborate report. This time, the raw material itself was striking enough that it was sent on its own.

Almost all the evidence in the document expressed direct defiance of Moscow’s orders. ‘I will not obey this [grain requisition] plan’, one party member was quoted as saying: ‘I do not want to accept this plan. I will not complete this grain requisition plan.’ And after that, the secret policemen recorded, he ‘put his party card on the table and left the room’.

Another had a similar reaction: ‘It will be difficult to fight for the completion of this grain requisitions plan, but I know a way out of this difficulty – I’ll send my party card to the local council, and then I will be free.’

And a third: ‘We will not accept the grain requisitions plan, since in its current form it cannot be fulfilled. And to again force the people to starve is criminal. For me it is better to turn in my Party card than to doom the collective farmers to starve through deceit.’

And a fourth: ‘I see that this plan dooms me. I will ask the party cell to remove me from my job, since otherwise I will soon be excluded from the party for failing to cope with my work and failing to fulfil the party’s tasks.’107

Had they been deliberately trying to prejudice the Soviet leader against Ukraine, the men of the OGPU could not have chosen a better way, for the report confirmed all of Stalin’s worst fears. He had long perceived a clear connection between the grain collection problem in Ukraine and the threat of nationalism in the republic. Now he heard a clear echo of the events of the previous decade: the civil war, the peasant revolt, the Bolshevik setback. His response, in a letter to Kaganovich, was harsh:

The chief thing now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are terrible. It’s terrible in the party. They say that in some parts of Ukraine (it seems, Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk) around 50 district committees have spoken out against the grain requisition plan, considering it unrealistic. In other district committees, it appears the situation is no better. What is this? This is not the party, not a parliament, this is a caricature of a parliament …

If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine. Keep in mind that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior think. Keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist Party includes more than a few rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites as well as direct agents of Piłsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will not be slow in opening a front within (and without) the party against the party. The worst thing is that the Ukrainians simply do not see this danger …108

Stalin went on to list all the changes that he wanted to make in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He wanted to remove Stanislav Redens, the head of the Ukrainian secret police (and his brother-in-law). He wanted to transfer Balytsky, his reliable ally, back to Ukraine from Moscow, where he had briefly served as deputy leader of the OGPU, an order that would be carried out in October. He wanted Kaganovich himself to take full responsibility for the Ukrainian Communist Party once again: ‘Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic. We won’t spare money on this task.’¹⁰⁹ He believed that this was the moment to revive tactics deployed in the past: ‘Lenin was right in saying that a person who does not have the courage to swim against the current when necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader …’

He also believed that time was short: ‘Without these and similar measures (ideological and political work in Ukraine, above all in her border districts and so forth) I repeat – we could lose Ukraine …’¹¹⁰

For Stalin, who remembered the civil war in Ukraine, the loss of the republic was an exceedingly dangerous prospect. In 1919 a peasant revolt in Ukraine had brought the White Army within a few days’ march of Moscow; in 1920 chaos in Ukraine had brought the Polish army deep into Soviet territory. The USSR could not afford to lose Ukraine again.