Robert Conquest

THE TERROR-FAMINE IN PERSPECTIVE

The Soviet assault on the peasantry and on the Ukrainian nation, in 1930 - 1933, was one of the largest and most devastating events in modern history. It was a tremendous human tragedy - with many more dead than in all countries together in World War I. It was a major economic disaster. And it was a social "revolution from above", as Stalin put it, which wholly transformed a major country.

Yet, these events have not to this day been fully registered in Western consciousness. There is a general knowledge here that some sort of catastrophe struck, or may have struck, the Soviet countryside, but little more. This minimum has percolated, over the decades, from eyewitnesses and victims; and more recently from the fact that almost every work by the many talented Soviet writers who have come (or whose unofficial writings have come) to the West has at least a passing reference to the rural terror and its hideous consequences, taking for granted events which to them are part of a known background.

But the events are both complex and unfamiliar to Westerners. The very concept of a peasant is strange to American and British ears. The Ukrainian nationality, subjugated to be merely part of the Russian Empire for a century and a half, enjoying only a few years of precarious and interrupted independence after the revolution, and then again becoming merely part of the USSR, does not declare itself to the Western observer as the Polish or even the Latvian nations are able to. Even the Communist Party, with its ideology and its motivations, is for us an alien and not easily understood phenomenon.

The facts of the assault on the peasantry and on the Ukrainian nationality are complex. Essentially, it was a threefold blow. Dekulakization meant the deportation of millions of peasants. Collectivization meant the herding of the rest of them into collective farms. And in 1932 - 1933, the collectivized peasantry of Ukraine and adjacent regions was crushed in a special operation by the seizure of the whole grain crop and the starvation of the villages. We see no single and simply describable and assimilable event, but a complicated sequence.

Most important of all, a great effort was put into denying or concealing the facts. Right from the start, when the truth came out from a variety of sources, the Stalinist assertion of a different story confused the issue, and some Western journalists and scholars were duped or suborned into supporting the Stalinist version. Nor have the Soviet authorities yet admitted the facts. A recent novel published in the USSR briefly describes the terror-famine, and later notes "in not a single textbook in contemporary history will you find the merest reference to 1933, the year marked by a terrible tragedy."

From 1918, an attempt was made to abolish the market and get grain by forced requisition. By 1921, peasant resistance, expressed in widespread - indeed almost universal - peasant uprisings, had brought the regime to the point of collapse, and Lenin, with the "New Economic Policy" (NEP), restored the market system. The ruined peasants, who then worked indefatigably to restore their fortunes, thereby saved the country; but the more they prospered, the more they were regarded as "kulaks" by Party ideologists.

The kulak category was later broadened to include "subkulaks", who were not kulaks by party definition, except that they shared kulak "attitudes."

In the villages, teams headed by Communists from the cities, supported by GPU men (secret police), held violent denunciation sessions to meet their quota of kulaks, who were often defended by poor villagers, who themselves were then labeled "subkulaks."

Some 100,000 kulaks were shot. The remainder (except for the very old, who were left to their own devices) were evicted from their homes and marched to the nearest railway. Huge lines of peasants converged on the trains which took two to three thousand people in cattle trucks, on journeys lasting a week or longer, to the arctic. In the unheated trucks, death, particularly of infants, was common. On changing trains, they might spend some time crammed starving into the confiscated churches of Archangel or Vologda, or go straight to their destinations--typically being marched for several days to a clearing in the forest and told to make their own homes. About three million died in the early stages, predominantly young children. The survivors either had to create farms in the frozen wilderness, or were sent to work on such projects as the Baltic-White Sea Canal, on which about 300,000 died (and which was never of any use).

The kulaks and subkulaks, of course, included all the natural leaders of the peasantry, especially those resistant to the new collectivization. After their removal, the bulk of the remaining peasants were forced into the collective farms.

There was much resistance. Sporadic armed uprisings involving whole districts took place, especially in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. But scythes and shotguns could not prevail against the armed forces of the GPU. They were ruthlessly suppressed. But so was more peaceful resistance.

The only peasant tactic, which had a measure of success, was the astonishing "women's rebellions"; peasant women would prevent confiscation of their cows, and the authorities were often at a loss as to how to cope. The peasants' main reaction, however, was to slaughter the cattle. In a few months, over 40% of the country's cattle and 65% of the sheep had gone. Stalin's policy lay in ruins. Like Lenin, in March 1930, he made a tactical retreat. Peasants were now allowed to leave the collective farms. Sixteen million families had been collectivized. Within a few weeks, 9 million left.

But they were not allowed their land back. They were given rough ground at the edge of the ploughed land. Then, heavy taxes were imposed on them. A huge new wave of dekulakization removed the more recalcitrant. And over the next two years, the bulk of the land was again collectivized. The system was inefficient from the start, and the countryside soon presented, as Soviet Nobel Prize novelist Boris Pasternak described it, "such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness."

The collective farm system, still the Soviet Union's agricultural mainstay, was an economic disaster. Even in the 1950's, the new mechanized farms were admitted to be producing less than the pre-World War I moujik with his wooden plough. A schematic idea had failed, at enormous human and other cost.

Dekulakization and collectivization were virtually complete by mid-1932. It was now that Moscow launched the third and most lethal of its assaults-the terror-famine against the peasants of Ukraine and some neighboring areas, in particular the largely Ukrainian Kuban region.

Soviet Academician Sakharov refers to Stalin's "Ukrainophobia". But it was not an irrational Ukrainophobia. In the free elections of November 1917, Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly for national parties. The Bolsheviks got only l0% of the vote, and that mainly in Russified industrial centers. Over the next few years, independent Ukrainian governments rose and fell. Twice, Bolshevik governments were established by Russian troops, but only on the third attempt was the country finally subdued. The first two efforts had made virtually no concessions to nationalism. The view of Lenin and his subordinates was that Ukrainian was merely a peasant dialect, and it was only after bitter experience that it was seen that Ukraine could not be mastered without some recognition of its national feeling.

Over the next eight or nine years, Ukrainian culture was allowed to flourish, and high officials and supporters of the former independent Ukrainian government were given posts. But there were always Moscow's complaints and apprehensions about the national tendencies thus encouraged. Thus, starting in 1929, a violent mass purge was initiated, first on non-Communist, then on Communist cultural and political figures. During the years that followed, some 200 of the 240 published authors in Ukraine were shot or died in camps, together with a wide swathe of all other intellectuals, from agronomists to language specialists.

But in Stalin's view, "the national problem was in essence a peasant problem". The decapitation of the Ukrainian culture was now accompanied by a blow at its body, the peasant bulk of the nation. The peasantry of Ukraine and contiguous areas had also been the foremost in resisting collectivization. They were thus, as it were, a double target. Stalin's Secret Police Chief in Ukraine, Balitsky, spoke of a "double blow" at the nationalists and the kulaks.

The Ukrainian countryside had already, in 1931- 1932, suffered grain requisitions which left it on the point of famine. In July 1932, Stalin issued the decisive decree: 6.6 million tons of grain were now to be requisitioned. The figure was far beyond possibility. Ukrainian Communist leaders protested, but were ordered to obey. As Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman put it, "the decree required that the peasants of Ukraine, the Don and Kuban regions be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children."

By November, only 41 % of the delivery plan had been fulfilled, and there was nothing left in the villages. There were again protests from leading Ukrainian Communists who told Stalin that famine was raging. They were rebuffed and ordered to find the grain. "Brigades" with crowbars searched the peasants' houses and yards. A little hidden grain was sometimes found, the peasant then being shot or sent to labor camp, but in general the villages were now living on all sorts of marginal edibles - cats and dogs, buckwheat, chaff, nettles, worms and ground bark.

The borders between Ukraine and Russia were blocked by police posts, which prevented bread being brought back. About a third of Ukraine itself was officially blocked so that not merely bread, but supplies of any sort, could not enter. In the Ukrainian cities a small ration was issued, but in the countryside nothing at all.

The cities were barred to the peasants by guard posts. Even so, when the last food had gone, many peasants managed to crawl their way to city centers. It was forbidden to feed them or treat them medically, and they either died on the spot or were removed in twice weekly roundups.

Back in the countryside, while any strength remained, families would come to the railway lines in the hope of being thrown a crust. Arthur Koestler*, who was then in Kharkiv, describes this as follows: "the stations were lined with begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, stick-like limbs and swollen pointed bellies..."

They returned to die in the villages. It is not our purpose to harrow you any further, but you need only envisage famine scenes as in the world today, with a single difference - that no aid or relief organizations were present trying to alleviate things. Indeed, it was illegal - even in the villages - to suggest that famine was taking place.

Infants like those described by Koestler were particularly vulnerable and many died. Children of 7 or 8 often also died, either at home or rounded up into special centers. But many, after their parents died, joined the wandering bands of the "Homeless Ones" and lived by petty pilfering. Others, indoctrinated in the Party's "Pioneers" organization, were used by the authorities to help harrass the peasants. Some became much-publicized heroes by denouncing their own parents.

One of the most moving descriptions of the famine is by Vasily Grossman, a Soviet Jewish writer, whom we have already quoted. His mother was killed at Auschwitz, and he himself wrote the first documentary description of the Nazi death camps, The Hell of Treblinka, and was joint editor of the Soviet section of the Black Book on Nazi atrocities (never published in the Soviet Union). He gives us, in his novel Forever Flowing, the most harrowing description and indictment of Stalin's slaughter of the Ukrainian peasantry, and quite explicitly makes the parallel with Hitler, adding that in the Stalinist case it was a matter of Soviet people killing Soviet children. And the death toll was indeed on the Hitlerite scale.

A census taken in January 1937 was suppressed, and members of the census board were shot as (in the words of an official communique) "a serpent's nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics"; they had, Pravda stated, "exerted themselves to diminish the population of the Soviet Union".

During Khrushchev's time, a later head of the census board wrote sardonically that the State Planning Commission had been very incompetent in its population predictions, having forecast 180.7 million for 1937 when the real total was 164 million. This enormous discrepancy can be reduced to about 11.5 million for various reasons (for example, children unborn owing to prematurely dead parents). Of this, the famine deaths seem to have been about 7 million - 5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the Kuban region and North Caucasus, 1 million in the Don and lower Volga. Three million had already died during dekulakization, and about 1 million (out of some 4 million) Kazakhs had perished as a result of the banning of their nomad life and resettlement on desert "farms." To this 11 million, we must add some 3 million peasants in labor camps for a reasonable estimate of approximately 14 million victims of the entire anti-peasant and anti-Ukraine campaign. The total dead in all countries during World War I was under 9 million.

There have been many useful books, usually of a specialist nature, about one aspect or another of the Stalinist revolution in the countryside, and many individual testimonies have also appeared; but there has not previously been a general history covering the whole phenomenon.

Yet, the material only needed to be brought together. We have literally hundreds of first hand accounts from victims and officials, from foreign communists and journalists, that is, firsthand observers. We have official material, both from the early 1930s and from the Khrushchev period, which strongly indicates much of the truth. And we have fiction, from the orthodox Sholokhov in the 1930s, through novels published in the USSR in Khrushchev's time and even in the early 1980s, to say nothing of samizdat and emigre work, in which the events are presented in only slightly dramatized form.

All of them tell, or contribute to, the same story. Every point made here can be overwhelmingly documented. Soviet history, and therefore the Soviet Union today, cannot be properly understood without a full knowledge of such major determining events as those described above.

Excerpted from Congressional testimony presented by Robert Conquest before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington, D.C. on October 8, 1986.