Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

Unable to counter force with force, the peasants turned to passive resistance. One, and from the government’s point of view the most dangerous, manifestation of it was the villagers slaughtering their livestock rather than surrendering it to the kolkhoz . In 1928, the USSR had 32 million horses; by 1934 the figure stood at 15.5 million. In January and February 1930 alone, 14 million head of cattle were destroyed. Confronted with this disaster, the government called a halt to its war. In what was surely a masterpiece of hypocrisy, Stalin in March 1930 announced that the local officials had erred in compelling villagers to join the collectives and in forgetting that his and the Party’s instructions insisted that membership in them had to be through voluntary accession. As he wrote, “Who would wish for such abuses, for that bureaucratic ordering of the collectivization movement, for those unworthy threats against the peasant?” And graciously he allowed those peasants who wished to do so to leave the collectives. How voluntary the process had been is best illustrated by the following figures: before Stalin’s pronouncement, on March 1 the number of collectivized households stood at 57.6 percent for the whole country. Two months later the figure was 23.6 percent. One can imagine the chaos and the damage done to agriculture in that one terrible year.

But the peasant had won not a victory but a reprieve. By the end of 1930 the government resumed its drive to regiment the rural population into the collective farms. Force was this time combined with slight concessions to the peasant’s longing for something he could call his own. He was now allowed to retain the so-called garden plot—about half an acre per household, and sometimes a single cow. By September 1931, 60 percent of rural households were again within the collectives. But the damage already done to the rural economy was soon to contribute to a disaster surpassing even that of 1929–30.

The collectivization drive was synchronized with the Soviet government’s first Five Year Plan, which was designed to industrialize in a hurry the hitherto predominantly rural country. An essential ingredient in the plan was the acquisition of foreign machines, patents, and experts. How were those imports to be paid for? At the time the only way for the Soviet Union to earn large quantities of foreign currency for the sinews of industrialization was through the exports of raw materials. Hence the increasing pressure on the already devastated and impoverished countryside to extract from it grain not only for the Soviet Union’s growing urban population, but also for export. In 1930, with the harvest of 83.5 million tons, the regime extracted from the peasants 22 million and exported 5.5. In the next year the country, largely for the reasons already adduced, produced 14 million tons less, but the regime squeezed out of the terrorized peasantry 22.8 million and exported 4.5. It did not take an agronomist to see that this was a path to disaster, yet the regime went on raising its quotas for compulsory deliveries. In 1932 there were portents of serious crop failures in large areas, including Ukraine, as early as the spring, and yet the state procurement plan was fixed at the highest amount yet, 29.5 million tons. By the end of the year people were already starving—the USSR exported 1.5 million tons of grain, an ample amount to feed the six to eight million people estimated to have perished from hunger in the course of 1932–33.

Such then is the background of the events described in Mr. Dolot’s book. When it became clear in the course of 1932 that the quota for state grain procurement could not physically be met, Stalin in his fury ordered all the available stocks to be seized, no matter what the consequences for the local population. It is not an anti-Communist refugee, but a Soviet author during the Khrushchev era when one could allude to such things, who wrote the following about the results of a visit by a lieutenant of Stalin’s to one of the afflicted areas: “All the grain without exception was requisitioned for the fulfillment of the Plan, including that set aside for sowing, fodder, and even that previously issued to the kolkhozniki as payment for their work.” And another Soviet source: “Many kolkhozy experienced great difficulties with provisionments. There were mass cases of people swelling up from hunger and dying.” These two sentences appear in the middle of a lengthy technical article which, in general, takes a very positive view of collectivization, even though, as it was the fashion under Khrushchev, it reprimands Stalin and his henchmen for their “errors.” Today, of course, in line with the partial rehabilitation of Stalin, it is unlikely that a Soviet author would be permitted to be so indiscreet about what really happened during those terrible years.

Was Stalin’s policy motivated by the need to extract all the available grain for feeding the cities and export, the goal against which the preservation of a few million peasants’ lives was deemed unimportant, or was it also, as our author implies, a deliberate attempt to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism and thus solidify the Russian domination of the Soviet Union? This is a hypothesis strongly argued by several other writers, not all of them, by any means, Ukrainian. And to be sure, already by 1930 Stalin sought to make Russian nationalism the main psychological bulwark of the Soviet regime and his own personal power. Anything even remotely resembling nationalism or demands for autonomy for other of the numerous nationalities of the USSR was being stamped out by him and his henchmen even before 1930. And in the great purges of 1936–39, those officials and intellectuals suspected of even the slightest sympathy with Ukrainian national aspirations were ruthlessly repressed. In a previous great famine that struck many parts of the USSR, including Ukraine, that of 1921–22, the Soviet government did not seek to prevent its victims from fleeing the stricken areas in search of food, and it called upon the capitalist nations to help and succour the suffering millions. In 1932–33, the Kremlin sought to keep the news of mass starvation from spreading even within the USSR, so that the inhabitants of other regions remained ignorant of what was happening in Ukraine and North Caucasus. Far from outside help being sought, the government banned the import of food into these stricken areas. The militia and GPU (political police) detachments barred starving people from leaving their villages, and trying to save their own and their families’ lives. Some news of course trickled out. In a poem which when discovered by the authorities was to cost him his life, the Russian poet Mandelstam wrote of Stalin: “Ten paces away and our voices cannot be heard. The only one heard is the Kremlin mountaineer, the destroyer of life and the slayer of peasants.” In the West, there were just some very sparse and muted echoes of the manmade disaster. And so all the more valuable and heartrending is this testimony of the death of the once peaceful and self-reliant Ukrainian village.

THE POLICY of compulsory collectivization introduced at the end of 1929, called for all farms to be collectivized, and the farmers to be firmly bound to the collectives just as they used to be bound as serfs to the feudal estates some seventy years before. The farms were collectivized, but not without struggle. The farmers fiercely resisted the collectivization efforts. They clung to their plots of land and their possessions for dear life, and the struggle became one for life or death. But unarmed, disorganized, and leaderless, the farmers were no match for government forces. They were crushed mercilessly. Their villages were ruined and depopulated. Millions died. Many were sent to concentration camps, or banished from their villages to God-forsaken northern regions, and still others simply disappeared mysteriously, without a trace. Those who survived swallowed their pride and finally joined the collective farms in order to save themselves and their families. Thus the battle came to an end: the farmers lost and the Communists triumphed. Within only a few years—four in all!—the traditional patterns of village life were destroyed.