14

The Cover-Up

There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Walter Duranty, The New York Times, 31 March 1933

I am almost illiterate and write in a simple manner, but what I write is true and truth, they say, shall overcome evil.

Petro Drobylko, Sumy province, 19331

In 1933 the cities knew that the villages were dying. The leaders and administrators of the Communist Party and the government knew that the villages were dying. The evidence was in front of everyone’s eyes: the peasants at the railway stations, the reports coming in from the countryside, the scenes in the cemeteries and morgues. There is no doubt that the Soviet leadership knew it too. In March 1933, Kosior wrote a letter to Stalin in which he explicitly spoke of hunger – Ukraine’s provinces were begging the Central Committee for help – and anticipated worse, noting that ‘even starvation has not taught good sense to the peasants’, who were still too slow in their spring sowing.² In April he wrote again, noting the large number of people now joining collective farms: ‘the famine has played a large role, having in the first instance hit individual farmers’.³

But in the official, Soviet world the Ukrainian famine, like the broader Soviet famine, did not exist. It did not exist in the newspapers, it did not exist in public speeches. Neither national leaders nor local leaders mentioned it – and they never would. Whereas the response to the 1921 famine was a prominent and widely heeded call for international aid, the response to the 1933 famine was total denial, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, of any serious food shortage. The aim was to make the famine disappear, as if it had never happened. In an era before television and the internet, before open borders and travel, this was easier to achieve than it would have been in the twenty-first century. But even in 1933 the cover-up required an extraordinary effort on the part of numerous people over many years.

The organized denial of the famine began early, before the worst starvation had even begun. From the beginning, its facilitators had a number of different goals. Inside the USSR the cover-up was only partly designed to fool the Soviet public, or at least those who had no direct knowledge of the famine, though at this it probably did not succeed. Rumours were impossible to control, and were even repeated, as Stalin well knew, inside elite Bolshevik families. But letters of protest, which were sent quite frequently from all kinds of people – peasants, officials, bureaucrats – in the years leading up to the famine, soon stopped. There is anecdotal evidence inside the Soviet Union of some effort to control the mail that reached the Red Army. Mariia Bondarenko’s brother, a Red Army soldier serving in the Caucasus, told his sister that none of the Ukrainian soldiers received mail from home in 1933. Members of his unit eventually found the withheld letters. Only then had they learned the truth about what was happening to their families.4 Other soldiers never received letters from home in 1932 or 1933 at all; some recalled that it was as if their families had just disappeared.⁵

Even more effort went into the control of public speech. One Ukrainian Red Army soldier went to serve in 1934, having survived the famine. During one of the ‘political instruction’ classes that all soldiers had to attend, he asked the teacher a question about the famine. He was sharply rebuked: ‘There was no famine and there cannot be, you will be locked up for ten years if you keep talking like this.’⁶ Students and workers sent to the countryside to help bring in the 1933 harvest were often told bluntly not to speak of what they had seen. Out of fear many obeyed. We were told to ‘sew up our mouths’, one remembered.⁷ The code of silence was understood by everyone:

At work no one spoke of the famine or of the bodies in the streets, as if we were all part of a conspiracy of silence. Only with the closest and most trusted of friends would we talk about the terrible news from the villages … The rumours were confirmed when the townspeople were ordered to the countryside to help with the harvest and saw for themselves whence had come the living skeletons that haunted our city’s streets.8

The taboo on speaking of the famine in public affected medical workers too. Both doctors and nurses recall being told to ‘invent something’ for death certificates, or to write down all cases of starvation as the result of ‘infectious diseases’ or ‘cardiac arrest’.⁹

Fear even affected correspondence between officials. In March the secretary of the local government in Dnipropetrovsk wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, complaining that numerous cases of starvation, swelling and deaths from hunger had received no official attention because lower-level officials had failed to report them: ‘It was considered to be anti-party, reprehensible even to react to them.’ In one case a village party secretary who was himself swollen from hunger had failed to report anything, so afraid was he of censure.¹⁰

As the emergency passed, official vigilance spread to record-keepers. In April 1934 the Odessa provincial leadership sent out a note to all the local party committees, warning them about the ‘criminally outrageous manner’ in which births and deaths were being registered: ‘In a number of village councils this work is actually in the hands of class enemies – kulaks, Petliura henchmen, special deportees etc.’ Allegedly to increase supervision, the Odessa bosses withdrew death registration books from all village councils, from 1933 ‘without exception’ and from 1932 in some regions as well.¹¹ Similar orders exist for Kharkiv province, where officials also demanded all death registries from November 1932 until the end of 1933, on the grounds that they were in the hands of ‘class-hostile elements’ such as kulaks, Petliurites and special deportees.¹²

In reality, both types of document conformed to an identical formula, probably the result of an order from the Ukrainian authorities, and both were intended to destroy evidence of the famine.¹³ Although mortality numbers compiled at the provincial and national level did remain in statistical archives, at the village level many records were physically destroyed. Eyewitnesses from Zhytomyr and Chernihiv provinces have described the disappearance of death registries from their villages in 1933–4.14 In Vinnytsia, Stepan Podolian recalled that his father had been asked to burn the village registry books and rewrite them, eliminating references to hunger.¹⁵

At the highest levels the cover-up functioned as a form of party discipline: it was a means of controlling officials, even testing their loyalty. To prove their dedication, party members had to accept and endorse the official falsehoods. Roman Terekhov, one of the party bosses in Kharkiv, dared to use the word ‘famine’ in Stalin’s presence and in public during the autumn of 1932, as Terekhov himself later recalled. The Soviet leader’s response was harsh: ‘You spin this yarn about the famine thinking that you’ll intimidate us, but it won’t work!’ Instead, Stalin told him, ‘go to the Writers’ Union and write fairy tales for idiots to read’.¹⁶ Terekhov lost his job two weeks later.

An echo of this incident is found in the party conference speeches made over the subsequent year. In many of them Ukrainian communists referred to ‘problems’ or ‘difficulties’, but very rarely to ‘famine’. Of course they knew it was happening, but in order to survive they had to observe the Kremlin’s taboos. Privately, the word remained in use, as we have seen in Kosior’s letters to Stalin. But although no written record exists of an order not to use the word ‘famine’ in public, it is striking how rarely it was used.¹⁷ Instead, Soviet officials used euphemisms. When a Japanese consul in Odessa made an official inquiry about the famine, for example, even he was told ‘there are food shortages but no famine’.¹⁸

The victims were harder to banish. Even after the bodies had been buried in unmarked mass graves, and even after the death registries were altered, there still remained the problem of Soviet statistics. In 1937 the Soviet census bureau set out to count and measure the Soviet population, a vast task made urgent by the need to coordinate central planning. But even as the complex process began – it involved asking millions of people to fill out forms – the Soviet leadership began to be anxious about the possible result. ‘Not one figure from the census can be published’, employees of the local statistical offices were told in December 1936. There was to be ‘no preliminary processing of the raw material’ either.19

Even so, the final result of the 1937 census was shocking. Newspapers had floated advance stories of growth and a population boom, ‘evidence of the great increase in our workers’ standard of living’ after ‘ten years of our heroic fight for socialism’.²⁰ Statisticians, not wanting to be blamed for sending a negative message, had been filing regular reports of growth too. One preliminary report did cautiously hint that the population levels might turn out to be lower than anticipated in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Volga region – ‘regions where the resistance of kulaks to collectivization was particularly determined and bitter’ – but it devoted little space to the problem. Overall, the projections were optimistic. In 1934 census officials estimated that the population of the USSR stood at 168 million. In 1937 they estimated 170 million or even 172 million.

The real numbers, when they finally arrived, were quite different. The total population figure of the USSR came to 162 million – meaning that (for those who expected 170 million) some eight million people were ‘missing’. That inexact number included victims of the famine and their unborn children. It also reflected the genuine chaos of the famine years. The peasants dying by the roadsides, the mass migration, the deportations, the impossibility of keeping accurate statistics in villages where everyone was starving, including public officials – all of these things made the census-takers’ job more difficult.²¹ In truth, nobody was absolutely sure how many people had really died and how many lived, counted or uncounted. The census-takers had erred on the side of caution.

Rather than accept the result, Stalin abolished it. Meetings were called; expert panels were created. A special Central Committee resolution declared the census badly organized, unprofessional, and a ‘gross violation of the basic fundamentals of statistical science’.²² The journal Bolshevik declared that the census had been ‘disrupted by contemptible enemies of the people – Trotsky-Bukharinite spies and traitors to the motherland, having slipped at that time into the leadership of the Central Directory of People’s Economic Accounting … Enemies of the people set themselves the goal of distorting the real number of the population.’²³

The publication of the 1937 census was halted immediately, and the results never appeared. The statisticians themselves paid the price. The head of the census bureau, Ivan Kraval, at the time a resident of the House on the Embankment, the most exclusive party residence in Moscow, was arrested and executed by firing squad in September. His closest colleagues were also put to death. Repression cascaded downwards to Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as the Russian provinces, where hundreds of lower-level census officials were sacked from their jobs and sometimes arrested and executed as well. The list of the repressed included not only those directly responsible for the census, but also statisticians who might have had access to the original numbers. Mykhailo Avdiienko, the Kyiv editor of Soviet Statistics, was arrested in August and executed in September. Oleksandr Askatin, the head of the economics department at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, met the same fate.24

By November an entirely new cadre of officials had replaced these men, every one of whom now understood that it was extremely dangerous to produce accurate numbers.²⁵ A new census was duly commissioned. This time Stalin did not wait for the result. Even before the census had taken place, he declared victory:

Under the sun of the Great Socialist Revolution an astonishingly rapid, never-before-seen increase in population is taking place. Mighty socialist industry has called into life new professions. Tens of thousands of people, who yesterday were unskilled labourers, today have become qualified masters in the most diverse branches of production. Yesterday’s Stakhanovites today have become technicians and engineers. Millions of peasant smallholders, eking out a beggarly life, have become prosperous collective farmers, creators of socialist harvests … The all-Union census of the population must show all the great changes that have happened in the life of the people, the growth of the cultural and material level of the masses, the increase in the qualification of factory workers and office workers …²⁶

Stalin got what he ordered: at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, before the final tally was complete, he announced, with great fanfare, that the Soviet population had indeed reached 170 million.²⁷

In due course the statisticians found ways to make the numbers match the rhetoric. They massaged data to mask the high number of prisoners in the north and east of the USSR – the years 1937–9 were a time of major Gulag expansion – and, of course, to hide the ravages of the famine. Census forms for more than 350,000 people residing elsewhere were assigned to Ukraine. Another 375,000 dead souls were allotted to Kazakhstan. As well as altering the totals, the census-takers erased some small national and ethnic groups, and changed the balance of the population in ethnically divided regions to suit Soviet policy. Overall, they boosted the population by at least 1 per cent. For decades afterwards the 1939 census was held up as a model piece of statistical research.28

With publication of the 1939 census the great famine vanished not only from the newspapers but from Soviet demography, politics and bureaucracy. The Soviet state never kept any record of the victims, their lives or their deaths. For as long as it existed, it never accepted that they had died at all.

Violence, repression and the census falsification successfully quelled discussion of the famine inside the USSR. But the cover-up of the famine abroad required different tactics. Information was not so easily controlled outside the Soviet Union. Information did cross borders, as did people. In May 1933 a Ukrainian newspaper in Lviv (then a Polish city) published an article denouncing the famine as an attack on the Ukrainian national movement:

The eastern side of the Zbruch River [the border] now looks like a real military camp that is difficult for a citizen to cross even at night, as in wartime. We are informed of this by refugees who recently managed to wade across the Zbruch … they arrived as living skeletons because the famine there is terrible. Even dogs are being killed, and today’s slaves of the collective farms are being fed dog meat, for in fertile Ukraine neither bread nor potatoes are to be had.²⁹

Other news came from officials and consuls who crossed the border legally as well as from letters mailed from ports, sent via travellers or missed by censors. Ethnic Germans wrote to individuals in the United States and Germany, sometimes to relatives and sometimes to unknown leaders of their religious communities: ‘Dear Fathers and Brothers in faraway Germany, a plea from Russia from me of German name … I call to you for advice and help and to tell you what is in my grief-stricken heart.’30 Letters also managed to reach Canada.

These missives had an impact, as did the few refugees. Even as the famine was unfolding, Ukrainians abroad began to protest against it, both peacefully and otherwise. Ethnic Ukrainian politicians brought up the famine at sessions of the Polish parliament, and described it in the Ukrainian-language press.³¹ In October 1933, Mykola Lemyk, a member of a Ukrainian nationalist organization in Poland, murdered the secretary of the Soviet consul in Lviv. During his trial in a Polish court, Lemyk, who had been hoping to kill the consul himself, described the murder as revenge for the famine.³² At the end of that month the Ukrainian community in Poland tried to organize a mass demonstration in protest against the famine, but they were stopped by the Polish government, which feared further violence.³³

At about the same time, on the other side of the world, the Ukrainian National Council, an organization formed in May 1933, staged street protests in Winnipeg, Canada, and sent a letter to President Roosevelt, enclosing an eyewitness account of the famine.³⁴ At a meeting held at the Ukrainian church in Winnipeg, diaspora leaders read aloud letters from Ukraine exhorting the public to help Ukraine ‘break away’ from the USSR.³⁵ Ukrainians in Brussels, Prague, Bucharest, Geneva, Paris, London and Sofia, among other cities, created action committees that sought, without much luck, to publicize the famine and deliver aid to the starving.³⁶

News also filtered out via the Catholic Church. In Poland, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priests took up collections for victims of the famine in 1933, held a day of mourning and hung black flags on the facades of Ukrainian churches and the local offices of Prosvita, the Ukrainian cultural institute.³⁷ Polish and Italian diplomats as well as priests with contacts inside the USSR also alerted the Church hierarchy. The Vatican first received a written description of the famine in April 1933, via an anonymous letter smuggled out through the Russian port of Novorossiisk. A second anonymous letter made its way to Rome from the North Caucasus in August. Pope Pius XI ordered both letters published in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.38 In that same month the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer, issued an alarmed appeal. He denounced famine conditions in Russia, and in the ‘Ukraine districts of the Soviet Union’:

[they are] accompanied by such cruel phenomena of mass starvation as infanticide and cannibalism … It is already established that that catastrophe still obtains, even at the time of the new harvest. It will in four months reach a new peak. Once again millions of lives will be lost … Merely to look on such a situation would be to increase the responsibility of the whole civilized world for mass deaths in Russia. It would mean to bear the guilt of the fact that, at a time when whole sections of the world are almost choked with a surplus of wheat and food, men are starving in Russia.³⁹

Later, Innitzer would be the recipient of an unusual form of evidence: a collection of two dozen photographs taken by Alexander Wienerberger, an Austrian engineer who worked at a factory in Kharkiv and smuggled the pictures out over the border. Preserved in the church diocese archive in Vienna, these are still the only verified photographs taken in Ukraine of famine victims in 1933. They show starving people by the sides of roads, empty houses and mass graves. They leave no doubt about the scale of the tragedy.⁴⁰ But in 1933 the problem for the Church was not evidence, but politics. A debate broke out inside the Vatican – one faction wanted to send a famine relief mission to the USSR, another preached diplomatic caution. The argument for caution won. Although the Vatican continued to receive information about the famine, the Holy See mostly kept silent in public. Among other things, Hitler’s January 1933 electoral victory created a political trap: the hierarchy feared that strong language about the Soviet famine would make it seem as if the Pope favoured Nazi Germany.⁴¹

Similar arguments took hold elsewhere, shaped by similar political constraints. Many European foreign ministries had superb information about the famine, as it was happening, in real time. Indeed, in 1933, Ukraine was blessed with several extraordinarily observant resident foreigners. Gradenigo, the Italian consul who lived in Kharkiv between 1930 and 1934, understood both the scale of the famine and the impact it had on the Ukrainian national movement. He did not doubt that ‘the hunger is principally the result of a famine organized in order to teach a lesson to the peasants’:

… The current disaster will lead to the colonization of Ukraine by Russians. It will transform Ukraine’s character. In the near future there will be no reason to speak of Ukraine or Ukrainian people, simply because there will be no more ‘Ukrainian problem’ when Ukraine becomes an indistinguishable part of Russia …42

The German consul in Odessa in 1933 was no less emphatic about the origins of the famine:

The communist rulers do not let the peasants remember their hardships for too long, achieving this by having one hardship follow the other immediately, and thus, whether one wants to or not, the old fears are forgotten. In the past, if someone in a village was struck by misfortune, entire generations remembered.⁴³

Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat in Moscow, later an important adviser on Soviet policy to Hitler (and after that to the CIA), also believed at the time that the famine was artificial:

It was our impression then that the authorities deliberately refrained from aiding the stricken population, except those organized in collective farms, in order to demonstrate to the recalcitrant peasant that death by starvation was the only alternative to collectivization.⁴⁴

Yet in both Italy and Germany – one already a fascist state, the latter in the course of becoming one – the famine had no impact on official policy. Benito Mussolini personally read and marked up some of the reports from Ukraine, but never said anything in public, perhaps because it was not in the nature of his regime to show pity, or perhaps because the Italians, who concluded a non-aggression treaty with the USSR in September 1933, were more interested in trade.⁴⁵ But other than the deliberately discreet effort to help ethnic Germans, and, later, use of the famine in Nazi propaganda, the Germans made no attempt at the time either to protest or to offer aid.

Not all of the reports were believed. Polish diplomats were deeply shocked by the famine – so much so that their accounts were dismissed. Stanislaw Kosnicki, the head of the Kyiv consulate, was rebuked in January 1934 for including too much ‘information about famine, misery, persecution of the population, the fight against Ukrainianness etc.’. Polish diplomats, like their colleagues, nevertheless had no doubt that the famine and the repressions were part of a plan: ‘Mass arrests and persecutions cannot be explained or justified by peril on the part of the Ukrainian national movement … the real cause of the action lies in the planned, far-sighted, long-term policy of the Moscow leaders, who are more and more becoming imperialists, strengthening the political system and borders of the state’.46

British diplomats, on the other hand, had no trouble believing the worst stories they heard. They had a whole network of informants, including the Canadian agricultural expert Andrew Cairns, who travelled through Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932 on behalf of the Empire Marketing Board. Cairns reported seeing ‘rag-clad hungry peasants, some begging for bread, mostly waiting, mostly in vain, for tickets, many climbing on to the steps or joining the crowds on the roof of each car, all filthy and miserable and not a trace of a smile anywhere’.⁴⁷ He also concluded that the government’s grain export plan was ‘ridiculous’ and could not be fulfilled.⁴⁸

But the British government not only did not offer aid, it actively discouraged several independent efforts to get food to the starving in 1933, on the grounds that the Soviet government was opposed to such efforts and therefore it was naive to make them. Laurence Collier, head of the Foreign Office Northern Department at the time, also objected to the presence of diaspora Ukrainians in several of the charities: ‘anything to do with Ukrainian nationalism was like a red rag to a bull to the Soviet authorities’. Collier understood what was happening – of Cairns’ report, he wrote: ‘I have seldom read a more convincing document’ – but preferred not to ruffle feathers.⁴⁹

Diplomatic silence suited the Soviet leadership, which had good reasons to stop stories about the famine from spreading. Although the Bolshevik goal of world revolution had been pushed into the far distance, it had never been abandoned completely. By 1933 radical political change in Europe once again seemed plausible. The continent was gripped by economic crisis; Hitler had just become Chancellor of Germany. The worsening international situation meant, to the Marxist-Leninist mind, that the final crisis of capitalism must be approaching. In this context, perceptions of the USSR abroad mattered a great deal to Soviet leaders, who hoped to use the crisis to promote the Soviet Union as a superior civilization.

The Soviet leadership also cared about foreign public opinion for domestic reasons. Since 1917, foreigners, from the American communist John Reed to the French writer Anatole France, had been deployed inside the USSR as ballast for propaganda. The writings of foreigners who lauded the achievements of the revolution were published and publicized inside the country, as were the remarks of enthusiastic visitors – communists, writers, intellectuals – who were taken to see Soviet schools, farms and factories. In the wake of the famine, the Soviet leadership encouraged these fellow travellers to dismiss any talk of food shortages – and some of them did.

Their motives were mixed. Some, like the British socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were ‘true believers’ who wanted some form of socialist revolution in their own countries and sought to use the example of the USSR for their own ends. The Webbs were aware of the famine but downplayed it in order to laud collectivization: ‘The experience of the last three harvests seems to justify the claim of the Soviet government that the initial difficulties of this giant transformation have been overcome,’ they wrote in 1936. ‘There is, indeed, little reason to doubt that the aggregate output of foodstuffs is being increased at a great rate.’50

Other visitors seem to have been motivated by vanity, as well as the immense pomp and favour that the USSR could shower upon celebrities. The writer George Bernard Shaw, accompanied by the MP Nancy Astor, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at a banquet in Moscow – vegetarian, to accommodate his tastes – in 1931. Having been greeted by welcoming parties and serenaded by brass bands, Shaw was in an expansive mood when he spoke to the audience of Soviet officials and distinguished foreigners.⁵¹ Thanking his hosts, he declared himself the enemy of anti-Soviet rumour-mongers. When friends had heard he was going to Russia, he told the crowd, they had given him tins of food to take on the journey: ‘They thought Russia was starving. But I threw all of the food out the window in Poland before I reached the Soviet frontier.’

His audience ‘gasped’, recalled a journalist in attendance: ‘One felt the convulsive reaction in their bellies. A tin of English beef would provide a memorable holiday in the home of any of the workers and intellectuals at the gathering.’52 A flavour of the cynical weariness with which at least some of the Soviet intelligentsia received these pompous outsiders can be deduced from Andrey Platonov’s play, Fourteen Little Red Huts. Platonov’s play features a visiting foreign intellectual who demands, ‘Where can I see socialism? Show it to me at once. Capitalism irritates me.’⁵³

In the summer of the famine, the most important real-life version of Platonov’s anti-hero was Édouard Herriot, a French Radical politician and former prime minister who was invited to Ukraine at the end of August 1933 specifically to repudiate growing rumours of famine. Herriot’s own motivation seems to have been political. Like other ‘realist’ statesmen in many Western capitals, he wanted to encourage his country’s trade relations with the USSR, and he wasn’t particularly bothered by the nature of its government. During his two-week trip he visited a model children’s colony, saw shops whose shelves had been hastily stocked in advance, rode down the Dnieper River on a boat and met enthusiastic peasants and workers coached especially for the occasion. Before his arrival, Herriot’s hotel was hastily refurbished and the staff were given new uniforms.

The highlight of the Frenchman’s trip was a visit to a collective farm. Afterwards, he remembered their ‘admirably irrigated and cultivated’ vegetable gardens. ‘I’ve travelled across Ukraine,’ declared Herriot, ‘I assure you that I have seen a garden in full bloom’.⁵⁴ According to OGPU reports filed afterwards, Herriot did ask about famine, but was assured that any past difficulties were now over.⁵⁵ Pravda made immediate use of the visit for purposes of domestic propaganda, and proudly stated that Herriot ‘categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeois press in connection with a famine in the USSR’, just in case any Soviet citizens had somehow managed to hear them.⁵⁶

The diplomats and one-off visitors did not present a difficult challenge for the Soviet authorities. The Foreign Ministry mandarins were too discreet to voice their opinions. Men like Herriot and Shaw could not speak the language or control their itineraries; it was relatively easy to monitor what they saw and whom they met. By contrast, the manipulation of the foreign press corps in Moscow required a good deal more sophistication. Their movements and conversations could not be completely controlled – and they could not be ordered what to write.

By 1933 the regime already had bad experiences with the more independent-minded members of the press corps. One of these was Rhea Clyman, an extraordinary Canadian who spent four years in Moscow before deciding to drive across the USSR in the company of two American women from Atlanta, arguing with officials at every turn. Clyman was finally stopped in Tbilisi in the summer of 1932 and forcibly deported (the other two women made it to Tashkent before they met the same fate).57 The result was an enormous headline in the Toronto Evening Telegram:

Telegram Writer Driven from Russia

Rhea Clyman Exposes Prison Camp Conditions

Angers Soviet Dictators⁵⁸

Once she knew that she could never return to the USSR, Clyman published a series of luridly written but accurate stories, describing kulak families sent to the far north, the growing food shortages in Ukraine, and the early Gulag camps in Karelia near the Finnish border. She also described the after-effects of collectivization in Ukraine:

The villages were strangely forlorn and deserted. I could not understand at first. The houses were empty, the doors flung wide open, the roofs were caving in. I felt that we were following in the wake of some hungry horde that was sweeping on ahead of us and laying all these homes bare … When we had passed ten, fifteen of these villages I began to understand. These were the homes of those thousands of expropriated peasants – the kulaks – I had seen working in the mines and cutting timber in the North. We sped on and on, raising a thick cloud of dust in front and behind, but still those empty houses staring out with unseeing eyes raced on ahead of us.⁵⁹

Although Clyman’s writing was embarrassing to the Soviet government, neither she nor her newspaper were sufficiently prestigious to create any stir at a higher level. Her expulsion helped the Soviet state maintain order. It sent a message: the more established, more influential Moscow-based journalists had to be careful if they wanted to keep their jobs.

Indeed, they had to be careful if they wanted to be able to do their jobs at all. At the time, Moscow correspondents needed the state’s permission not only to remain in residence but also to file their articles. Without a signature and the official stamp of the press department, the central telegraph office would not send any dispatches abroad. To win that permission, journalists regularly bargained with Foreign Ministry censors over which words they could use, and they kept on good terms with Konstantin Umanskii, the Soviet official responsible for the foreign press corps.60 William Henry Chamberlin, then the Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that the foreign correspondent who refused to soften his commentary ‘works under a Sword of Damocles – the threat of expulsion from the country or of the refusal of permission to re-enter it, which of course amounts to the same thing’.⁶¹

Extra rewards were available to those who played the game particularly well, as the case of Walter Duranty famously illustrates. Duranty was the correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow between 1922 and 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. Duranty, British by birth, had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and sceptical ‘realist’ trying to listen to both sides of a story. ‘It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,’ he wrote in 1935. But ‘in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose’.⁶²

This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that he lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting seems to have been the primary motivation for Duranty’s flattering coverage of the USSR. Whereas Clyman’s writing struck few chords, Duranty’s missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. Many of the men who would become part of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Brains Trust’ were looking for new economic ideas and had a deep interest in the Soviet experiment; several had visited Moscow in 1927, where they were granted a six-hour interview with Stalin. Duranty’s accounts chimed with their general worldview and attracted wide attention: in 1932 his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize. Soon afterwards, Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where the Democratic presidential candidate peppered him with queries. ‘I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating,’ Roosevelt told another reporter.63

But as the famine worsened, controls tightened still further. In 1933 the Foreign Ministry minders, having learned their lesson from Clyman and her companions, began requiring correspondents to obtain permission and submit a proposed itinerary before any journey. All requests to visit Ukraine or the North Caucasus were refused. The sole French correspondent in Moscow received permission to cover Herriot’s visit in the summer of 1933 only after he agreed to remain within the party of the former French prime minister, keep to the planned route, and write about nothing other than the events carefully prepared by the Soviet state. The censors also began to watch dispatches for covert reporting on the famine. Some phrases were allowed: ‘acute food shortage’, ‘food stringency’, ‘food deficit’, ‘diseases due to malnutrition’, but nothing else.⁶⁴ In late 1932, Soviet officials even visited Duranty at home, making him nervous.⁶⁵

In that atmosphere few correspondents were inclined to write about the famine, although all of them knew about it. ‘Officially, there was no famine,’ wrote Chamberlin. But ‘to anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and who kept his eyes and ears open, the historicity of the famine is simply not in question’.⁶⁶ Duranty himself discussed the famine with William Strang, a diplomat at the British Embassy, in late 1932. Strang reported back drily that the correspondent for The New York Times had been ‘waking to the truth for some time’, although he had not ‘let the great American public into the secret’. Duranty also told Strang that he reckoned ‘it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food’, though that number never appeared in any of his reporting.⁶⁷ Duranty’s reluctance to write about famine may have been particularly acute: the story cast doubt on his previous, positive (and prize-winning) reporting. But he was not alone. Eugene Lyons, Moscow correspondent for United Press and at one time an enthusiastic Marxist, wrote years later that all foreigners in the city were well aware of what was happening in Ukraine as well as in Kazakhstan and the Volga region:

The truth is that we did not seek corroboration for the simple reason that we entertained no doubts on the subject. There are facts too large to require eyewitness confirmation … There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression. Inside Russia the matter was not disputed. The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversation at the hotels and in our homes. In the foreign colony estimates of famine deaths ranged from one million up; among Russians from three million up …68

Everyone knew – yet no one mentioned it. Hence the extraordinary reaction of both the Soviet establishment and the Moscow press corps to the journalistic escapade of Gareth Jones.

Jones was a young Welshman, only twenty-seven years old at the time of his journey to the USSR in 1933. Possibly inspired by his mother – as a young woman she had been a governess in the home of John Hughes, the Welsh entrepreneur who founded the city of Donetsk – Jones studied Russian, as well as French and German, at Cambridge University. He then landed a job as a private secretary to David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister. At the same time he began writing about European and Soviet politics as a freelancer, making short trips in and out of the USSR, which put him in a different position from the Moscow correspondents who needed the regime’s approval in order to keep their residence permits. On one of those trips, in early 1932 before the travel ban was imposed, Jones journeyed out to the countryside (accompanied by Jack Heinz II, scion of the ketchup empire) where he slept on ‘bug-infested floors’ in Soviet villages and witnessed the beginnings of the famine. Months later he travelled to Frankfurt-am-Main in the entourage of Adolf Hitler – the first foreign correspondent to have access to the newly elected Chancellor of Germany.⁶⁹

In the spring of 1933, Jones returned to Moscow, this time with a visa granted him largely on the grounds that he worked for Lloyd George (it was stamped ‘Besplatno’ or ‘Gratis’, as a sign of official Soviet favour). Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, had been particularly keen to impress Lloyd George and had lobbied on Jones’s behalf. Upon arrival, Jones first went around the Soviet capital, meeting with other foreign correspondents and officials. Lyons remembered him as ‘an earnest and meticulous little man … the sort who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’.70 Jones met Umanskii, showed him an invitation to pay a visit to the German Consul-General in Kharkiv, outlined a plan to visit a German tractor factory, and asked to visit Ukraine. Umanskii agreed. With that official stamp of approval, Jones set off south.⁷¹

He boarded the train in Moscow on 10 March. But instead of travelling all the way to Kharkiv, Jones got off the train about forty miles north of the city. Carrying a backpack filled with ‘many loaves of white bread, with butter, cheese, meat and chocolate bought with foreign currency from the Torgsin stores’, he began to follow the railway track towards the Ukrainian capital.⁷² For three days, with no official minder or escort, he walked through more than twenty villages and collective farms, seeing rural Ukraine at the height of the famine, recording his thoughts and impressions in notebooks that were later preserved by his sister:

I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past. They all had the same story.

‘There is no bread. We haven’t had bread for over 2 months. A lot are dying.’ The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of buriak [beetroot] was running out. They all said: ‘The cattle are dying, nechem kormit’ [there’s nothing to feed them with]. We used to feed the world & now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food?’

Then I caught up [with] a bearded peasant who was walking along. His feet were covered with sacking. We started talking. He spoke in Ukrainian Russian. I gave him [a] lump of bread and of cheese. ‘You couldn’t buy that anywhere for 20 rubles. There just is no food.’

We walked along and talked. ‘Before the War this was all gold. We had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are ruined … We’re doomed.’73

Jones slept on the floor of peasant huts. He shared his food with people and heard their stories. ‘They tried to take away my icons, but I said I’m a peasant, not a dog,’ someone told him. ‘When we believed in God we were happy and lived well. When they tried to do away with God, we became hungry.’ Another man told him he had not eaten meat for a year.

Jones saw a woman making homespun cloth for clothing, and a village where people were eating horse meat.⁷⁴ Eventually, he was confronted by a ‘militiaman’ who asked to see his documents, after which plainclothes policemen, no doubt OGPU, insisted on accompanying him on the next train to Kharkiv and walking him to the door of the German consulate. Jones, ‘rejoicing at my freedom, bade him a polite farewell – an anti-climax but a welcome one’.⁷⁵

In Kharkiv he kept making notes. He observed thousands of people queuing in bread lines: ‘They begin queuing up 3–4 o’clock in the afternoon to get bread the next morning at 7. It is freezing: many degrees of frost.’⁷⁶ Jones spent an evening at the theatre – ‘Audience: Plenty of lipstick but no bread’ – and spoke to people about the political repression and mass arrests that were rolling across Ukraine at the same time as the famine:

‘They are cruelly strict now in the factories. If you are absent one day, you are sacked, get your bread card taken away & cannot get a passport.’

‘Life is a nightmare. I cannot go in the tram, it kills my nerves.’

‘It is more terrible than ever. If you say a word now in the factory, you are dismissed. There is no freedom …’

‘Everywhere persecution. Everywhere terror. One man we knew said: “My brother died, but he still lies there & we don’t know when we’ll bury him, for there are queues for the burial.” ’

‘There is no hope for the future.’⁷⁷

He seems to have tried to call on Umanskii’s colleague in Kharkiv, but never managed to speak to him. Quietly, Jones slipped out of the Soviet Union. A few days later, on 30 March, he appeared in Berlin at a press conference probably arranged by Paul Scheffer, the Berliner Tageblatt journalist who had been expelled from the USSR in 1929. Jones declared that a major famine was unfolding across the Soviet Union and issued a statement:

Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia …

In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month’s supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night as there were too many ‘starving’ desperate men.

‘We are waiting for death’ was my welcome: ‘See, we still have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,’ they cried.

Jones’s press conference was picked up by two senior Berlin-based American journalists, in the New York Evening Post (‘Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying, Idle on Rise Says Briton’) and the Chicago Daily News (‘Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George’).78 Further syndications followed in a wide range of British publications. The articles explained that Jones had taken a ‘long walking tour through the Ukraine’, quoted his press release, and added details of mass starvation. They noted, as did Jones himself, that he had broken the rules that held back other journalists: ‘I tramped through the black earth region,’ he wrote, ‘because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.’⁷⁹ Jones went on to publish a dozen further articles in the London Evening Standard and Daily Express, as well as the Cardiff Western Mail.⁸⁰

The authorities who had showered favours on Jones were furious. Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, complained angrily to ambassador Maisky, using an acidic literary allusion to Gogol’s famous play about a fraudulent bureaucrat:

It is astonishing that Gareth Johnson [sic] has impersonated the role of Khlestakov and succeeded in getting all of you to play the parts of the local governor and various characters from The Government Inspector. In fact, he is just an ordinary citizen, calls himself Lloyd George’s secretary and, apparently at the latter’s bidding, requests a visa, and you at the diplomatic mission without checking up at all, insist the [OGPU] jump into action to satisfy his request. We gave this individual all kinds of support, helped him in his work, I even agreed to meet him, and he turns out to be an imposter.

In the immediate wake of Jones’s press conference, Litvinov proclaimed an even more stringent ban on journalists travelling outside Moscow. Later, Maisky complained to Lloyd George, who, according to the Soviet ambassador’s report, distanced himself from Jones, declared that he had not sponsored the trip and had not sent Jones as his representative. What he really believed is unknown, but Lloyd George never saw Jones again.81

The Moscow press corps was even angrier. Of course, its members all knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were already beginning to look for ways to tell the same story. Malcolm Muggeridge, at the time the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian – substituting for Chamberlin, who was out of the country – had just smuggled three articles out of the country via diplomatic bag. The Guardian published them anonymously, with heavy cuts made by editors who disapproved of his critique of the USSR, and they were largely ignored: they clashed with bigger stories about Hitler and Germany. But the rest of the press corps, dependent on the goodwill of Umanskii and Litvinov, closed ranks against Jones. Lyons meticulously described what happened:

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials … There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of Umanskii’s gilded smile, before a formal denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski’.82

Whether or not such a meeting actually ever took place, it does sum up, metaphorically, what happened next. On 31 March, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. ‘Russians Hungry But Not Starving’, read the headline of The New York Times. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with ‘thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation’. Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was ‘on the verge of a terrific smash’, as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkiv and had found conditions sad.

I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.⁸³

Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: ‘To put it brutally – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ He went on to explain that he had made ‘exhaustive inquiries’ and concluded that ‘conditions are bad, but there is no famine’.

Indignant, Jones wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, patiently listing his sources – a huge range of interviewees, including more than twenty consuls and diplomats – and attacking the Moscow press corps:

Censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition’.

And there the matter rested. Duranty outshone Jones: he was more famous, more widely read, more credible. He was also unchallenged. Later, Lyons, Chamberlin and others expressed regret that they had not fought harder against him. But at the time nobody came to Jones’s defence, not even Muggeridge, one of the few Moscow correspondents who had dared to express similar views. As for Jones himself, he was kidnapped and murdered by Chinese bandits while reporting in Manchukuo in 1935.84

‘Russians Hungry But Not Starving’ became the accepted wisdom. It also coincided nicely with the hard political and diplomatic considerations of the moment. As 1933 turned into 1934 and then 1935, Europeans grew even more worried about Hitler. Édouard Herriot was only one of several French politicians, including former prime ministers Jean-Louis Barthou and Pierre Laval, who believed that the rise of Nazism required a Franco-Soviet alliance.⁸⁵ In the British Foreign Office, Laurence Collier thought a British-Soviet alliance might be necessary too. In answer to a query by a Member of Parliament, he explained:

The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions … and that there is no obligation on us not to make it public. We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.⁸⁶

The Poles, who had very detailed information on the famine from multiple sources, also remained silent. They had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932; their policy of truce and cold peace with their Soviet neighbours would backfire badly in 1939.⁸⁷

By the end of 1933 the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president’s team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to contain the Japanese meant it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes – the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully – encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too.88 Eventually a deal was struck. Litvinov arrived in New York to sign it – accompanied by Duranty. During a lavish banquet for the Soviet Foreign Minister at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced to the 1,500 guests. He stood up and bowed.

Loud applause followed. Duranty’s name, the New Yorker later reported, provoked ‘the only really prolonged pandemonium’ of the evening. ‘Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.’⁸⁹ With that, the cover-up seemed complete.