8

Famine Decisions, 1932: Requisitions, Blacklists and Borders

Like the Jews that Moses led out of Egyptian slavery, the half-savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages … will die out, and a new tribe will take their place – literate, sensible, hearty people.

Maxim Gorky, On the Russian Peasant, 19221

Sometime in the early hours of 9 November 1932 – two days after the solemn celebrations of the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution – Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, shot herself with a small pistol. She died instantly.

A few hours later a doctor examined her corpse and declared the cause of death to be ‘an open wound to the heart’. Soon afterwards, after exchanging a few sharp words with Molotov and Kaganovich, the doctor changed his mind. On her death certificate he listed the cause of death as ‘acute appendicitis’. The politics behind this change would have been perfectly clear to Stalin’s inner circle: in the autumn of 1932 all of them knew that Nadya’s suicide, whatever its real causes, would be interpreted as a form of political protest – even as an anguished outcry against the spreading famine.²

Rightly or wrongly, this is indeed how Nadya’s suicide was remembered. Years later their daughter Svetlana wrote of her mother’s ‘terrible, devastating disillusionment’ with her father and his politics.³ A talkative Ossetian who met Nadya at a student party in 1929 recalled her sympathy for Stalin’s most important opponent, Bukharin, who opposed collectivization and lost his Politburo seat, and eventually his life, for doing so.⁴ The famine had been a common topic of conversation among their fellow students at the Industrial Academy, and several people there heard her denouncing collectivization. In the last months of her life she suffered from migraine headaches, stomach pains, rapid mood swings and bouts of hysteria. Retrospectively, these maladies have been attributed to acute depression. At the time they were described, in whispers, as symptoms of bad conscience, of disappointment and of despair.5

Certainly others in Stalin’s immediate entourage were unhappy about the famine. Peeking through the lace curtains of their well-appointed trains, many senior Bolsheviks saw things that summer that horrified them, and a few of them were brave enough to tell their leader about it. In August 1932, while Stalin was still in Sochi, he had received a letter from Klement Voroshilov, soon to become Commissar of Defence:

Across the Stavropol region, I saw all the fields uncultivated. We were expecting a good harvest but didn’t get it … Across the Ukraine from my train window, the truth is that it looks even less cultivated than the North Caucasus … Sorry to tell you such things during your holiday but I can’t be silent.⁶

Another senior military figure, the civil war hero Semyon Budyonny, also wrote to Stalin from his train: ‘Looking at people from the windows of the train, I see very tired people in old worn clothes, our horses are skin and bone.’⁷ When Kira Alliluyeva, Nadezhda’s niece, travelled to Kharkiv to visit her uncle – Stanislav Redens, then head of the Ukrainian OGPU – she too saw beggars at the train stations, emaciated people with swollen bellies. She told her mother, who told Stalin. He dismissed the story: ‘She’s a child, she makes things up.’⁸

Others who were less intimate with the Soviet leader saw or heard the same things. Bukharin had by now recanted his views: in December 1930 he had declared that he now understood the need for the destruction of the kulaks and for a ‘direct break with the old structure’.⁹ But others had not. Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow party boss, was one of them. Ryutin had been evicted from the party in 1930 for ‘expounding right-opportunist views’, but unlike Bukharin he had refused to recant. Ryutin was arrested and then released. But he kept in touch with other would-be dissidents, and in the spring of 1932 he invited a dozen of them to help him write a statement of opposition. In August the group met in a Moscow suburb to put the finishing touches to a political platform calling for change, as well as a shorter ‘Appeal to all Party Members’.10 Both documents were copied and circulated, by hand and by post, in Moscow, Kharkiv and other cities.

‘Ryutin’s Platform’, as it came to be known, denounced Stalin in no uncertain terms. The authors called him an ‘unscrupulous political intriguer’, mocked him for his pretensions to be Lenin’s successor, and accused him of having terrorized workers and peasants alike. Above all, Ryutin was angered by Stalin’s attack on the Soviet countryside. The policy of ‘all-out collectivization’, Ryutin declared, had not been voluntary, as the propaganda claimed, and it was not a success. On the contrary:

It is founded on direct and indirect forms of the most severe coercion, designed to force the peasants to join the collective farms. It is founded not on an improvement in their condition, but on their direct and indirect expropriation and massive impoverishment … outcries directed by Stalin at the kulaks at the present time are only a method of terrorizing the masses and concealing his own bankruptcy.

These were not just mistakes, wrote Ryutin, but crimes. He called on his fellow dissidents to organize a revolt:

In the struggle to destroy Stalin’s dictatorship, we must in the main rely not on the old leaders but on new forces. These forces exist, these forces will quickly grow. New leaders will inevitably arise, new organizers of the masses, new authorities … A struggle gives birth to leaders and heroes. We must begin to take action.¹¹

This was distinctly Bolshevik language, which may help explain why Stalin, when he read it, took it so seriously. He had seen revolutionary passion before, and he knew it could be triggered again. After an informer tipped off the OGPU in September, he showed no mercy. Within days the Communist Party expelled and arrested twenty-one people, including the son of Hryhorii Petrovskyi, the chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, as well as Ryutin himself. All were condemned as counter-revolutionaries. All were executed, as were, in due course, Ryutin’s wife and two adult sons.¹² In later years, to have read ‘Ryutin’s Platform’, or even to have heard of it, became a capital crime.

Stalin must have assumed that Ryutin’s views were nevertheless widely shared, especially at the lower levels of the party and among people who had daily contact with the hungry rural population, for the Ryutin affair sharpened his sensitivity to other signs of discontent. Throughout the summer of 1932 he had been reading the reports from across the Soviet Union, including the disturbing ones from Ukraine. More arrived in early September. In the North Caucasus the OGPU claimed to have discovered a counter-revolutionary group that objected to Soviet policy because ‘the pace of all-out collectivization has been too rapid’.13 Across the USSR secret policemen were warning their superiors about ‘new tactics practised by the kulaks’, now including ‘fake’ complaints of famine. They were advised to investigate: ‘where a case of feigning hunger is brought to light, the perpetrators are to be considered counter-revolutionary elements’.¹⁴

Nadya’s death, the Ryutin affair, the worrying letters from close colleagues, the stark missives from the field – all this fed Stalin’s growing paranoia that autumn. Discontent was seething all around him, and the prospect of counter-revolution suddenly seemed real. Historians have long thought that the events of the summer and autumn of 1932 were the catalyst for the mass arrests and executions of 1937–8, later known as the Great Terror.¹⁵ But they also formed the immediate backdrop to an extraordinary set of decisions affecting Ukraine.

That autumn it would still have been possible to turn back. The Kremlin could have offered food aid to Ukraine and the other grain-growing regions of the USSR, as the regime had done in 1921 and as it had begun to do, in fits and starts, already that year. The state could have redistributed all available resources, or imported food from abroad. It could even have asked, as it had also done in 1921, for help from abroad.

Instead, Stalin began using stark language about Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus, the Russian province that was heavily Ukrainian. ‘Give yourself the task of quickly transforming Ukraine into a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic’, were Stalin’s words to Kaganovich in August. ‘Curse out the North Caucasus leadership for their bad work on grain requisitions,’ he declared.16 Others echoed his words on the ground. Early in October, Stanislav Kosior, General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, accused district officials who could not collect enough grain of harbouring ‘right-wing attitudes’. A few days later, after a week in which the Ukrainian provinces produced only 18 per cent of their grain quota, the Ukrainian Politburo sent a panicked letter to local leaders warning them that there was ‘little time left’ and calling for ‘an end to the calm attitude of party and state agencies’.¹⁷ Soon after that, Molotov arrived in Kharkiv and Kaganovich headed to the North Caucasus to ‘struggle with the class enemy who sabotaged the grain collection and the sowing’.¹⁸

By November 1932 it was nevertheless clear that the autumn harvest would not meet the plan. It came in 40 per cent lower than the planners had expected in the USSR as a whole, and 60 per cent lower in Ukraine.¹⁹ Intriguingly, the overall drop in production was not as dramatic as it had been in 1921, and over the next few years it remained about the same. All across the USSR the total grain harvest for 1931–2 was 69.5 million tonnes (down from 83.5 million in 1930–1); for 1932–3 the total was 69.9 million tonnes. In 1933–4 the USSR harvested 68.4 million tonnes, and in 1934–5 the total was 67.6 million. But the state’s unrealistic demands on the peasants – the expectation that they meet unattainable goals – created the perception of total failure. The insistence that the peasants deliver grain that Stalin believed should exist created, in turn, a humanitarian catastrophe.²⁰

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Several sets of directives that autumn, on requisitions, blacklisted farms and villages, border controls and the end of Ukrainization – along with an information blockade and extraordinary searches, designed to remove everything edible from the homes of millions of peasants – created the famine now remembered as the Holodomor. The Holodomor, in turn, delivered the predictable result: the Ukrainian national movement disappeared completely from Soviet politics and public life. The ‘cruel lesson of 1919’ had been learned, and Stalin intended never to repeat it.

REQUISITIONS

In July 1932, Stalin had toyed with the idea of reducing his unrealistic demands for grain from Ukraine in order to appear more benevolent. In the autumn, as it became clear that Ukraine would not come anywhere near the required number, he changed his tactics. Ukraine could indeed be ‘allowed’ to produce less than required, even by 70 million poods (1.1 million tonnes). But this meant that every bit of the remaining quota – which was still unrealistic – had to be collected. On 29 October, Molotov sent a telegram to Stalin confirming what he had told the Ukrainians: the remaining plan had to be ‘fulfilled unconditionally, completely, not lowering it by an ounce’.21

On 18 November the Ukrainian communists carried out his wishes. The party issued a resolution declaring that ‘the full delivery of grain procurement plans is the principal duty of all collective farms’, to be prioritized above and beyond anything else, including the collection of grain reserves, seed reserves, animal fodder and, ominously, daily food supplies. In practice, both individual and collective farmers were forbidden from holding back anything at all. Even those allowed to keep grain in the past had to give it back. Any collective farmer who produced grain for his family on a private plot now had to turn that over too.²² No excuses were accepted.

A few weeks after this order was issued, Kaganovich arrived in Ukraine to ensure that it was carried out. Following another tumultuous Politburo meeting, this one lasting until 4 a.m., he posted a telegram to Stalin. Myriad Ukrainian communists had begged for the peasants to be allowed some reserves for their own consumption, as well as some seeds for the next season’s crop, but he assured Stalin that he had stood firm: ‘We are convinced that this “preoccupation” with reserves, including seed reserves, is seriously hampering and undermining the entire grain procurement plan.’23 Two days later, on 24 December, the Ukrainian Communist Party gave up trying to resist. The leadership conceded completely and gave all underperforming collective farms ‘five days to ship, without exception, all collective farm reserves, including sowing seeds’.²⁴

Grain was not the only food that Moscow now determined to squeeze out of Ukraine. During past years of poor harvests and bad weather, peasants had survived thanks to their livestock and to vegetables grown in their kitchen gardens. Following the bad harvest in 1924, Soviet agronomists noted that the dairy and poultry industries actually expanded.²⁵ But in the autumn of 1932 underperforming private farmers and collective farms not only had to give up their seed reserves, they also had to pay a meat penalty – a ‘fifteen-month quota of meat from collectivized and privately owned livestock’ – as well as a potato penalty, comprising a ‘one-year potato quota’. In practice, this law forced families to relinquish whatever potatoes they had stored away, and to turn over their remaining livestock, including the family cows that they had been allowed to keep since March 1930.²⁶

To ensure that nobody protested or resisted those orders, Stalin sent a telegram to the Ukrainian Communist Party leaders in Kharkiv on 1 January 1933 demanding that the party use the 7 August law on ‘theft of state property’ to prosecute collective and individual farmers in Ukraine who were allegedly hiding grain.²⁷ The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food – after which they would also die of starvation.²⁸

Two and a half weeks later the Soviet government issued another order that seems, at first glance, to have been intended to soften the blow. In an oddly worded statement, the Council of Ministers denounced the irregular methods of food collection that had been used all across the country – the plans, the plan failures, the supplementary plans – and called, instead, for peasants to pay a tax, in the form of a fixed percentage of their production. But there was one caveat: the tax was to take effect only in the summer of 1933. Until then the deadly requisitions would continue.29 In other words, Stalin knew that the methods being used were damaging, and he knew they would fail. But he allowed them to continue for several fatal months, during which time millions died.³⁰

Certainly during the winter of 1933 he did not offer any additional food aid, nor did he ease up on grain collection. Grain exports continued to flow out of the USSR, albeit more slowly than in the past. Since the spring of 1932 Soviet foreign trade officials had complained about the drop in the quantity of grain for export. In Odessa those responsible for shipping also complained that they were receiving poor-quality and poorly packed grain. Soviet officials had in the past been specifically instructed to take Western businessmen out to dinner and to flatter them, as a way of making up for the fact that grain shipments were late or non-existent.³¹ Such gestures may well have been required in 1932, for export levels did sink that year, as noted earlier.³²

But the number never fell to zero. Nor did exports of other kinds of food stop either. In 1932 the USSR exported more than 3,500 tonnes of butter and 586 tonnes of bacon from Ukraine alone. In 1933 the numbers rose to 5,433 tonnes of butter and 1,037 tonnes of bacon. In both years Soviet exporters continued to ship eggs, poultry, apples, nuts, honey, jam, canned fish, canned vegetables and canned meat, food that could have helped to feed Ukraine.³³

BLACKLISTS

In November and December 1932, as the significance of the new ‘unconditional’ requisition orders was sinking in, the Ukrainian Communist Party enlarged and formalized the republic’s system of blacklists. The term ‘blacklist’ (chorna doshka, which translates more literally as ‘black board’) was not new. From their very earliest days in power, the Bolsheviks had grappled with the problem of low productivity. Since neither bosses nor workers in state companies had any market incentives to work hard or well, the state created elaborate schemes of reward and punishment. Among other things, many factories began to place the names of their most successful workers on ‘red boards’, and those of the least successful workers on ‘black boards’. In March 1920, Stalin himself gave a speech in Donbas and referred specifically to the need to ‘favour one group over another’ and to reward ‘red medals’ to the work brigade leaders, ‘as in a military operation’. At the same time, those comrades who were avoiding work must be ‘pulled by the hair’: ‘For them we need black boards’. During the civil war, in 1919–21, the Bolsheviks had placed whole villages on blacklists if they failed to fulfil grain requisition requirements.34

In 1932 the blacklist returned as a tool for the reinforcement of grain procurement policy. Although they were used to some degree in all the other grain-producing regions of the USSR, blacklists were applied earlier, more widely and more rigorously in Ukraine. From the beginning of that year, provincial and local authorities had begun to blacklist collective farms, cooperatives and even whole villages that had failed to meet their grain quotas, and to subject them to a range of punishments and sanctions. In late summer local leaders expanded the blacklists. In November the practice became ubiquitous, spreading to include villages and collective farms in almost every district of Ukraine.³⁵

All across the republic, the names of blacklisted villages appeared in newspapers, along with the percentage of the grain quota they had achieved. One such article, for example, simply entitled ‘The Black List’, appeared in the Poltava province in September 1932, with a black border around it. The list contained seven villages, each of which had produced between 10.7 per cent and 14.2 per cent of the yearly plan.³⁶

Because records were kept separately in each province of Ukraine, the total number of blacklisted entities is hard to determine. But by the end of the year there were hundreds and possibly thousands of villages, collective farms and independent farms on blacklists all across the republic.37 At least seventy-nine districts were entirely blacklisted, and 174 districts were partially blacklisted, nearly half of the total in the entire republic.³⁸ Although the names were compiled by local leaders, Moscow took a keen interest in the process. Kaganovich personally pushed for the system of blacklisting to be spread to the Kuban, the historically Cossack and majority Ukrainian-speaking province of the North Caucasus.³⁹ Kuban had attracted negative attention a few years earlier, when enthusiasts of Ukrainization had begun promoting the language there. Kaganovich himself now took charge of a commission set up to combat the combined problem of grain deliveries and national sentiments there. On 4 November the leadership of the North Caucasus duly published a blacklist of fifteen Cossack settlements (stanitsy).

A series of sanctions on blacklisted farms and villages followed. In a telegram sent to all the provinces the Ukrainian Central Committee banned blacklisted districts that had failed to meet grain targets from purchasing any manufactured or industrial goods. In the initial order an exception was made for kerosene, salt and matches. Two weeks later, in a telegram from Moscow, Molotov ordered Kosior to ban the delivery of those three items too. After the ban went into effect, any peasant who might possess food would soon have great difficulties cooking it.⁴⁰

A complete ban on trade came next. Earlier in 1932 an edict had forbidden peasants from trading grain and meat products if their farms had not met requisition quotas. Now, districts which had failed to meet the grain procurement targets – and this included most of Ukraine – could no longer legally trade grain, seeds, flour or bread in any form at all. Anyone caught trading anything was liable to be arrested. Policemen seized grain or bread from bazaars. The peasants who lived on underperforming farms could neither purchase grain, barter for grain, nor legally obtain or possess grain at all.

The Politburo’s next decree purged ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ in blacklisted communities. Local activists in Kuban won the right to conduct their own ‘trials’ of local saboteurs, and in the weeks that followed they deported 45,000 people and imported demobilized Red Army soldiers and other outsiders to replace them.⁴¹ Kaganovich was in no doubt about the purpose of the Kuban blacklist. As he wrote to Stalin, he wanted ‘all Kuban Cossacks to know that in 1921 the Terek Cossacks who resisted were deported. Just like now – we cannot allow them on Kuban land, its golden land, to refuse to sow and to obstruct us instead.’42

The blacklists also served as a lesson in the folly of resistance in Ukraine. Unlike Russia and Belarus, where the term ‘blacklist’ was confined to grain producers, in Ukraine it could be applied to almost any entity. Whole districts were blacklisted. Machine tractor stations, timber companies and all kinds of provincial enterprises only distantly connected to grain production were blacklisted. As one historian has written, ‘the blacklist became a universal weapon aimed at all rural residents’ in Ukraine.⁴³ Blacklisting affected not just peasants but artisans, nurses, teachers, clerks, civil servants, anyone who lived in a blacklisted village or worked in a blacklisted enterprise.

As the number of people affected increased, the definition of what it meant to be ‘blacklisted’ would also evolve. Like everyone in the regions that had not met the grain targets, those on the blacklists were prohibited from receiving any manufactured goods whatsoever – including, thanks to Molotov, kerosene, salt and matches. The activists also forced them to hand back to the central authorities any manufactured goods – clothes, furniture, tools – they had stored in shops and warehouses.

Financial sanctions then also followed: blacklisted farms and enterprises could no longer receive credit of any kind. If they had outstanding loans they had to repay them early. In some cases all of their money was confiscated: the state could close their bank accounts and force their employees to pay their collective debts. The state prohibited the milling of grain, making it impossible to prepare flour (even if any grain could be obtained) in order to bake bread. Blacklisted farms could not receive the services of the machine tractor stations, which meant that all farm work had to be done by hand or with livestock.⁴⁴ In some places the blacklists were enforced by special brigades or teams of soldiers or secret policemen who blocked trade to the village, farm or district.⁴⁵

Sometimes particular farms received extra sanctions. After the village of Horodyshche, in Voroshilov district, Donetsk province, was blacklisted in November 1932, local authorities noticed that the rules weren’t having much impact. Horodyshche was near the large railway station of Debaltseve where a good deal of illicit trading took place. Many of the villagers were craftsmen or worked in nearby mines, they had a wide range of contacts as well as private plots of land, and they were finding ways to get hold of the products they needed. Worse, Horodyshche had a suspect history: during the civil war, the local party committee report noted, the village had hosted many ‘groups of bandits, horse thieves and the like’. Collectivization had ‘encountered active resistance’ in the town as well, thanks to a ‘large kulak community’. The district leaders decided to tighten the rules just for Horodyshche. They demanded the early return of a 23,500-ruble loan that had been borrowed by the collective farm. They seized three tractors. They confiscated all of the village’s seed stock. They levied meat ‘fines’ – which meant the confiscation of livestock – and confiscated the miners’ garden plots. They arranged for 150 people to be dismissed from their jobs in local factories, because their families had failed to hand over grain. Finally, they arrested and put on trial the collective farm leadership, and warned all of the village residents that if ‘sabotage’ did not cease, they would be deported and replaced with ‘conscientious collective farmers’. Their houses would be confiscated and given to ‘industrial laborers in need of accommodations’.46

Ostensibly, the blacklists were designed to persuade the peasants sanctioned by them to work harder and produce more grain. In practice, they had quite a different impact. With no grain, no livestock, no tools, no money and no credit, with no ability to trade or even to leave their places of work, the inhabitants of blacklisted villages could not grow, prepare or purchase anything to eat at all.

BORDERS

As Ukrainian peasants grew more hungry, another problem arose: how to prevent starving people from leaving their homes in search of something to eat.

The issue was not a new one. Already in 1931 the OGPU had been warning of a ‘systematic’ exodus of peasants from Ukrainian villages, and the numbers had continued to rise.47 Their own statistics showed the number of rural workers dropping rapidly as thousands of people escaped the collective farms.⁴⁸ In January 1932 the problem grew suddenly worse. In a report sent to Stalin, Vsevolod Balytsky, still the head of the Ukrainian OGPU, reckoned that more than 30,000 people had left the Ukrainian Republic during the previous month.⁴⁹ A year later the Ukrainian OGPU produced an even more alarming tally: between 15 December 1932 and 2 February 1933 nearly 95,000 peasants had left their homes. The OGPU stopped short of admitting that people were leaving because they were starving – ‘most of those fleeing are private farmers and kulaks who have failed to fulfil their grain procurement obligations and are afraid of facing repression’ – but they did concede that some of the escapees had ‘concerns over problems with food supplies’.⁵⁰

Some were crossing the Ukrainian border to search for food in Russia. ‘When their potatoes were gone,’ one Ukrainian worker remembered, ‘people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food. Interestingly enough, beyond Kharkiv where the Russian territory starts there was no hunger.’⁵¹ Indeed, officials in Russian districts along the Ukrainian border had already begun complaining of the Ukrainian influx in early 1932. ‘Crowds’ of individuals, whole families with small children and old people were pouring over the border, looking to buy or beg for bread: ‘The situation is becoming dangerous,’ wrote one Russian local official. His letter also spoke of the ‘moral’ threat from the hungry arrivals and the rise of theft.⁵²

A few weeks later a group of Belarusian workers wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Communist Party. They protested that starving Ukrainians were blocking their roads and railways:

It’s shameful, when you look at these wandering, starving Ukrainians, and when you ask, why don’t they stay at work, they answer that there aren’t any seeds to sow and there’s nothing to do at their collective farms and the supplies are bad … a fact is a fact, millions of people are wandering naked, starving in the woods, stations, towns and farms of Belarus, begging for a piece of bread.⁵³

But the Ukrainians kept leaving, not least because there really was more food available in Russia and Belarus. At the end of October 1932 one young girl’s father made it all the way to Leningrad. Departing in secret, in the middle of the night, her family managed to join him weeks later, travelling through stations packed with starving Ukrainians. ‘At that time neither Moscow nor other cities close to it were starving,’ she remembered. ‘Only Ukraine was honoured with this crown of thorns.’ By making the arduous trip to the far north, the entire family survived.54

Others made it out as well: in January 1933 the OGPU observed that 16,500 long-distance tickets had been purchased at Lozova station and 15,000 at Sumy, both towns in Kharkiv province in the northern part of Ukraine.⁵⁵ Tens of thousands of others were trying to leave with them. By the end of 1932, stations all across Ukraine were already crowded with emaciated, ragged people, trying to beg food and tickets from passengers, since many of them had no money. A boy who travelled to join his mother at that time saw corpses at the Kharkiv railway station, and watched a young girl grab chicken bones off the floor of the station buffet and begin gnawing them. Those who did manage to board a train hid themselves beneath benches; the conductors threw them off, but more kept getting on.⁵⁶ These same crowds had disturbed Voroshilov, Budyonny and Kira Alliluyeva in the summer of 1932. In the autumn of 1932 and winter of 1933 their numbers only grew larger.

Others left by ship. One of several unusually observant Italian consuls, this one in the city of Batumi, Georgia, on the Black Sea coast, reckoned in January 1933 that ‘every steamship that arrives from Odessa – three arrive per week – usually delivers one to two thousand Ukrainians’. Previously, the Ukrainians seemed to have been looking to buy food in Batumi, to purchase flour or seeds that they could eat at home or else sell at a profit. But in the late autumn, the mass movement of people had taken on the character of a refugee influx, with thousands seeking to settle ‘where the means of existence and opportunities to obtain food are more abundant’.⁵⁷

As in 1930, some peasants tried to leave the country as well. Maria Błażejewska, an ethnic Pole, entered Poland from Ukraine in October 1932 by pretending to be a washerwoman. While laundering clothes in the Zbruch River, which then served as the border, she slipped across to the other side. Two of her sons made the dangerous crossing with her; a third had already been deported to the Far East. ‘From 1931,’ she told the Polish border police, ‘life in Soviet Russia … turned into unbearable torture because the Soviet authorities began taking almost all the grain and the livestock away from us, leaving me only a very small amount which did not suffice even for the most modest standard of living.’58 Leon Woźniak, aged fifteen, also escaped in October: ‘We were driven away from our own house … both my brother and I worked in the forests, yet with this we could not make a living. Because presently all work has ceased and I was dying of hunger, on 15 October, together with my mother Małgorzata and my brother Bronisław, I escaped from Soviet Russia into Poland.’⁵⁹

Others tried to escape the same way, but failed in the attempt. A few months after Maria and Leon slipped over the border, a group of sixty people tried to cross the Zbruch River together. Only fourteen succeeded; the rest drowned or were shot by border guards. Another 250 families would try to cross the border during the winter of 1932–3. By December 1932 the Polish Interior Ministry had established a special commission for Ukrainian refugees, including a representative of the Red Cross and one from the League of Nations.⁶⁰

Still others tried to walk, ride or get onto trains heading into Ukrainian cities. If they had left early enough, if they had relatives to meet them, and if they were strong enough to work, they sometimes succeeded. Many ‘kulaks’ had earlier escaped deportation by moving to Kyiv and Kharkiv as well as to the mines and factories of Donetsk. But by late 1932 the numbers of people began to multiply, and the cities, especially Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, could no longer cope. In the autumn of 1932 one memoirist recalled an ‘uneasy mood’ in Kharkiv:

There was no food. There were long lines, and there was much noise in newspapers about the grain procurements, about the way the anti-Soviet element, the so-called ‘kurkuls’ or ‘kulaks’ were supposedly hiding grain from the government … Bread, which could be obtained with ration cards, was sold only irregularly. Lines began to form at night, but were often dispersed by the militia. In order to mask the situation, bread was issued not in shops but out in the open.⁶¹

As more peasants drifted into the centre of Kharkiv, things grew worse. They were easily identifiable by their ragged clothes and bare feet: thanks to the trudodni system of rationing, they had no money, and no way to buy either food or clothing. Instinctively, the city-dwellers, who themselves had very little food and also relied on rationing, stayed away from them. By the winter, the peasants in the city were hardly better off than those who had remained at home:

Many villagers roamed the streets there. You met them everywhere. They were of various ages – old, young, children, and infants. Their state of physical deterioration was evident in the slow way they moved their bodies. The light was extinguished from the downcast eyes on the haggard and occasionally swollen faces. They were hungry, exhausted, ragged, filthy, cold and unwashed. Some of them dared to knock on people’s doors or maybe on someone’s window, and some could barely stretch out their begging hands. Others yet were sitting against the walls, and they were motionless and speechless.62

Another memoirist remembered the peasants in the marketplaces:

The mothers with babies in their arms made the strongest impression. They seldom mingled with the others. I remember seeing one such mother who looked more like a shadow than a human being. She was standing by the side of the road, and her little skeleton of a child, instead of suckling her mother’s empty breast, sucked its own small knuckles thinly covered with translucent skin. I have no idea how many of the unfortunates I saw managed to survive. Every morning on my way to work I saw bodies on the pavements, in ditches, under a bush or a tree, which were later carried away.⁶³

As a result of the influx, municipal authorities found themselves simultaneously trying to cope with several different kinds of crisis. Orphans began to crowd into city orphanages, as many parents left their children behind in the hope that they would survive. Dead bodies caused a sanitary crisis. In January 1933 the city of Kyiv had to remove 400 corpses from the streets. In February the number rose to 518, and in just the first eight days of March there were 248.⁶⁴ These were only the official numbers. Multiple witnesses in Kyiv and Kharkiv recall the trucks cruising the city at that time, the men pulling the dead off the streets and loading them onto their vehicles in a manner which suggested that no one would give much thought to counting them.

The beggars from the countryside added to the pressure on city residents who were also running short of food. Tempers inside Kharkiv rose particularly quickly. That spring the Italian consul reported that several thousand people had attacked the militiamen assigned to distribute bread in one suburb of the city. In another part of town an enraged mob attacked two bakeries, stole the flour and wrecked the buildings. Police began to use special, preventative measures in response. At about 4 a.m. one morning, the consul reported, Kharkiv police blocked the side streets around a bakery where hundreds of people had been waiting all night for the doors to open. They beat the crowd back and forced the people towards the train station. They then pushed them onto trains and drove them out of the city.

The influx was further demoralizing the countryside, because the vast migration made life more difficult for those who remained. In desperation, one Communist Party member from Vinnytsia wrote a letter to Stalin in the autumn of 1932 begging for help:

All the peasants are moving and leaving the villages, to save themselves from starvation. In the villages, ten to twenty families die from hunger every day, the children run away to wherever they can, all of the train stations are full of peasants trying to get out. In the countryside neither horses nor cows remain. Starving peasant-collective farm workers leave everything and disappear … it is impossible to speak of fulfilling the sowing campaign, because the small percentage of peasants who remain are wasting away from hunger.65

What really concerned the Soviet authorities was the political significance of this mass movement of people. All across the Soviet Union, in the far north and far east, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of Poland and in Ukraine itself, itinerant Ukrainians were not only spreading news of the famine, they were bringing their allegedly counter-revolutionary attitudes along with them. As their numbers increased dramatically, the Soviet government finally declared there could no longer be any doubt: ‘the flight of villagers and the exodus from Ukraine last year and this year is [being] organized by the enemies of the Soviet government … and agents of Poland with the goal of spreading propaganda among the peasants’.

A solution was found. In January 1933, Stalin and Molotov simply closed the borders of Ukraine. Any Ukrainian peasant found outside the republic was returned to his or her place of origin. Train tickets were no longer sold to Ukrainian villagers. Only those who had permission could leave home – and permission was, of course, denied.66 The borders of the heavily Ukrainian North Caucasus district were also closed, and in February the Lower Volga district was also blocked.⁶⁷ The border closures remained in place throughout the famine.

Separately, work continued on an internal passport system, which was finally set up in December 1932. In practice, this meant that anyone who resided in the city needed a special passport, a residence document – and peasants were explicitly prevented from obtaining them. In conjunction with this new law, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odessa were all to be cleared of ‘excess elements’ from the countryside.⁶⁸ City-dwellers were reassured: the new measures would facilitate ‘the unburdening of the cities and the purging of kulak criminal elements’.⁶⁹

These restrictions were implemented with unprecedented speed. Within days the OGPU had sent reinforcements from Moscow. Cordons appeared on the roads leading out of Ukraine and along major highways entering the cities. Between 22 and 30 January 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU’s boss, told Stalin and Molotov that his men had caught 24,961 people trying to cross the borders, of whom two-thirds came from Ukraine and almost all the rest from the North Caucasus. The majority were sent back home, though nearly eight thousand were being detained under police investigation and more than a thousand had already been arrested.⁷⁰

By their own account, Yagoda’s Ukrainian colleagues were even busier. In February they reported that they had established an ‘unconditional ban on issuing any travel document’, so that no peasant could legally leave his or her village. In addition, they had created ‘mobile patrols’ that had detained more than 3,800 people found on the roads and over 16,000 people on the railways. They had mobilized ‘secret agents’ and ‘village activists’ to uncover ‘exodus organizers’ and help arrest them.71

The effect was stark, as if Ukraine and Russia now had a visible border. A Polish diplomat who travelled by car from Kharkiv to Moscow in May 1933 was struck by it:

What intrigued me most during the whole journey was the difference between what villages looked like in Ukraine and the neighboring [Russian] Black Earth province … Ukrainian villages are in decay, they are empty, deserted and miserable, cottages half-demolished, with roofs blown down; no new houses in sight, children and old people are more like skeletons, no sight of livestock … When I found myself in [Russia] afterwards I had the impression of crossing the border from the state of the Soviets to Western Europe.⁷²

To preserve a semblance of order, policemen also began to remove any peasants who had made it into the cities. Vasily Grossman – the Soviet writer who grew up in Ukraine, worked in Donbas, and knew of the famine as it was happening – remembered that ‘blocks were put on the roads to prevent peasants from getting into Kyiv. But they used bypasses, forests, swamps to get there.’⁷³ Those who made it did so by ‘cutting through’ the cordons, and hacking through the underbrush.⁷⁴ But even those who found their way into the queues for bread did not necessarily last long, as another Kyiv resident remembered: ‘The police would take villagers from these lines, load them on trucks and take them out of the city.’⁷⁵

Halyna Kyrychenko saw police remove people from bread queues in Kharkiv too. They were put onto trucks, she remembered, and driven so far out of town that they could not return: ‘being exhausted, they died somewhere on the road’. Police also seized people on the streets who seemed to be trying to buy or barter for bread, since to do so was suspicious: city-dwellers had access to ration cards and workers with the proper registration ate their meals in canteens. Kyrychenko herself, then aged thirteen, several times escaped from police.⁷⁶

Urban Ukrainians saw what was happening, and spread rumours about it. Mariia Umanska’s father told her that he had helped pick up peasants and their children off the streets of Kharkiv. The authorities had promised him that they would be fed and taken home, but he had heard a different story: at night, the living and the dead would be loaded onto trucks, driven to a ravine outside of town and thrown into it: ‘They said that the ground stirred.’77 Olena Kobylko heard the same story: peasants found on the streets of Kharkiv were supposedly ‘carried out in a freight train behind the city to a field so that they die there unseen by anybody’, and then, alive or dead, were thrown into pits.⁷⁸

These stories surely filtered back to the villages, as they were intended to do. Peasants knew that if they left home without the permission of the local authorities, they could be returned by force. Lev Kopelev’s conclusion was stark: ‘The passport system laid an administrative and judicial cornerstone for the new serfdom [and] tied down the peasantry as it had been before the emancipation of 1861.’⁷⁹