Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (9 page)

Stalin, a master of personal politics, presented the Ukrainian famine in personal terms. His first impulse, and his lasting tendency, was to see the starvation of Ukrainian peasants as a betrayal by members of the Ukrainian communist party. He could not allow the possibility that his own policy of collectivization was to blame; the problem must be in the implementation, in the local leaders, anywhere but in the concept itself. As he pushed forward with his transformation in the first half of 1932, the problem he saw was not the suffering of his people but rather the possibility that the image of his collectivization policy might be tarnished. Starving Ukrainian peasants, he complained, were leaving their home republic and demoralizing other Soviet citizens by their “whining.”
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Somewhat inchoately, Stalin seemed to think in spring and summer 1932 that if starvation could somehow just be denied then it would go away. Perhaps he reasoned that Ukraine was in any case overpopulated, and that the deaths of a few hundred thousand people would matter little in the long run. He wanted local Ukrainian officials to meet grain procurement targets despite the certain prospect of lower yields. Local party officials found themselves between Stalin’s red hammer and the grim reaper’s sickle. The problems they saw were objective and not soluble through ideology or rhetoric: lack of seed grain, late sowing, poor weather, machinery insufficient to replace animal labor, chaos from the final push toward collectivization in late 1931, and hungry peasants unable to work.
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The world as local party activists had to see it, in the Ukrainian countryside, was described far better by this Ukrainian children’s song than by the terse orders and propaganda conceits coming from Moscow:

Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There’s no bread and there’s no fat
The party’s ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father’s eaten his own child
The party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps
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Around the local party activists was death, and above them was denial. Starvation was a brute fact, indifferent to words and formulas, deportations and shootings. Beyond a certain point, the starving peasant could no longer productively work, and no amount of ideological correctness or personal commitment could change this. Yet as this message traveled upward through institutional channels it lost its force. True reports of hunger from below met political pressure from the top at a Ukrainian party central committee plenum of 6-9 July 1932 in Kharkiv. Ukrainian speakers complained of the impossibility of meeting the annual targets for grain requisitions. Yet they were silenced by Lazar Kaganovich and Viacheslav Molotov, politburo members and Stalin’s emissaries from Moscow. Stalin had instructed them to defeat the “Ukrainian destabilizers.”
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Molotov and Kaganovich were Stalin’s loyal and trusted allies, and with him dominated the politburo and thus ruled the Soviet Union. Stalin was not yet an unrivalled dictator, and the politburo was still in principle a kind of collective dictatorship. Yet these two men, unlike some of his previous allies in the politburo, were unconditionally loyal. Stalin manipulated them ceaselessly, but he did not really have to. They served the revolution by serving him, and tended not to distinguish between the two. Kaganovich was already calling Stalin “our father.” In July 1932 in Kharkiv, they told Ukrainian comrades that talk of starvation was just an excuse for laziness on the part of peasants who did not wish to work and activists who did not wish to discipline them and requisition grain.
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By this time, Stalin was on vacation, having traveled in a train well stocked with fine provisions south from Moscow through the starving Ukraine to the pretty resort town of Sochi on the Black Sea. He and Kaganovich wrote to each other, confirming their shared view of the famine as a plot directed against them personally. Stalin managed a nice reversal, imagining that it was the peasants, not him, who were using hunger as a weapon. Kaganovich reassured Stalin that talk of Ukrainians as “innocent victims” was just a “rotten cover-up” for the Ukrainian party. Stalin expressed his fear that “we could lose Ukraine.” Ukraine would have to be made into a “fortress.” The two of them agreed that the only reasonable approach was to hold tight to a policy of requisitions, and to export the grain as quickly as possible. By now Stalin seemed to have worked out, at least to his own satisfaction, the connection between starvation and the disloyalty of Ukrainian communists: hunger was a result of sabotage, local party activists were the saboteurs, treacherous higher party officials protected their subordinates—all in the service of Polish espionage.
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Perhaps as late as 1931, Stalin might indeed have interpreted Polish and Japanese policies as heralding an encirclement of the Soviet Union. The year 1930 was a peak time for Polish espionage in the Soviet Union. Poland had secretly founded a Ukrainian army on its own soil, and was training dozens of Ukrainians and Poles for special missions inside the Soviet Union. Japan was indeed ever more threatening. In 1931, the Soviets had intercepted a note from the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, in which he advocated preparations for an offensive war to conquer Siberia. That year Japan had invaded Manchuria, a northeastern Chinese region with a long border with Soviet Siberia.
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In fall 1931, according to a Soviet intelligence report, Poland and Japan had signed a secret agreement concerning a joint attack on the Soviet Union. This was not the case; and insofar as there had been an incipient Polish-Japanese alliance, it was prevented by an adept Soviet foreign policy. Though Japan had declined to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Moscow, Poland had agreed. The Soviet Union wanted a treaty with Poland so that its economic transformation could be pursued in peace; Poland never had any intentions of starting a war, and was now experiencing economic depression. Its largely unreformed agrarian economic system could not support increasing military spending at a time of economic collapse. Soviet military budgets, comparable to Poland’s for many years, were now far greater. The Soviet-Polish agreement was initialed in January 1932.
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In 1932 and 1933, there could be no serious thought of Poland as a threat by itself. The Polish army had suffered massive budget cuts. The Soviet police and border guards had captured a large number of Polish spies. Polish agents had not hindered collectivization during the chaos of 1930, and were helpless to rouse a starving population in 1932. They tried, and they failed. Even the most enthusiastic Polish proponents of an aggressive policy saw summer 1932 as a time for calm. If the Soviets promised peace, it seemed best to make no provocative moves. Polish diplomats and spies were witnesses to the famine. They knew that “cannibalism has become a habit of sorts” and that “entire villages have died out completely.” But they had nothing to do with the famine’s origins, and could do nothing to help the victims. Poland did not publicize to the world what its diplomats knew about the famine. In February 1932, for example, an anonymous letter reached the Polish consulate in Kharkiv, pleading with the Poles to inform the world of the famine in Ukraine. But by then the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union had been initialed, and Warsaw would take no such step.
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Stalin now had won far more room for maneuver in his western borderlands than he had had in 1930. Poland had accepted the status quo by signing the nonaggression pact in July 1932, and so the Ukrainian peasants were at his mercy. With pedantic enthusiasm, Stalin in August (still on vacation) offered his closest collaborators the theory that collectivization was missing only the correct legal basis. Socialism, he claimed, just like capitalism, needed laws to protect property. The state would be strengthened if all agricultural production was declared to be state property, any unauthorized collection of food deemed theft, and such theft made punishable by immediate execution. Thus a starving peasant could be shot if he picked up a potato peel from a furrow in land that until recently had been his own. Perhaps Stalin really did think that this could work; the result, of course, was the removal of any legal protection that peasants may have had from the full violence of the triumphant state. The simple possession of food was presumptive evidence of a crime. The law came into force on 7 August 1932.
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Soviet judges usually ignored the letter of the law, but the rest of the party and state apparatus understood its spirit. Often the most enthusiastic enforcers of the law were younger people, educated in the new Soviet schools, who believed in the promise of the new system. Members of the official youth organization were told that their “main task” was “the struggle against theft and the hiding of grain as well as kulak sabotage.” For the young generation in the cities, communism had offered social advance, and the world demonized in this agitation was one that they had left behind. The communist party in Soviet Ukraine, though disproportionately Russian and Jewish in its membership, now included many young Ukrainians who believed that the countryside was reactionary and were eager to join in campaigns against peasants.
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Watchtowers went up in the fields to keep peasants from taking anything for themselves. In the Odessa region alone, more than seven hundred watchtowers were constructed. Brigades went from hut to hut, five thousand youth organization members among their members, seizing everything they could find. Activists used, as one peasant recalled, “long metal rods to search through stables, pigsties, stoves. They looked everywhere and took everything, down to the last little grain.” They rushed through the village “like the black death” calling out “Peasant, where is your grain? Confess!” The brigades took everything that resembled food, including supper from the stove, which they ate themselves.
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Like an invading army the party activists lived off the land, taking what they could and eating their fill, with little to show for their work and enthusiasm but misery and death. Perhaps from feelings of guilt, perhaps from feelings of triumph, they humiliated the peasants wherever they went. They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport, or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray. Women caught stealing on one collective farm were stripped, beaten, and carried naked through the village. In one village the brigade got drunk in a peasant’s hut and gang-raped his daughter. Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations—and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated. This was the triumph of Stalin’s law and Stalin’s state.
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Raids and decrees could not create food where there was none. Of course peasants will hide food, and hungry people will steal food. But the problem in the Ukrainian countryside was not theft and deceit, which might indeed have been solved by the application of violence. The problem was starvation and death. Grain targets were not met because collectivization had failed, the harvest of autumn 1932 was poor, and requisition targets were too high. Stalin sent Molotov to Ukraine to urge comrades forward in the “struggle for grain.” But the enthusiasm of Stalin’s servants could not change what had already happened. Even Molotov was forced to recommend on 30 October that quotas for Ukraine be reduced somewhat. Stalin accepted the recommendation, but soon he was more categorical than ever. As of November 1932 only about one third of the annual target had been met.
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As reports about failed requisitions were delivered to the Kremlin, Stalin’s wife killed herself. She chose 7 November 1932, the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution, to shoot herself in the heart. Just what this meant to Stalin can never be entirely clear, but it seems to have been a shock. He threatened to kill himself as well. Kaganovich, who found Stalin a changed man, had to give the funeral oration.
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The next day Stalin approached the problem of the famine with a new degree of malice. He placed the blame for problems in Ukraine at the feet of Ukrainian comrades and peasants. Two politburo telegrams sent out on 8 November 1932 reflected the mood: individual and collective farmers in Soviet Ukraine who failed to meet requisition targets were to be denied access to products from the rest of the economy. A special troika was created in Ukraine to hasten the sentencing and execution of party activists and peasants who, supposedly, were responsible for sabotage. Some 1,623 kolkhoz officials were arrested that month. Deportations within Ukraine were resumed: 30,400 more people were gone by the end of the year. The activists told the peasants: “Open up, or we’ll knock down the door. We’ll take what you have, and you’ll die in a camp.”
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As Stalin interpreted the disaster of collectivization in the last weeks of 1932, he achieved new heights of ideological daring. The famine in Ukraine, whose existence he had admitted earlier, when it was far less severe, was now a “fairy tale,” a slanderous rumor spread by enemies. Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.
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