Bloodlands (7 page)

Hunger was far worse in the cities of Soviet Ukraine than in any city in the Western world. In 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a few tens of thousands of city dwellers actually died of starvation. Yet the vast majority of the dead and dying in Soviet Ukraine were peasants, the very people whose labors had brought what bread there was to the cities. The Ukrainian cities lived, just, but the Ukrainian countryside was dying. City dwellers could not fail to notice the destitution of peasants who, contrary to all seeming logic, left the fields in search of food. The train station at Dnipropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants, too weak even to beg. On a train, Gareth Jones met a peasant who had acquired some bread, only to have it confiscated by the police. “They took my bread away from me,” he repeated over and over again, knowing that he would disappoint his starving family. At the Stalino station, a starving peasant killed himself by jumping in front of a train. That city, the center of industry in southeastern Ukraine, had been founded in imperial times by John Hughes, a Welsh industrialist for whom Gareth Jones’s mother had worked. The city had once been named after Hughes; now it was named after Stalin. (Today it is known as Donetsk.)
⁵

Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, completed in 1932, had brought industrial development at the price of popular misery. The deaths of peasants by railways bore a frightful witness to these new contrasts. Throughout Soviet Ukraine, rail passengers became unwitting parties to dreadful accidents. Hungry peasants would make their way to the cities along railway lines, only to faint from weakness on the tracks. At Khartsyszk, peasants who had been chased away from the station hanged themselves on nearby trees. The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, returning from a family visit to his hometown Berdychev, encountered a woman begging for bread at the window of his train compartment. The political emigré Arthur Koestler, who had come to the Soviet Union to help build socialism, had a similar experience. As he recalled much later, outside Kharkiv station peasant women held up “to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, sticklike limbs, and swollen, pointed bellies.” He found that the children of Ukraine looked like “embryos out of alcohol bottles.” It would be many years before these two men, now regarded as two of the moral witnesses of the twentieth century, wrote about what they had seen.
⁶

City dwellers were more accustomed to the sight of peasants at the marketplace, spreading their bounty and selling their wares. In 1933, peasants made their way to familiar city markets, but now to beg rather than to sell. Market squares, now empty of both goods and customers, conveyed only the disharmonies of death. Early in the day the only sound was the soft breathing of the dying, huddled under rags that had once been clothes. One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was a lifeless grey. Passersby had seen this before, not just the disarray of corpses, not just the dead mother and the living infant, but that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly, as they passed: “These are the buds of the socialist spring.”
⁷

The mass starvation of 1933 was the result of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, implemented between 1928 and 1932. In those years, Stalin had taken control of
the heights of the communist party, forced through a policy of industrialization and collectivization, and emerged as the frightful father of a beaten population. He had transformed the market into the plan, farmers into slaves, and the wastes of Siberia and Kazakhstan into a chain of concentration camps. His policies had killed tens of thousands by execution, hundreds of thousands by exhaustion, and put millions at risk of starvation. He was still rightly concerned about opposition within the communist party, but was possessed of immense political gifts, assisted by willing satraps, and atop a bureaucracy that claimed to see and make the future. That future was communism: which required heavy industry, which in turn required collectivized agriculture, which in turn required control of the largest social group in the Soviet Union, the peasantry.
⁸

The peasant, perhaps especially the Ukrainian peasant, was unlikely to see himself as a tool in this great mechanization of history. Even if he understood entirely the final purposes of Soviet policy, which was very unlikely, he could hardly endorse them. He was bound to resist a policy designed to relieve him of his land and his freedom. Collectivization had to mean a great confrontation between the largest group within Soviet society, the peasantry, and the Soviet state and its police, then known as the OGPU. Anticipating this struggle, Stalin had ordered in 1929 the most massive deployment of state power in Soviet history. The labor of building socialism, said Stalin, would be like “raising the ocean.” That December he announced that “kulaks” would be “liquidated as a class.”
⁹

The Bolsheviks presented history as a struggle of classes, the poorer making revolutions against the richer to move history forward. Thus, officially, the plan to annihilate the kulaks was not a simple decision of a rising tyrant and his loyal retinue; it was a historical necessity, a gift from the hand of a stern but benevolent Clio. The naked attack of organs of state power upon a category of people who had committed no crime was furthered by vulgar propaganda. One poster—under the title “We will destroy the kulaks as a class!”—portrayed a kulak under the wheels of a tractor, a second kulak as an ape hoarding grain, and a third sucking milk directly from a cow’s teat. These people were inhuman, they were beasts—so went the message.
¹⁰

In practice, the state decided who was a kulak and who was not. The police were to deport prosperous farmers, who had the most to lose from collectivization. In January 1930 the politburo authorized the state police to screen the peasant population of the entire Soviet Union. The corresponding OGPU order
of 2 February specified the measures needed for “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” In each locality, a group of three people, or “troika,” would decide the fate of the peasants. The troika, composed of a member of the state police, a local party leader, and a state procurator, had the authority to issue rapid and severe verdicts (death, exile) without the right to appeal. Local party members would often make recommendations: “At the plenums of the village soviet,” one local party leader said, “we create kulaks as we see fit.” Although the Soviet Union had laws and courts, these were now ignored in favor of the simple decision of three individuals. Some thirty thousand Soviet citizens would be executed after sentencing by troikas.
¹¹

In the first four months of 1930, 113,637 people were forcibly transported from Soviet Ukraine as kulaks. Such an action meant about thirty thousand peasant huts emptied one after another, their surprised inhabitants given little or no time to prepare for the unknown. It meant thousands of freezing freight cars, filled with terrified and sick human cargo, bound for destinations in northern European Russia, the Urals, Siberia, or Kazakhstan. It meant gunshots and cries of terror at the last dawn peasants would see at home; it meant frostbite and humiliation on the trains, and anguish and resignation as peasants disembarked as slave laborers on the taiga or the steppe.
¹²

The Ukrainian peasantry knew about deportations to prison camps, which had touched them from the mid-1920s onward. They now sang a lament that was already traditional:

Solovki was a prison complex on an island in the Arctic Sea. In the minds of Ukrainian peasants Solovki stood for all that was alien, repressive, and painful in exile from the homeland. For the communist leadership of the Soviet Union, Solovki was the first place where the labor of deportees had been transformed into profit for the state. In 1929, Stalin had decided to apply the model of Solovki across the entire Soviet Union, ordering the construction of “special settlements” and concentration camps. The concentration camps were demarcated zones of
labor, usually surrounded by fences and patrolled by guards. The special settlements were new villages purpose-built by the inmates themselves, after they were dropped on the empty steppe or taiga. All in all, some three hundred thousand Ukrainians were among the 1.7 million kulaks deported to special settlements in Siberia, European Russia, and Kazakhstan.
¹³

Mass deportations of peasants for purposes of punishment coincided with the mass use of forced labor in the Soviet economy. In 1931, the special settlements and the concentration camps were merged into a single system, known as the Gulag. The Gulag, which the Soviets themselves called a “system of concentration camps,” began alongside the collectivization of agriculture and depended upon it. It would eventually include 476 camp complexes, to which some eighteen million people would be sentenced, of whom between a million and a half and three million would die during their periods of incarceration. The free peasant became the slave laborer, engaged in the construction of the giant canals, mines, and factories that Stalin believed would modernize the Soviet Union.
¹⁴

Among the labor camps, the Ukrainian peasant was most likely to be sent to dig the Belomor, a canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea that was a particular obsession of Stalin. Some 170,000 people dug through frozen soil, with picks and shovels and sometimes with shards of pottery or with their hands, for twenty-one months. They died by the thousand, from exhaustion or disease, finding their end at the bottom of a dry canal that, when completed in 1933, turned out to be of little practical use in water transport. The death rates at the special settlements were also high. Soviet authorities expected five percent of the prisoners in the special settlements to die; in fact, the figure reached ten to fifteen percent. An inhabitant of Archangelsk, the major city on the White Sea, complained of the senselessness of the endeavor: “it is one thing to destroy the kulak in an economic sense; to destroy their children in a physical sense is nothing short of barbaric.” Children died in the far north in such numbers that “their corpses are taken to the cemetery in threes and fours without coffins.” A group of workers in Vologda questioned whether “the journey to world revolution” had to pass “through the corpses of these children.”
¹⁵

The death rates in the Gulag were high, but they were no higher than those that would soon attend parts of the Ukrainian countryside. Workers at the Belomor were given very poor food rations, some six hundred grams of bread (about 1,300 calories) a day. Yet this was actually better nutrition than what was
available in Soviet Ukraine at about the same time. Forced laborers at Belomor got twice or three times or six times as much as the peasants who remained in Soviet Ukraine would get on the collective farms in 1932 and 1933—when they got anything at all.
¹⁶

 

In the first weeks of 1930, collectivization proceeded at a blinding pace in Soviet Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union. Moscow sent quotas of districts to be collectivized to capitals of the Soviet republics, where party leaders vowed to exceed them. The Ukrainian leadership promised to collectivize the entire republic in one year. And then local party activists, with an eye to impressing their own superiors, moved even more quickly, promising collectivization in a matter of nine to twelve weeks. Threatening deportation, they coerced peasants into signing away their claims to land and joining the collective farm. The state police intervened with force, often deadly force, when necessary. Twenty-five thousand workers were shipped to the countryside to add numbers to police power and overmaster the peasantry. Instructed that the peasants were responsible for food shortages in the towns, workers promised to “make soap out of the kulak.”
¹⁷