European Document/The Great Ukrainian Famine

...It took a famine to show them who is master here...

...Thus, in the more equitable NEP days of 1926, the Ukraine provided the state with 3.3 million tons of grain, or 21 percent of its total harvest...

...They would also view it, however, as a deliberately anti-Ukrainian policy of the "Moscow government": Stalin, they allege, masterminded the scheme in order to solve his peasant and Ukrainian problems with one blow...

...decade, however, the regime had come to perceive both trends as subversive...

...Ukrainians, consequently, consider the famine their Holocaust, a national trauma of mythical proportions that has shaped their present consciousness...

...According to an expert on the Stalin era, British historian Robert Conquest: The famine can be blamed quite flatly on Stalin...

...Two who in particular went out of their way to downplay if not ignore the famine were Walter Duranty, then head of the New York Times Moscow bureau, and Louis Fischer, Moscow correspondent for the Nation...

...By the end of the Alexander J. Motyl is author of The Turn to the Right, a study of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s, and a contributor to Survey, Slavic Review, and other publications...

...Considering the Soviet dictator's exceptionally brutal treatment of the non-Russians and his mass deportations of the entire Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai, Kalmyk, and Crimean Tatar populations during and after World War II, this interpretation, clearly, is not implausible...

...The government won.''eir disposal...

...The peasants wanted to destroy collectivization...

...Fischer said it best: "History can be cruel," he wrote...

...Yet, as formulated, it invites skepticism: if Stalin's goal had been genocide, then why did the authorities not confiscate a// the grain harvested in the Ukraine...

...If we ask ourselves which national groups were most likely to constitute a threat to the new centralized and Russified Soviet Union which Stalin was creating, we arrive at the following: Ukrainians, second only to the Russians in numbers, who had fought a stubborn and protracted war for national independence...

...Every village I visited reported a death rate of not less than ten per cent...

...They responded by slaughtering their animals, working less, and engaging in "terrorist" acts against representatives of the regime...

...National Communists" were forced back into line...

...Bureaucratic bungling and cadre overzealousness in a campaign to extract maximal resources from the richest regions...

...state extraction of grain, however, increased...

...Why did collectivization hit the Ukrainians with particular severity...

...how a woman they knew ate her children...

...and how H. Skrynnyk ate his mother...

...First of all, the tempo of collectivization in the Ukraine, which served as a kind of testing ground for Stalin's agricultural experiments, was more rapid than in the rest of the USSR...

...This supposedly means that a policy of extracting the most grain from the most productive regions-that is, economics, and not great-power chauvinism-was to blame for the famine...

...But from Stalin's viewpoint, collectivization was a success: peasant opposition to Soviet power had been broken once and for all...

...The Soviets prefer to ignore "aberrations" of the period of the "cult of personality...

...Indirect responsibility for this ignorance lies with the widespread tendency among Westerners to be more than willing to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt...

...It is perhaps the only case in history of a purely man-made famine...

...They even ate toadstools...

...In 1930, the first full year of collectivization, it delivered 7.7 million tons out of a harvest of 23.1, or 33 percent...

...These were precisely the groups whose territories were affected by the famine...

...The government used the best means at their disposal...

...The Moscow government had taken away all the food long before...

...They prepared pancakes and fritters from leaves and other inedible substances...

...That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be...

...The officials hunted them and put them into a pound, but the hungry people caught and ate them...

...Would even Stalin have jeopardized his economic plans by deliberately devastating a country that figured so importantly in them...

...There seems little doubt that the main issue was simply crushing the peasantry at any cost...

...Fifty years after the fact, however, the tragedy-and, even more, its overwhelmingly Ukrainian character-continues to be largely unacknowledged in both East and West...

...People avoided one another in the calm, unreal atmosphere for fear of being eaten...

...They boiled dried animal hides...

...In all, Soviet agriculture received a blow from which it has still not fully recovered...

...And, as Stalin noted in 1925, both developments complemented each other: "The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question...

...and the Germans, who had welcomed the 1918 German occupation in Ukraine...

...But Duranty did succeed in something else-he actually won a Pulitzer Prize for his reportage...

...The West, meanwhile, prefers to remain either uninformed or misinformed about the dimensions of the event...

...Meanwhile the cultural relaxation associated with NEP threatened to undermine the regime's decidedly great Russian character...

...The traditional interpretation among Western Sovietologists views the famine as an unplanned and largely unavoidable by-product of the revolutionary zeal and bureaucratic shortsightedness that characterized the collectivization campaign...

...The remaining "poor" and "middle" peasants were herded into collective farms...

...the Kuban and Don Cossacks, who had first given the White counterrevolution its base...

...Small wonder that Malcolm Muggeridge, who traveled to the Ukraine in the summer of 1933 as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, recently termed the famine the "most terrible thing I have ever seen.'' JLVlost Ukrainians would agree with Chamberlin that "this famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe...

...Now the village was bereft of even cats and dogs...

...The Communist Party's un-enthusiastic acceptance in 1921 of Lenin's "New Economic Policy*' (NEP) sanctioning a limited reintro-duction of capitalism had allowed the Ukrainian peasantry to prosper and the Ukrainian language, literature, and arts to flourish...

...and the Party's determination to root out all nationalist opposition, whether urban or rural, surely would have made for a set of callous attitudes that could endorse the "cleansing" effect of a famine on the regime's enemies...

...the cultural freedoms of the 1920s were revoked...

...Stalin also achieved a breakthrough on the non-Russian front...

...In good Soviet fashion, the dead Ukrainian peasants have been relegated to the status of "non-person...

...It did not, strictly speaking, correspond with the main grain-producing areas, as would be expected were it solely a question of intensified extraction solely motivated by economic concerns: there was no famine in the Central Black Soil Region of Russia, while-in Ukraine it extended into Volhynia and Podillia, hardly part of the basic grain-producing area of the USSR...

...indeed, the Party appeared to be drowning in a "peasant sea...

...The murderous grain requisitions of 1930-1932 resulted in the outbreak of a country-wide famine-"not hardship, or privation, or distress, or food shortage," as Christian Science Monitor correspondent William Henry Chamberlin wrote soon thereafter, "but stark, outright famine, with its victims counted in millions...

...officially encouraged hostility to the peasantries most opposed to collectivization...

...They even devoured the carrion of horses infected with glanders and then the authorities had them shot...

...It is also the only major famine whose very existence was ignored or denied by the governmental authorities, and even to a large degree successfully concealed from world opinion...

...My mother and a few of her neighbors told me how H. Zhuk ate his mother...

...By the same token, Biafrans would presumably have found little solace in the thought that they were being starved not as Ibos, but as secessionists subjected to the arbitrariness of an overly zealous Nigerian war-machine...

...Directly responsible, however, were those Western admirers of Stalin's "bold experiment" all too ready to overlook images that did not fit their preconceived schemes...

...The richer, more productive, and politically more troublesome peasants- kulaks-were deported to Siberia and thereby "liquidated as a class...

...The NEP was sustaining a private peasantry-both Russian and non-Russian-that was hostile to the urban-based Bolsheviks' collectivist goals...

...One eyewitness, a city resident, described a visit to his parents' village: Although it was not long since I had last been there, I could hardly recognize it...

...In the Ukraine, major political show trials in the early 1930s marked the beginning of a centrally directed secret-police terror that lasted through the decade...

...One high official told a Ukrainian who later defected that the 1933 harvest "was a test of our strength and their endurance...

...Of course,, for the millions who starved to death these considerations are scarcely to the point: exactly why the regime was tolerating their destruction was far less important than the fact of their destruction...

...It has-cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay.'' In this view, famine was a policy instrument directed against the most recalcitrant peasants, regardless of nationality...

...and, by 1933, the tsarist policy of Russifica-tion was formally reintroduced...

...They fed on the mash left over from the previous year, which was no longer considered suitable for feeding to livestock...

...As Mace puts it: The areas affected by the man-made famine all contained groups which could plausibly be considered hindrances to Stalin's plans to resurrect a politically homogeneous Russian empire...

...Its main proponent is James Mace, an American historian who is preparing a book on the famine...

...yet, it continues to remain largely unknown to the world...

...According to Duranty's colleague, former Times critic John Chamberlain, Duranty "was not only heartless about the famine, he had betrayed his calling as a journalist by failing to report it...

...Wrote one survivor: People scooted the fields for roots of all kinds, stripped the trees of their bark, caught mice and gophers, ate carrion...

...A third, ethnically oriented "revisionist" interpretation has recently been gaining ground in scholarly circles...

...A catastrophe of such dimensions ranks as one of the twentieth century's prime examples of mass destruction...

...Before the year was out, over five million Ukrainian peasants had died a slow and gruesome death...

...Peasant resistance to collectivization caused the harvest to drop to 18.3 million tons in 1931, but the Ukraine's quota remained at 7.7-an extortionately high 42 percent...

...Furthermore, it is argued, famine generally affected the USSR's most fertile areas-not only the Ukraine, but the North Caucasus and Central Volga regions as well...

...The peasants used the best means at their disposal...

...This kind of grim, stark chronicle could have been compiled in almost any village in the Ukraine in that terrible winter and spring of 1932-33," wrote Chamberlin...

...And second, the grain quotas imposed on the Ukraine were disproportionately higher...

...Stalin's solution to the peasant problem was collectivization...

...Not surprisingly, production plummeted...

...Billy Graham's infamous behavior on his trip to the USSR last year was but one manifestation of this attitude...

...Although the quota was reduced to 6.6 million tons in 1932, grain production fell to 14.6, so that only 4.7 million tons, or 32 percent of the harvest, could actually be collected...

...The government wanted to retain collectivization...

...Other scholars, however, consider the famine to have been a deliberate political act...

...The government won...

...Soviet mendacity, Western gullibility, and a readiness on both sides to condone the liquidation of nations and classes thought to stand in the way of "progress" have conspired to transform a major human tragedy into a forgotten historical footnote...

...Local nationalisms, it was officially decreed, were more dangerous than Russian chauvinism...

...The 1920s had been years of plenty in the Ukraine, as well as in the entire USSR...

...The three interpretations are not irreconcilable...

...Thanks to Stalin, a great famine ravaged their homeland in 1933, reducing the breadbasket of the Soviet Union to little more than a graveyard...