The demented Roman Emperor Caligula once mused that if all the people of Rome had one neck he would cut it just to be rid of his troublesome people. The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all.
Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him. So he found another solution: starvation.
Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.
The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor - the Hunger.
Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers' homes. They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children. If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands.
So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.
For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the 'useful idiots' -- as Lenin called Soviet sympathisers in the West.
Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st-century state of Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join Nato and the EU. They see it as an anti-Russian manoeuvre more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognise this old crime as a genocide. They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can't be termed genocide -- defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group.
It may be a strange defence, but it is historically correct.
So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia's wrath by demanding public recognition now?
The Ukraine was the bread basket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932/3 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation -- it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population -- Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh -- especially better-off, small-time farmers. It was a class war designed to 'break the back of the peasantry', a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit.
So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.
To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 Revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression.
The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it.
Initially, they were thrilled with the Revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm. But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin. Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx's stages in the creation of a classless society. The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children.
This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia. Lenin's hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the Revolution. With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the Revolution, he said 'Let the peasants starve', and wrote ranting notes ordering the better-off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.
Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless
pragmatist, he realised the country was so poor and weak in the
immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants
were vital to its survival. So instead, he embraced what he called a
New Economic Policy,
in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants
to grow crops and sell them for profit. It was always planned by Lenin
and his fellow radicals that this New
Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be
abandoned in the Marxist cause.
But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated
all his rivals for the Soviet leadership.
Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been
a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had
shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production. Stalin
travelled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible
seizures of grain from the peasantry.
Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside
to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had
failed. Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised
what he
called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into
collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a
Five Year Plan of furious industrialisation to make Soviet Russia a
military super power. He expected the peasants to resist and decreed
anyone who did so was a kulak
-- a
better-off peasant who could afford to withhold grain -- and who was
now
to be treated as a class enemy.
By 1930, it was clear the collectivisation campaign was in
difficulties. There was less grain than before it had been introduced,
the peasants
were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering.
Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a
ruthless memorandum ordering the 'destruction of the kulaks as a
class'. They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories.
The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned
in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households -- almost a
million innocent people -- was to be deported to wildernesses in
Siberia
or Asia. Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to
improve grain production, but this was beside the point. What mattered
was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed
or deported for all resistance to his collectivisation programme to be
smashed.
In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and
Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the
expression: 'We must break the back of the peasantry.' And they meant
it.
In 1930/1, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But
800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local
commissars who tried to take their grain. So Stalin's top henchmen led
armed expeditions of secret policemen to
crush 'the wreckers', shooting thousands.
The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26
million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the
cities they came from) getting their food. Their mistake was to think
they were dealing with ordinary politicians.
But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions
of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not
afraid of killing them. It was war -- and the struggle was most vicious
not only in the Ukraine
but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia.
The strain of the slaughter affected even the bull-nerved Stalin, who
sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate
Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya. He knew Soviet power was suddenly
precarious, yet Stalin kept selling
the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine. More than a
million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of
thousands were arrested or shot.
Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the
numbers of executed peasants and the tonnes of grains he had collected.
By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus.
'The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees,
anything they could find,' wrote one witness Fedor Bleov.
By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside
witness, visited a village near Kharkiv in Ukraine, where he found all
the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one
insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies. Beal found messages next to
the bodies such as: 'My son, I couldn't
wait. God be with you.'
One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of 'women and
children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless
eyes. 'And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt
boots;
corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and
Kharkov [in Ukraine].'
Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favours in return
for food. There are horrific eye-witness accounts of mothers eating
their own children. In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk
recalled that
neighbours found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in
the home of one mother who had died. Under a barrel in the cellar they
discovered a small hole in which a
child's head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the
woman's little daughter, Vaska.
A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as 'like a
battlefield after a war. 'Littering the fields were bodies of starving
farmers who'd been
combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a
potato.' ... 'Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.'
On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered 'no deviation regarding
amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted'. A week
later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for
food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being
wreckers. 'The Ukraine has been given more than it should,' he stated.
When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors,
Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: 'Wouldn't
it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can
concoct more fables!' In the same week, a train pulled into Kiev from
the Ukrainian villages
'loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death', according to
one report.
Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership. When the
American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss,
Petrovsky, he replied: 'We know millions are dying. That is
unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify
it.'
Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his
plan. The archives reveal one young communist admitting: 'I saw people
dying
from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.'
Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at
this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might
have simply fallen apart and history would have been different.
Embattled on all sides, criticised by his own comrades, faced with
chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed
on ruthlessly -- even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide,
in part as a protest against the famine.
'It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to
exist,' he wrote. 'Check the problem and take measures.' That meant the
destruction of
any resistance.
Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a
husk of grain was to be shot -- the notorious Misappropriation of
Socialist Property law. 'If we don't make an effort, we might lose
Ukraine,' Stalin said,
almost in panic. He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by
his henchmen, who
engaged in mass murders and executions.
Not just Ukraine was targeted -- Molotov, for example, headed to the
Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate
of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and
Siberia regions where famine was also rife. Train tickets were
restricted and internal passports were
introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine
areas. Stalin called the peasants 'saboteurs' and declared it 'a fight
to the
death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage'.
Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in
Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga. By
1933, 5.7 million households -- somewhere between ten million and 15
million people-- had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of
starvation.
As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated
than before. Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most
difficult
time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler's invasion. 'It was a
terrible struggle' in which he had 'to destroy ten million.
It was fearful. Four years it lasted -- but it was absolutely
necessary'. Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder
of his own
people be considered 'necessary'.
Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of
the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.
• Sashenka, a novel of
love, family, death and betrayal in 20th century Russia, by Simon Sebag
Montefiore, is out now.
-------------- [email protected] | 20080727 | Stefan Lemieszewski ------------
One would have expected that Simon Sebag Montefiore,
the author of various award-winning Stalin books, would have known that
"Holodomor" means "death by hunger" and more than just his
interpretation as "the Hunger". Some say the
derivation is from the Ukrainian expression “moryty holodom”, meaning
“to inflict death by hunger”. (One definition of "zamoryty" is "to kill
or drive to death by hunger").
And “to inflict” contains the connotation of human “intent” which a
simple “the Hunger” does not. According to some genocide definitions,
“intent” is a key component to the crime of genocide. Thus “holodomor”
and “moryty holodom” inherently contain the notion
of intent as would be understood by Ukrainian speakers, but
unfortunately, the translation to “the Hunger”, omits this notion of
intent and leaves the wrong impression for the English reader. Once you
have intent, it begs the question, “Who is responsible?” which is
currently being debated in both Ukraine and Russia.
[ http://www.day.kiev.ua/205014/
]
Montefiore also raises the Russian red herring defense that because
people of multiple ethnicities died, the Holodomor can't be a genocide.
Isn't that analogous to claiming the Holocaust was not a genocide
because not only 6 million Jews, but 6 million non-Jews (including
Ukrainian "untermenschen") also died from Hitler's
racist policies, many in the very same concentration camps.
Stefan Lemieszewski
--------- [email protected] | 20080727 Roman Serbyn ------------------------------------------
This is a welcome addition to popular literature on the Great
Famine. The author is right to stress the ruthlessness of Stalin, his
henchmen and the Bolsheviks, who were not afraid to kill people by the
million. The
author accurately identifies the goals of collectivization: “to break
the backbone of the peasantry”, “to shatter their independent spirit”
and with the
stolen grain from the starving peasants to industrialize and “make
Soviet
Russia a military super power”. Montefiore’s description of “the Great
Turn” --
the destruction of the peasantry, the horrors of the famine, with
dekulakization, deportation, starvation, cannibalism, and so forth --
can be appreciated.
There are, however, errors in his historical narrative that should be
pointed out, and unwarranted assertions that must be challenged.
Stalin’s musings about deporting Ukrainians revealed by Khrushchev
refer to the
post WW II period and not to the time of the famine. Ukrainians,
according
the 1926 census numbered 28.5 million (as citizens of Ukr.
SSR)
and 31 million (as an ethnic minority in USSR). If anything, the
figures would be a
million or so higher in 1932. NEP was introduced in the beginning of
1921
because agriculture was collapsing, and not in response to the famine,
which
began only towards the end of that summer and continued until 1923. The
first
famine (1921-1923) was, to a large extent, due to the requisitions
practiced
by the Red Army during the Russian civil war (and wars of reconquest of
the seceding republics like Ukraine); peasants’ delight over the
Bolshevik
seizure of power was rather short-lived.
Some of the author’s descriptions and claims lack precision or
completeness.
The author fails to take into account that while “the Cossacks” formed
a
more or less homogenous social group, they belonged to two different
nationalities. Most of the Kuban Cossack were of Ukrainian
background and
in the deportation of the Kuban Cossack stanytsias (settlements) the
national factor played a decisive role. At the beginning of the famine
there
were some 8,000,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in RSFSR, mostly along the
Ukrainian border: the Kuban was 62% Ukrainian, the Don about 40 %. The
rise
of Ukrainian national consciousness, and the “infiltration” of the
party and
state institutions in these regions by “Ukrainian nationalists” was
blamed
for the problems in grain procurement (read confiscations). As a
result, on
14 December 1932, the Ukrainian language was banned in all schools,
local
administration, mass media throughout the RSFSR. This and other
national
factors in 1932-1933 tragedy are ignored by the author, thus giving the
whole presentation a rather lopsided interpretation.
Montefiore states that train tickets were restricted and internal
passports
were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the
famine
areas. Here he confuses two different issues: 1) passport system whose
purpose was to the main urban centres from growing and which came into
effect towards the end of the main period of the famine, and 2) a
Stalin/Molotov directive of 22 January 1933 closing cordoning off
Ukrainian
SSR and the North Caucasus Territory (chiefly aimed at the Kuban) from
the
rest of the Soviet Union to any peasant movement. This directive had a
specifically anti-Ukrainian factor which is completely ignored by the
author.
The author presents the argument often heard from Russian political and
academic deniers of the Ukrainian genocide, namely that, “because the
famine
not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks,
Kazakhs
and many others as well, it can’t be termed genocide -- defined as
deliberate
killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group.” What is
surprising,
is that the author then defends this illogical position: “It may be a
strange defence, but it is historically correct.”
Well, I beg to differ: it is not correct, either logically or
historically.
Logically, the question of the Ukrainian genocide has to be decided on
its
own merit. Whether Russians and Kazakhs (ethnically the Cossacks were
either
Russians or Ukrainians -- there was no Cossack nationality) were
victims
of
genocide has no bearing on Ukrainian genocide, any more than the
destruction
of Gypsies and Poles had any influence on the recognition of the
genocide of
the Jews. Each case has to be decided on its own merit. Bringing
Russians
and Kazakhs into the discussion of Ukrainian genocide is to confuse the
issue. Historically, the Russians’ argument is incorrect for the simple
reason that the famine was not the sums total of the genocidal
atrocities
and the Ukrainian peasantry was not the sum total of the Ukrainian
victims
of the genocide. The genocide was against the Ukrainians as a
national/ethnic group living within the whole Soviet empire. Montefiore
leaves out not only the 8 million Ukrainians in the RSFSR but also the
other
segments of the Ukrianian population (national elites, professional
class
etc,) that were also part of the overall target of Stalin’s genocidal
policies. We cannot go into detail here, and I shall make just two
short
comments. First, concurrently with the destruction of the village
elites in
1929-1930 (“dekulakization”) the regime began the elimination of the
national elites with the roundup of hundreds of intellectuals accused
of
organizing a Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Soiuz Vyzvolennia
Ukrainy). One of their “crimes” was organizing cells in the
countryside.
There was no corresonding witch-hunt of Russian elites accused of
Russian
nationalism.
Second example. Montefiore (mis)quotes Stalin’s letter to Kaganovich
(whose
role in Ukraine Montefiore underestimates, in favor of Molotov),
“Unless we
begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine”
and
leaves it dangling because two paragraphs further he insists that “not
just
Ukraine was targeted -- Molotov … headed to the Urals, … Kaganovich …
crushed
the Kuban”. It is what Montefiore leaves out that gives sense to the
Stalin’s reference to Ukraine. “Keep in mind that the Ukrainian
Communist
Party (500,000 members, ha-ha) has quite a lot (yes, quite a lot!) of
rotten
elements, conscious and unconscious Petliura adherents … As soon as
things
get worse, these elements will waste no time opening a front inside
(and
outside) the party, against the party.” The sequence to this
declaration was
the second series of elimination of Ukrainian elites, this time from
the
faithful party cadres, suspected of siding with the Ukrainian peasantry
“as
soon as things get worse” (no better indication that Stalin was
anticipating
widespread starvation). The national factor always present in Stalin’s
genocidal policies in the 1930s. It behooves the commentators on those
years
to present the full picture of events.
Roman Serbyn