13

Aftermath

The rye is beginning to ripen

But – and his hair stands on end –

Not many have survived

To see the new harvest.

He won’t fall asleep till dawn …

Then his mother approaches

And says with sorrow

‘My son, it’s time to get up,

The sun has risen over the field

We cannot lie peacefully in our graves,

We, the dead, are unable to rest.

Who will care for the precious ears of grain

In the fields, my dear son?’

Mykola Rudenko, ‘The Cross’, 19761

In the springtime, the Ukrainian countryside is a riot of cherry blossoms, tulip petals, sprouting grass and black mud. Only an hour’s drive from Kyiv the villages seem too provincial to have witnessed important historical events. Roads are pockmarked by puddles; some of the rickety cottages still have thatched roofs. Every house has a kitchen garden and many have beehives, chicken coops, and garden sheds filled with tools.

Yet it was in springtime, in this same provincial Ukrainian countryside, that the famine in 1933 reached its peak. Today, that history is there if one looks for it, in the wide fields that once belonged to collective farms, in the overgrown cemeteries, and in the monuments put up since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Just on the edge of the village of Kodaky, at the point where houses give way to broad fields, local people have erected a piece of black stone. It has a cross-shaped hole cut in the centre and a dedication, ‘In memory of the victims of the Holodomor’. In Hrebinky an abandoned mound at the edge of town – a mass grave where famine victims were buried in 1933, then forgotten, then rediscovered – is now encircled by a brick wall and marked, since 1990, with a simple cross.

In Barakhty the famine memorial is hard to miss: a larger-than-life statue of a mourning mother, kneeling beside a cross, at a prominent crossroads in the centre of the village. A list of victims carved into the black granite behind the statue both reveals and conceals. Surnames repeat themselves, showing that the famine wiped out whole families, but Christian names are often missing because records were badly kept:

Bondar, Overko

Bondar, Iosyp

Bondar, Mariia

Bondar, Two Children

The missing names point to a deeper problem. Even in better circumstances, it would have been difficult to keep precise records of the vast numbers of men and women who died on the road, or in train stations, or on the streets of Kyiv. District registrars would have had trouble accounting for everyone who migrated or escaped, or even for every child who survived, by some miracle, in a distant orphanage. But the regime made these problems worse. Although mortality statistics were recorded as accurately as possible in 1933, the authorities, as the next chapter will explain, later altered death registries across Ukraine to hide the numbers of deaths from starvation, and in 1937 scrapped an entire census because of what it revealed.

For all of these reasons, estimates of the numbers of dead have in the past ranged widely, from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, 7 million or even 10 million. But in recent years a team of Ukrainian demographers have looked again at the numbers that were tabulated at the district and provincial level, then passed on to Kharkiv and Moscow, and have come up with better answers.² Arguing that ‘there was some falsification of cause of death in death certificates, but the number of registered deaths was not tampered with’, they have sought to establish reliable numbers of ‘excess deaths’, meaning the number of people who died above an expected average. They have also looked at ‘lost births’, or the numbers of births that did not occur, by comparison to what would have been expected, because of the famine.3 Thanks to their work, agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million. These figures include all victims, wherever they died – by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages – and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards.

The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number.⁴ The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per cent of the deaths took place in 1933, and most of those in the first half of the year, with the highest numbers of casualties in May, June and July.⁵

But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932–4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years.

By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.⁶ These extreme statistics reflect, simply, the very high death rates in that year of children.

The new statistical methods are also revealing when applied to Russia. They show that overall the famine touched Russia far less than Ukraine, with an overall 3 per cent ‘excess deaths’ in rural Russia, as against 14.9 per cent in rural Ukraine. Only a very few regions of Russia were affected by the same patterns of famine as Ukraine: the Volga German region, the Saratov region, Krasnodar and the North Caucasus all had very high death rates in the first half of 1933, corresponding to the political decisions taken that winter. But even in those cases the overall numbers of ‘excess deaths’ were lower than those in the worst regions of Ukraine.7

The general statistics cannot reveal everything. For example, they conceal the story of particular groups within Ukraine, for whom separate accounts were not kept. Anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, that while the ethnic German community suffered greatly, in Ukraine as well as the Volga region, some of its members did get food aid and other forms of help from German sources. Andor Hencke, the German consul in Kyiv from 1933 to 1936, spent much of his first months in Ukraine trying to get food to the German minority community, despite the fact that ‘the party authorities and Soviet institutions are essentially unfavorably inclined towards the aid campaign’. He advised ethnic Germans to be discreet and to avoid personal visits to the consulate, so as not to attract attention, but he did communicate with them by post.⁸ Equally, as we have seen, there is anecdotal evidence that rural Jews also survived at higher rates because the majority were not farmers and so were not subject to either de-kulakization or collectivization. Jews, Germans and Poles had another advantage too: they were not perceived to be part of the Ukrainian national movement, and thus were not particular targets of the repressive wave of 1932–3, though those groups would become targets later on.

The statistics have also turned up some unexpected stories about the famine in different regions of Ukraine. In the past – going back to the nineteenth century if not further – drought and famine had always hit the southern and eastern steppe regions of the country hardest, as these were most dependent on grain. That was certainly the case in 1921–3 as well as during the smaller famine of 1928. It was also the case during the post-war famine of 1946–7. But in 1932–3 the highest mortality rate was in the Kyiv and Kharkiv provinces, where peasants traditionally grew a wider range of crops, including beets, potatoes and other vegetables, and where historically famine was rare. In Kyiv province death levels in 1932–3 were about 23 per cent higher than they would have been without the Holodomor; in Kharkiv province they were 24 per cent higher. In Vinnytsia and the Moldovan ‘autonomous’ province the percentage was 13 per cent; in Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa 13 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. In Donetsk province, by contrast, the death rate was only 9 per cent higher in the famine years.9

Demographers have offered a range of hypotheses to explain these regional variations, and in at least three exceptional cases good explanations have been found. In theory, for example, peasants living in forested areas should have had greater access to mushrooms, small animals and other sources of food. This environmental factor might explain why Chernihiv province, in northern Ukraine, suffered less than many other parts of the republic. But it cannot explain the high death rates in Kharkiv and Kyiv provinces, which were in mixed forest-steppe regions and which did contain some areas covered by trees or swamp.¹⁰

Proximity to international borders may also have affected death rates, which were indeed lower in Vinnytsia and Moldova, the two provinces bordering on Poland and Romania, as well as in the westernmost districts of the Kyiv region. Local authorities in these areas, worried about smuggling, discontent and sedition coming from abroad, seem to have hesitated to apply policies with the same degree of cruelty. Peasants who lived in these regions may also have been able to get food through barter, cross-border contacts, and from relatives who lived just on the other side.¹¹

The Donetsk region similarly appears to have been a special case. Because, as we have seen, this region was one of the few in Ukraine designated as an industrial ‘priority’ by the regime, more food was allocated to workers there. More food – relatively speaking – appears to have reached the rural areas too, probably through family connections to the cities. Proximity also meant that peasants in the region found it easier to escape the starving countryside, and to join the proletariat in the mines and factories.

The most intriguing difference, though, is the one remaining between Kyiv and Kharkiv, with very high direct losses, and Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa, where the level of such losses was relatively low. The best explanation appears to be political: both in 1918–20 and 1930–1 the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions witnessed the greatest political resistance, first to the Bolsheviks and then to collectivization. The greatest number of ‘terrorist incidents’ took place in those regions, as did the largest number of secret police interventions. Andrea Graziosi has argued that the ‘impressive geographical, ideological and even personal and “family” continuity between the peasant-based social and national revolts of 1918–20 and those against dekulakization requisitions and collectivization in 1930–1 was strongest in territories where famine reached its harshest peaks’.12 Although this correlation is not exact – among other things, Makhno’s men were very active in southeast Ukraine – it is true that these two provinces, with their proximity to Ukraine’s two most culturally important cities, had many links to the nationalist movement. That may explain why repression was cruellest, food aid was scarcest, and death rates were highest.¹³

In other words, the regions ‘normally’ most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not ‘normal’. It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity. And in this, it succeeded.

The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. Death rates went up in January, and then kept increasing through the spring. But instead of ending abruptly that summer, the tragedy slowly dwindled. ‘Excess deaths’ continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934.

In May the regime finally approved significant food aid for Ukraine – food originally taken, of course, from the peasants themselves – though it was especially targeted at border regions (where fear of outside influence was highest) and in areas where there were not enough healthy people to bring in the harvest.¹⁴ When it finally arrived, the harvest made a difference too. Students, workers and others were rushed to the countryside to make up for lost manpower, and more food became generally available in the countryside as well as the city. Theoretically, the grain collectors had also stopped requisitioning, in accordance with the decree that the Council of Ministers had issued in January. As of that spring, they were supposed to demand a tax – a percentage of the harvest – rather than a fixed amount of grain based on a plan produced in Moscow. In practice, this rule was applied unevenly. In some places peasants were taxed, but in others confiscations continued.¹⁵

The Central Committee and the Ukrainian government also issued a joint directive in May, on ‘halting the mass exile of peasants, reducing the number of arrests and decreasing the number of prisons’. This secret decree, which went out to all party officials as well as the OGPU, courts and prosecutors’ offices, reflected a decision to ‘stop, as a rule, the use of mass exile and sharp forms of repression in the countryside’ and to introduce a less harsh rural regime. There were pragmatic reasons for the change: at the time of the decree 800,000 people were under arrest all across the USSR, prisons and camps were overflowing, and the state could barely cope. In addition, the regime recognized that it would need people to bring in the harvest. But the decree also signalled an end to the harsh treatment of villagers, and thus an end to the policy of food confiscation as well.16

As in previous years, there was a procurement campaign in the late summer of 1933. Also as in previous years, there were shortfalls, although in 1933 the conversation about them was far more muted than it had been in the past. In October 1933, Stanislav Kosior, General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, wrote to Stalin, praising that autumn’s harvest, which he noted was an ‘improvement’ over the previous harvests. However, he admitted that there were still ‘problems’. Predicted yields had still not materialized.¹⁷ He also asked for a reduction in the grain procurement plan for Ukraine.

On 18 October 1933 the Soviet Politburo approved this request. Ukraine’s required contribution for 1934 was reduced by 415,000 tonnes. A few weeks later Kosior and Pavlo Postyshev, the former Kharkiv party boss and Stalin’s envoy in Ukraine, met the Soviet leader – this time in the luxurious setting of his personal train carriage – and he confirmed a further reduction of Ukraine’s contribution by 500,000 tonnes. Although the republic was still required to produce a huge quantity of grain to the state, this was an important change.

In acknowledgement of these concessions, the Ukrainian communists also changed their tone. They ceased to criticize the harsh requisitions policy. Instead, in multiple speeches and articles they rallied around the Soviet war against ‘nationalism’, the scourge that the leadership now blamed for all ‘errors’ in rural policy. Kosior told a November plenum that ‘in some republics of the USSR, in particular in Ukraine, the kulaks’ desperate resistance to our victorious socialist offensive led to a growth of nationalism’.

That allusion to ‘errors’ wasn’t strong enough for the leader, however. Stalin personally edited that speech in order to strengthen it: ‘in some republics of the USSR, in particular in Ukraine, the main threat is now Ukrainian nationalism that allies with imperialist interventionists’.18 Stalin drove the point home himself in January 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress, remembered as the Congress of Victors. In a long and much-applauded speech he marked the end of the worst famine in Soviet history with a vicious attack on nationalism:

… It should be observed that the survivals of capitalism in people’s minds are much more tenacious in the sphere of the national question than in any other sphere. They are more tenacious because they are able to disguise themselves well in national costume …

The deviation towards nationalism reflects the attempts of ‘one’s own’, ‘national’ bourgeoisie to undermine the Soviet system and to restore capitalism … It is a departure from Leninist internationalism … [Stormy applause]¹⁹

At the same Congress, Postyshev, as the senior Ukrainian communist, took upon himself full responsibility for the ‘gross errors and blunders’ in Ukrainian agriculture – without mentioning the famine – which he explicitly blamed on nationalism, counter-revolutionaries and invisible foreign forces:

The CP(B)U [Ukrainian Communist Party] did not take into account all the distinctive characteristics of the class struggle in Ukraine and the peculiarities of the internal situation in the CP(B)U.

What are those characteristics? …

The first characteristic is that in Ukraine the class enemy masks his activity against socialist construction with the nationalist banner and chauvinist slogans.

The second characteristic is that the Ukrainian kulak underwent a lengthy schooling in struggle against Soviet power, for in Ukraine the civil war was especially fierce and lengthy, given that political banditry was in control of Ukraine for an especially long period.

The third characteristic is that splinter groups of various counter-revolutionary organizations and parties settled in Ukraine more than elsewhere, being attracted to Ukraine on account of its proximity to western borders.

The fourth characteristic is that Ukraine proves to be an object of attraction to various interventionist centres and finds itself under their especially diligent observation.

And, finally, the fifth characteristic is that the deviationists in the CP(B)U in all-Party questions usually allied and continue to ally themselves with the nationalist elements in their ranks, with the deviationists on the nationality question …

Unfortunately, the CP(B)U did not draw all those conclusions in full measure. There lies the explanation of its errors and failures both in agriculture and in carrying out Leninist nationality policy in Ukraine …20

Further concessions followed. In the spring of 1934 there were no requisitions of vegetables. Peasants were allowed to keep the food they had grown inside their remaining private allotments. The Ukrainian leadership now dared to inform Stalin, openly, that some fields would not be sown – there was no one to sow them – and that there was a shortage of seeds, including corn, linen and hemp seeds as well as grain. This time around, Stalin agreed to ‘loan’ Ukraine seeds as well as food.²¹

Collectivization continued, indeed accelerated: any individual farmers who had survived the famine joined collective farms en masse that spring. This time there was no talk of rebellion, as 151,700 terrified families gave up their homes and property to work for the state. Another 51,800 households joined in the autumn. The demands for grain were quietly relaxed, and the number of arrests in the countryside fell.²²

Life did not return to ‘normal’; it never would. But slowly, Ukrainians stopped dying of hunger.

In the late spring of 1933, Max Harmash, an agricultural specialist from the Dnipropetrovsk region, was recruited by the provincial government to help with sowing the harvest at a collective farm about 25 kilometres from his home. On his first night in the countryside a village councillor directed Harmash to a house where he was told that he could sleep. There he encountered a ‘very thin man in rags’, who did not answer his greetings. He also found the ‘grotesque, half-naked swollen body’ of another person lying on a pallet. Rags were strewn about the floor; the stench was unbearable. Harmash backed out of the house, leaving some of his bread for its inhabitants, and ran back to the village council building. There, a watchman told him that there was hardly any food to be found anywhere in the vicinity. Only a few members of the collective farm still had any reserves at all. About half the villagers were already dead. The rest survived by eating cats, dogs and birds.

Horrified and shocked by what he had seen, Harmash fled the dying village as soon as he could. For a long time afterwards he had ‘nightmares’ and expected severe punishment for abandoning his duties. He was afraid to tell anybody about what had happened. But the punishment never came. Years later he reckoned that the officials who had sent him to the village must have known that there was no grain to sow and no one to sow it, but they had sent for him anyway. Someone had told them to do so, and they were simply fulfilling the task. No one dared to say clearly that the villagers were dying of hunger.23

At about the same time Lidiia, a student in Kharkiv, was also sent out to the countryside as part of a labour brigade. She and her companions received accommodation in an empty school building, were warned not to go outside at night and told not to open the door. During the day they went into the fields to weed around the sugar beets. They met no one. But after only a few days their mission was abruptly cut short: ‘We returned to Kharkiv at daybreak, but we were not allowed to go home. We were taken to an official building, despite the fact that we were hungry and dirty. When government officials arrived, a girl told me that I had to go to a special department. The manager asked me what I had seen. I said nothing. Then he said “go and don’t say anything”. Frightened, I never asked the others whether they had been called to the same department.’²⁴

Lidiia and Max were witnesses to another facet of the post-famine crisis: in 1933 the Soviet state suddenly faced a drastic shortage of labour in the Ukrainian countryside, which was particularly extreme in some districts. In the Markivka district of Donetsk province, for example, a meeting of village council leaders in December reckoned their prospects were bleak. Some 20,000 people, more than half the population, had perished in the famine. More than 60 per cent of local horses had been killed that year, and 70 per cent of the oxen. Their owners were gone too, one observed: ‘Now when you go out into the country you can see villages that are so empty, wolves are living in the houses.’ Grain stores were so low that it was impossible to provide collective farm workers with their daily grain ration in exchange for work. The amount of sown land was decreasing, from more than 80,000 hectares in 1931 to 67,000 in 1933.25

The brigades of students, workers and party officials sent from the city to the countryside did help somewhat. But this policy now carried some risks: the teams from the urban USSR might get to see, first hand, what had happened in the villages. Like Max, some ran away. Like Lidiia, some had to be monitored. They might go back and describe the scenes of death and devastation, with unknown consequences.

Students and workers could not provide a permanent solution either. For that, the regime needed permanent inhabitants, new people who could live in the countryside and continue to farm. And so, in late 1933, it launched a resettlement programme. Its practical result, in many parts of Ukraine, was the replacement of Ukrainians with Russians, at least as long as the programme – which was not successful – lasted.

By 1933 the Soviet Union already had some experience with moving and resettling people. Hundreds of thousands of kulaks had been moved to the empty northern and eastern regions of the country, as well as to the poorer and emptier districts of Ukraine itself. During the Second World War a range of explicitly ethnic deportations would result in the evictions of whole nationalities, including several Caucasian tribal peoples – the Chechens and the Ingush, the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Meshketians – as well as the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. In his famous ‘Secret Speech’ to the party elite in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced these mass population transfers, and joked that ‘Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, [Stalin] would have deported them also.’ The official transcript recorded that this remark sparked ‘laughter and animation in the hall’.²⁶

Officially, the movement of Russians into Ukraine began as a response to a clear need. Those at the top of the system knew about the drastic labour shortages. In a telegram sent in August 1933, Yakov Yakovlev, the Soviet Commissar for Agriculture, described a collective farm in Melitopol, southeast Ukraine, where ‘no more than a third of the households remain … less than one-fifth with horses’. Single households were labouring under the responsibility for farming 20 hectares of fertile soil by themselves. In western Russia, by contrast, crowded conditions meant that a single family had only one hectare to farm. Stalin responded in a note to Molotov, ‘it is necessary to speed up a possible “resettlement of the peasantry” ’.27

The first phase of the project began with 117,000 Russian peasants – 21,000 households – from Russia and Belarus. They began to arrive in Ukraine in the autumn of 1933. In January and February 1934 a further 20,000 arrived in the depopulated villages of eastern and southern Ukraine, this time coming from Russia as well as other regions of Ukraine.²⁸ These numbers may be an underestimation, since they include only those who received state assistance to make the trip. Others – an unknown number – simply gathered together what belongings they could take and made the journey from Russia and the other regions on their own, having heard that there was more space and free land in Ukraine. In general, this first wave of arrivals was mostly voluntary – settlers believed they would be given free housing and good food rations, as well as transportation – although some had been evicted from their homes as kulaks or as enemies and so had little choice.

Many were disappointed. They had expected to find accommodation and rich soil. The state had paid for their transportation, including their cattle and tools, given them hot food and rations on their journey, and even promised tax breaks. But the reality proved to be very different, as one woman settler from Zhytomyr province, a child at the time, remembered:

We were evicted from our house too, but we were sent to Horodyshche in Dnipropetrovsk province. That village had died out and we were re-settled there … In Horodyshche we were given a small room in the hut, we put down some hay and slept on the ground. In the collective farm they gave out 1 kg of bread for 10 days. We were promised a lot but we have not seen anything of it.29

Other surprises lay in store. On arrival, many of the Russians found the Ukrainian steppe unaccommodating. They did not know how to start fires with straw and dried grass, as the Ukrainians did. They were not necessarily welcomed by their new neighbours, who of course spoke a language they failed to understand. The villages were empty: even cats and dogs were now quite rare, as Ukrainian planners noted at the end of 1933, which had led to an infestation of mice in the houses as well as the fields.³⁰ One settler, writing back to relatives in Russia, found the atmosphere uncanny and strange, though if he knew that there had been famine, he didn’t say so. ‘A lot of people died here,’ he wrote instead, ‘there were epidemics in 1932. There were so few of them left that they can’t till the land themselves.’ Another noted that ‘all the households are destroyed and derelict, and there is chaos in workplaces. Locals say that it wasn’t like that before, the village used to be orderly. People lived well here … the potatoes grow amazingly well.’³¹

Others began to worry that they would meet the same fate as their predecessors, particularly when, after a few months’ residence, the things they had been promised gradually disappeared. In 1935 the new settlers were told that they, like the locals, would have to pay meat and milk taxes: this too must have seemed an ominous sign. The records of the Markivka district show that many of the Russian settlers left in the spring of 1935, and that those who remained were uneasy. They wrote home, complained about local conditions, observed that their new neighbours seemed lethargic, half dead. They had no shoes. They were eating corn husks.³²

Although the records are probably incomplete, many of those settlers sent to Ukraine in this first wave of resettlement did indeed return home within the year. Presumably as a consequence, new waves of deportation followed. But this second group did not contain volunteers. According to the deportation orders for the 39,000 ‘settlers’ in February 1935, they were people who had ‘not proved themselves in the strengthening of the border and the collective farm system’, as well as ‘nationalistic and anti-Soviet elements’. Many were from regions of western Ukraine that bordered on foreign countries, including large numbers of ethnic Germans and Poles. The ‘fifth column’ that the OGPU had described so many times was now removed from the border region for good.

This time the state made far greater efforts to keep the new settlers in place. Secret policemen enlisted locals to help monitor the new arrivals and prevent them from escaping. Those caught trying to leave were punished. This relatively ‘successful’ resettlement was repeated in 1936, though many of those deported from western Ukraine at this time were sent to distant destinations beyond eastern Ukraine. Some 15,000 Polish and German households – by some accounts 70,000 people – found themselves assigned to Kazakhstan, where famine had also devastated the countryside.33

Even at the time these resettlement campaigns were understood to be a form of Russification. Sergio Gradenigo, the observant Italian consul in Kharkiv, reported to Rome a conversation with an unnamed acquaintance who had agreed that the ‘Russification of Donbas’ was underway. He linked the policy to the closure of Ukrainian-language theatres, the restriction of Ukrainian opera music to just three cities, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, and the end of Ukrainization.³⁴ Ordinary people also knew that uninhabited villages were being populated by Russians. ‘People said that the authorities wanted to exterminate Ukraine with hunger and settle the land with a Russian population so that Russia will be here,’ one eyewitness recalled.³⁵ An anonymous letter from a resident of Poltava to the Kommunist newspaper made the same point: ‘The historically unprecedented physical extermination of the Ukrainian nation … is one of the central goals of the illegal programme of Bolshevik centralism.’ This letter was considered important enough to be the topic of a report sent to Stalin himself.³⁶

Dramatic as these emergency movements between 1933 and 1936 must have been, they are far less important, in terms of numbers and influence, than the slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine, and into depleted Ukrainian republican institutions, in subsequent years and decades. Some of them arrived to shore up the Ukrainian Communist Party, which had never recovered from the sweeping arrests of 1933. During and after the famine, the state purged, arrested and even executed tens of thousands of Ukrainian party officials. Often, their replacements came directly from Moscow. In 1933 alone the Soviet Communist Party sent thousands of political cadres, at all levels of the hierarchy, to Ukraine from Russia. By January 1934 only four of the twelve members of the Ukrainian Communist Party Politburo were Ukrainians. Eight of the twelve, in other words, did not speak Ukrainian, which was still the native language of a majority of Ukrainians.37

Nor did the purge end there. Three years later the Ukrainian communist leadership became a particular target of the Great Terror, Stalin’s nationwide attack on the older members of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev himself famously remembered in his memoir that in 1937–8 the Ukrainian Communist Party was ‘purged spotless’.³⁸ He was certainly in a position to know, since he stage-managed the arrests. Khrushchev, born in a Russian village near the Ukrainian border, grew up in working-class Donbas. Like Kaganovich, he identified with proletarian, Russophone Ukraine, not with the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry. At Stalin’s request he returned to Kyiv in 1937, accompanied by a host of secret police troops. After a struggle – the Ukrainian Communist Party at first resisted – he oversaw the arrest of the entire leadership, including Kosior, Chubar and Postyshev. Within months they were all dead; most members of the Ukrainian government were executed in the spring of 1938. Ordinary party members disappeared too: between January 1934 and May 1938 a third of the Ukrainian Communist Party, 167,000 people, were under arrest.³⁹ In Khrushchev’s words, ‘it seemed as though not one regional or executive Committee secretary, not one secretary of the council of people’s commissars, not even a single deputy was left. We had to start building from scratch.’⁴⁰

By the end of the decade, the purge was complete: at the time of the outbreak of war in 1939 none of the Ukrainian Communist Party leadership had any connection with or sympathy for the national movement or even national communism. By the time the war ended in 1945, the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust devastated the republic and its institutions even further. In the post-war era the party continued to pay lip service to ‘Ukrainian’ symbols and even language, but at the higher levels it was overwhelmingly Russian speaking. The native Ukrainians who remained in the party were often drawn from the activist groups who had carried out the searches that led to the famine – or, in the years that followed, their children and grandchildren.41 No one in the party remembered a different Ukraine.

Where the party led, the people followed. Between 1959 and 1970 over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn to the republic by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine and purges had created for energetic new residents. As the Soviet economy industrialized, a network of Russian-speaking industry bosses recruited colleagues from the north. Universities, hospitals and other institutions did the same. At the same time almost all the other minorities still living in Ukraine – the Jews who remained, the Germans, Belarusians, Bulgarians and Greeks – assimilated into the Russian-speaking majority. Peasants who moved from the devastated countryside into the cities often switched from Ukrainian to Russian, in order to get on. As in the nineteenth century, the Russian language offered opportunities and advancement. Ukrainian became simply a ‘backwards’ language of the provinces.⁴²

By the 1970s and 1980s the idea of a mass Ukrainian national movement seemed not just dead but buried. Intellectuals kept the flame alive in a few cities. But most Russians, and many Ukrainians, once again thought of Ukraine as just a province of Russia. Most outsiders failed to distinguish between Russia and Ukraine, if they remembered the name of Ukraine at all.

In the spring of 1933, Mikhail Sholokhov, already then a celebrated writer, sat down at his typewriter in Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa, a Cossack stanitsa in the North Caucasus, and composed a letter to Stalin. It was not the first such missive. As a patriotic and pro-Soviet citizen, Sholokhov had been informing Stalin about the progress of collectivization in Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa for many months. Perhaps because he had met the Soviet leader in Moscow, he did not fear the consequences. His first missives were short and mostly handwritten, and they often focused on small things he saw going wrong. In 1931 he wrote with concern about the cattle and horses he saw all across the countryside, dying for lack of food. In 1932 he worried that collective farmers were stealing seeds straight out of the sowing machines. He also told the Soviet leader that an order to collectivize livestock had backfired. In some of the local villages ‘purchasers’ of cattle were beating up peasants and forcibly dragging their livestock away. The peasants fought back and in one village they murdered a requisitioner.

But in the spring of 1933, Sholokhov’s tone suddenly grew more urgent: Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa was in crisis. Stalin needed to know that people were starving to death:

In this district, as in other districts, collective and individual farmers alike are dying of hunger; adults and children are swollen, and are eating things that no human being should have to eat, starting with carrion and finishing with the bark of oak trees and all kinds of muddy roots.

More details followed. In evocative, literary language, Sholokhov described peasants who refused to work because ‘all of our bread sails abroad’. He painted a portrait of the local party secretary, Ovchinnikov, who declared that ‘grain must be collected at any price! We’ll destroy everything, but we’ll grab grain!’ He described Ovchinnikov’s tactics, including the extortion of seed grain, the confiscation of cows, potatoes, pickled food – all of the tactics that the 1932 decrees had stipulated for both the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine.

Sholokhov also described what happened after the Communist Party purged its lower ranks. Those who lost their party cards were arrested; their families lost access to rationed food, and they began to starve as well. The writer begged Stalin to send some ‘authentic’ communists to Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa, ones with the courage to halt the crisis. Using Stalinist language, he called on the Soviet leader to help ‘unmask’ those who had brutally beaten and tormented the peasants, stolen their grain, and destroyed the agricultural economy of the region.

Stalin’s reply was blunt. In two telegrams, as well as a handwritten response, he told Sholokhov he was sorry to hear about these mistakes in the party’s work. He offered to send material aid, both to Vyoshenskaya Vstanitsa and the neighbouring Verkhne-Donskii district. But he wasn’t entirely sympathetic. He felt the writer’s perspective was incomplete. ‘You see only one side of the matter,’ he told Sholokhov: ‘The grain growers in your region (and not only yours) are conducting sabotage and leaving the Red Army without grain.’ These men might look like simple farmers, Stalin explained, but they were in fact waging a quiet, bloodless, but nevertheless effective ‘war against Soviet power’. Perhaps the writer was under the impression that they were harmless people. If so, he was gravely mistaken.

Stalin’s answer to Sholokhov in the spring of 1933, at the height of the famine, echoed the conspiratorial phrases that he was using in his personal correspondence as well as in speeches and party debates: those who were starving to death were not innocent. On the contrary, they were traitors, they were saboteurs, they were conspiring to undermine the proletarian revolution. They were waging ‘a war against Soviet power’.

Whereas, in 1921, the Soviet leadership had spoken of starving peasants as victims, in 1933, Stalin switched the vocabulary. Those who were starving were not victims; they were perpetrators. They were not sufferers; they were responsible for their terrible fate. They had caused the famine, and therefore they deserved to die. From this assessment came the logical conclusion: the state was justified in refusing to help them stay alive.

This was the argument that Stalin would advocate for the rest of his life. He never denied, to Sholokhov or to anyone else, that peasants had died from a famine caused by state policy in 1933, and he certainly never apologized. He clearly read Sholokhov’s missives, and took them seriously enough to respond. But he never admitted that any important element of his policy – not collectivization, not grain expropriation, not the searches and shakedowns that had intensified the famine in Ukraine – was wrong. Instead, he placed all responsibility for food shortages and mass deaths firmly onto the shoulders of those who were dying.43

This is certainly what he told his party. During the Congress of Victors at the beginning of 1934, where Stalin had denounced nationalism, he also predicted further violence. ‘We have defeated the kulaks,’ he declared, but the liquidation was not yet complete. Agents of the old regime – ‘former people’, as he called them – could still do a good deal of harm. More to the point, the party should expect more resistance from these ‘moribund classes’: ‘It is precisely because they are dying and their days are numbered that they will go on from one form of attack to another, sharper form, appealing to the backward sections of the population and mobilizing them against the Soviet regime.’44

This was in line with Marxist thinking: the sharpening of contradictions, the creation of greater stress – these were the precursors of revolutionary change. The deaths of millions was not, in other words, a sign that Stalin’s policy had failed. On the contrary, it was a sign of success. Victory had been achieved, the enemy had been defeated. As long as the Soviet Union lasted, that view would never be contested.