Anne Appelbaum's "Red Famine"

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Appelbaum, author of Gulag and Iron Curtain continues her magisterial body of work on Soviet crimes with Red Famine, a comprehensive account of the 1932-33 Holodomor, which resulted in between three and four million dead from starvation and associated diseases.

The Holodomor, as Appelbaum argues convincingly, was no ordinary famine. Typically, famines are caused by backwards agricultural methods, natural disasters such as drought, pestilence, and flooding, or human conflict rendering planting and harvest impossible. Often, human incompetence plays a role, as it did in Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward.”

But the Holodomor, Appelbaum shows through a painstaking historical analysis beginning in 1917 and continuing to the “Orange Revolution” of 2014, was a political famine. Stalin used hunger as a weapon in order to eliminate Ukrainian national aspirations and institutions. And the process by which he did so carries important lessons for us in the modern era.

The Russian Revolution brought hopes of independence to Ukraine. Self-government briefly flourished in Kyiv. Use of the Ukrainian language, long suppressed under Tsarism, was encouraged by nationalists, even tolerated by Bolsheviks once they took control in 1920. Ukrainian education and culture flourished.

But these were difficult times everywhere. With war came atrocity and famine. Particular horrors were visited on the Jewish, Polish, and German minorities by Reds, Whites, and Anarchists. The Ukrainian majority was hardly immune to depredations either. In 1921, a famine largely due to Soviet incompetence killed as many as 500,000.

But the 1921 famine was very different from what was to follow in 1933. The famine was not accompanied by mass arrest and deportation. Although Bolshevik gangs did search homes and confiscate grain in order to meet centrally-planned quotas, they did not operate as ruthlessly or efficiently as they would twelve years later.

…there is no evidence of a premeditated plan to starve the peasants in 1920-21.

Red Famine, page 79

Eventually, food supply rebounded, and life assumed a sort of normalcy. But Soviet leaders had not forgotten how unreliable Ukraine had been in the Civil War. They had not forgotten the close ties between Soviet enemy Poland and the Ukraine. And they had not forgotten the agricultural potential of Ukraine’s rich black earth, in a Union in which food supply was always precarious.

By 1929, Stalin had outmaneuvered all of his rivals in the Politburo to attain one-man rule. But he was never completely comfortable. Having achieved his rise with intrigue, double-dealing, and betrayal, he of course expected the same from others. The stage was set for a decade of bloodletting, and the Holodomor would be the first manmade disaster Stalin would inflict in the drive to consolidate his power.

Stalin had staked everything on the collectivization of agriculture. A doctrinaire Marxist who valued theory over human lives, he was not interested in the cost of implementation. As sycophantic journalist Walter Duranty said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

The collectivization campaign was extremely unpopular among the peasantry, especially in Ukraine, and especially among successful small-hold farmers. But Stalin and his toadies drummed up a sustained campaign of hate propaganda against the “Kulaks” as they came to be called.

Though Kulaks were styled, both inside and outside the USSR as “rich” farmers, this was often a gross exaggeration. A Kulak could be a farmer who had two cows instead of one; he could be a person who was notably more successful than his neighbour; or he could simply be denounced for something he’d said, or out of pure envy. In short, a Kulak was whoever the state wanted him to be. Every war needs an enemy. And Stalin approached the collectivization drive with the mentality of a conquering general.

Along with the collectivization drive, the urgent need for hard currency to modernize Soviet industry and defense led to grain exportation far in advance of what Ukraine could provide. Unrealistic targets for requisition were insisted upon, and pressure was put not only on farmers, but on Communist officials and policemen as well to find more grain.

Gangs formed of fanatical Party volunteers, secret policemen, and ordinary villagers descended on the countryside. Suspected Kulaks were arrested, deported, stripped of property and possessions, and sometimes killed.

By 1932, the effects of collectivization had produced the conditions for famine. Peasants had resisted by slaughtering or releasing animals. They had responded to a system in which success was penalized by working less and producing a fraction of what they once did. To the Stalinists, these were not the symptoms of a bad idea, poorly executed. No, this was “wrecking,” deliberate sabotage of Stalin’s genius. After all, Stalin couldn’t be wrong, could he?

Hand-in-hand with collectivization went the systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture. Writers, teachers, and politicians were arrested en masse. It became dangerous and foolhardy to even speak Ukrainian, let alone advocate for greater autonomy. Fantastical cases were manufactured against nationalists or suspected sympathizers, alleging sinister plots in collaboration with foreign powers.

In many ways, the mass terror techniques Stalin would use across the USSR in 1937-38 were being pioneered in the Ukraine. Hysterical, outlandish propaganda. The covering of state incompetence with allegations of “wrecking.” The use of mass arrest and networks of informants. The harnessing of personal envy and ambition to fuel peer surveillance.

Some more courageous officials were pointing out to Stalin that the demoralized peasantry had not planted nearly enough seed to come anywhere near harvest targets. Much of the tools and equipment confiscated from the Kulaks had already gone to rust. Lacking incentives to work, and short of manpower thanks to peasants fleeing to the cities, the collectives were leaving crops to rot in the fields.

Yet Stalin insisted the export targets be met. Nobody could say no to him, so the fate of millions was sealed. In the spring and summer of 1933, the deadly results became clear.

Believing that famine was the result of wrecking, the system turned on the enemies it required to exist. The starving peasants themselves were targeted, requisition gangs leaving nothing behind, not even seed grain or milk in children’s bottles. Those who resisted or hid food were beaten, tortured, or killed.

People began to die in large numbers, dropping dead on the roads or in their homes, sometimes even feasting on each other. As many as 13% of the population of Ukraine died as a result.

The regime denied that there was a famine. People were actually labelled as Kulaks and punished for “faking” hunger. Hundreds of thousands of unreliable elements were deported, as far away as Siberia and Kazakhstan. In this manner did Stalin also preview future actions like his mass deportations of nationalities in the 1940s.

Sycophantic foreign reporters like Duranty parroted the Party line. Foreign powers, more fearful of Hitler and needing Stalin as a potential ally, said nothing. Those few reporters, like the intrepid Welshman Gareth Davies, who did report the truth, were largely ignored.

At this point, I should point out that the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Duranty for his shameful lies has never been revoked.

Ukraine suffered a body blow it has never fully recovered from. Stalin’s insistence on requisitions and exports in the face of evidence, sometimes from his closest confidants, like Voroshilov and Kaganovich, that people were dying en masse, is evidence that the famine was a man-made disaster. It was proceeded by poorly-thought-out policies, but then, in Stalin’s typically bloody-minded fashion, he doubled down. Appelbaum makes a convincing case that Stalin saw the famine as an opportunity to rid himself of troublesome elements.

Indeed, he may have been right in predicting less resistance after the famine. Hungry people have no energy to fight. And in the depopulated ghost towns of Ukraine post-Holodomor, the survivors were either thoroughly cowed, or outnumbered by Russian settlers brought in to replace them. Their would-be leaders had long ago been arrested and shot by the secret police.

Terror works. In fact, it’s the only way Communism does.

For me, there are few takeaways of relevance here.

1. Communism, or as we like to call it these days, “equity,” does not work. It can only be imposed and made to look functional through violence and lies. A system that removes the incentive for hard work, and penalizes the successful, results in less production and poorer quality product. Stalin died in 1953. But the Soviet Union, a vast land with rich soil, still had to import grain until the hammer-and-sickle was lowered. Why? Because people do not work as hard when there is no reason to do so.

2. Demonizing people according to group characteristics rather than individual behaviour is almost always a prelude to violence. Appelbaum quotes Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who said:

Not one of them was guilty of anything. But they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything. (page 287)

Today, it has become once again fashionable to ignore individual characteristics in favour of group membership. We hear much talk of “white privilege,” often from members of other ethnic groups who are themselves very privileged. As Ehrenburg suggests, this does not matter; it is only the way the person has been defined that matters.

3. Lies are the fuel of oppression. A campaign of oppression requires constant misinformation and denial to succeed. Riots can become “mostly peaceful,” while words become “violence.” The widespread acceptance of lies allows previously unthinkable acts, like intentional starvation, acceptable.

4. When the state kills en masse, it must deflect attention from the victims. There are two ways to do this; one is by saying “Victims? What victims?” Appelbaum discusses the tragi-comic 1937 Soviet Census, which returned unacceptable results, in this regard. The other way is to blame the victims for their own demise. They were killed, so they must’ve done something to deserve it. We call burning churches “understandable,” and mock young Americans murdered in North Korea for their funny last names because we don’t want to criticize the people who are really to blame.

5. The current fashionable status of Communism should blind nobody to its inherent capacity for violence, dehumanization, and cultural destruction. Stalin is often presented by apologists for Communism as an aberration, and that the blame for Soviet excesses can mostly be laid at his doorstep. This is, in my opinion, missing the point. He was merely the most extreme example yet of the inherent qualities required to make a system based on fundamental disregard for human nature work. Violence and lies were two things in which Stalin excelled. Other Communist leaders who followed weren’t as good at these things; hence, the Soviet system crumbled, because the required violence and lies were no longer supplied to prop up the crumbling edifice.

6. For many years, the very existence of the Holodomor was denied. Not simply in the Soviet Union, but in the West as well. This was not merely the result of ignorance or lack of archival material. Robert Conquest proved as much by publishing Harvest of Sorrow, the first comprehensive account of the Holodomor, while the Iron Curtain was still up. Yet many academics and literary critics in the West attacked or simply ignored him. Soviet front organizations funded a pathetic Communist toady named Douglas Tottle to write Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, a smear job linking a supposed famine fraud to Ukrainian Nazism. This is a popular talking point for Putin and his supporters even today. The point is, many of the people attacking Conquest for speaking the truth are still influential today. What Conquest wrote was politically inconvenient, and the same attitude to truth still prevails amongst the same set today. These people teach your kids and report the news. Consider this.

Anne Appelbaum has once again delivered a literate and thoroughly readable account of one of the great disasters of Soviet history. In doing so, she has offered yet another exhibit in evidence against what should be a discredited ideology. Her work is all the more vital because, for whatever reason, Communism is once again in fashion.

Grant Patterson is the author of The Troika of Osip Teitelbaum, a novel set during Stalin’s Great Terror.