“All the measures listed above serve as proof of intent to starve the victims”

The collectivisation policy sought to create large farms in which land, livestock and implements were the property of the collective with agriculture itself being centrally managed. Moreover, without any historical precedent, there was no body of expertise who could advise on creating such farms. Instead, village officials and activists, students, civil servants, and workers were recruited to facilitate the policy on the ground using only vague guidelines. In practice, they confiscated property, pressured peasants to join the farms by imposing fines, or threatening them with dispossession. The wealthiest and those opposed to these actions were summarily executed or deported in their hundreds of thousands. Collectivisation, from the outset, devolved into mass violence.

Naturally, much of the peasantry resisted. When one’s land, implements and livestock are confiscated; their industrious neighbours or those critical of Soviet policies, are sent to Siberia or northern Russia; and one is told to work for free for an unelected government, would they be motivated to commit themselves? Some took to arms, and many protested by sabotaging the founding of collective farms or simply refusing to work. Others voted with their feet by abandoning their farms and villages for the city. The countryside was devastated.

In early 1930, the security services reported to Stalin that there was no Soviet rule in dozens of districts in Ukraine: peasants expelled village officials, took their property back, and stalled the state’s sowing campaigns. Resistance to collectivisation was fiercer in Ukraine than anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and some local party leaders in Ukraine were hesitant to follow the Kremlin’s orders. The republic’s rebelliousness must have reminded the Kremlin of the events of ten years prior, posing a security risk, once again, to the wider Soviet project. If collectivisation failed in Ukraine, it could just as easily fail in other parts of the country. Moreover, resistance to Soviet policies following displays of defiance by the Ukrainian intelligentsia presented another long-term problem that could see national sentiment smouldering in the countryside, a living reminder of the possibility of a non-Soviet Ukrainian state.

Establishing control over Ukraine manifested in many ways, including the famine. Indeed, all rebellions could be crushed when those rebelling, and their families, had been starved and could no longer resist. Nevertheless, policies addressing the problem of an emergent national movement had to be more lasting. On a political level, the Communist leadership of Ukraine could no longer be autonomous. The risk of losing Ukraine, as Stalin succinctly put in a 1932 telegram to his representatives, was associated with the republican leadership coming to resembling a parliament or rather “a caricature of a parliament” when they questioned the impossible grain procurement targets that had been set for that year. Indeed, Stalin had even dispatched his trusted envoys, Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, to push the impossible targets for grain procurement and later to oversee the famine-inducing policies on the ground.

In 1933, he subsequently sent another prominent Russian communist, Pavel Postyshev, to assume leadership over the communist party in Ukraine. In such a way, control over republican bosses was established during the famine.

In 1932, the Kremlin decided how much grain would be procured in Ukraine over winter 1932–1933. Stalin dismissed all concerns from republican leaders regarding the impossibility of meeting the set targets (these were later lowered but never met). Ukrainian district officials raised similar problems at the III Party conference in Kharkiv in July 1932, but Stalin’s envoys, now backed by the republican leadership, simply muted any dissenting voices. As the targets were passed down to the district and village-levels in August, a third of local officials refused to enforce them. While they were replaced with more complacent staff, during the 1932–33 grain procurement campaign that followed, the desertion rates among urban activists in some districts reached 40 per cent, while suicides were not uncommon.

On the ground, village, councils and collective farm managers organized teams of activists to search farmers’ houses for grain. To prevent the starving people from seeking food in the fields, a law prohibiting the theft of socialist property was passed in August 1932. From November, brigades of activists confiscated livestock if no grain could be found or any other supplies or valuables that could be exchanged for food. On rare occasions when targets were met, collective farms and farmers were given additional targets to meet. Additionally, in late 1932, hundreds of villages and, at times, entire districts were “blacklisted” for failing to meet grain procurement targets. That meant the confiscation of all supplies, including kerosene and matches, which made cooking and preparing food impossible.

In December 1932, another decree prevented peasants from obtaining passports, necessary for purchasing train tickets to escape the famine (collective farmers were not automatically entitled to passports until 1974). Following the directive by the Central Committee of All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolshevik) of 22 January 1933, the borders between Ukraine and Russia and Kuban and Russia were sealed to prevent the victims from leaving the Ukrainian countryside to travel to the other parts of the USSR. Within 50 days of the directive, 219 thousand peasants were detained, most of them returned to the villages they had attempted to escape. All the measures listed above serve as proof of intent to starve the victims by deliberately creating conditions incompatible with life.

Thus, the Soviet authorities were able to dictate who would eat and who would not, demonstrating that resistance would not be tolerated with those who persisted being punished. In March 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, the first secretary of the Central Committee of Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, Stanislav Kosior, wrote to Stalin, informing him that “the famine has not yet taught Ukrainian collective farmers a lesson” and that they were planning additional measures to prolong it into the summer. Understanding no law on socialist property would stop the starving from going into the fields during the summer of 1933, Kosior ordered half a million of armed young people to guard the crops, manning watchtowers and undertaking foot and horseback patrols.

Involving the local population in facilitating the famine translated into establishing a power balance in the villages that lasted until the USSR’s collapse. Having proved their loyalty, these local perpetrators subsequently became the village leaders and school masters. For many years after the famine, the victims were obliged to observe them wearing their clothes, using their farming implements or teaching their children. Most poignantly, no one was punished or faced any consequences for the millions of deaths.

Desperate to survive, people ate grass, berries, mushrooms, herbs, tree bark, acorns, chaff, and other substitutes. Local survival strategies were diverse and heart-wrenching. Mothers took their children to orphanages, hoping they would have a better chance of surviving there while many sold family heirlooms to the newly established chain of state-owned shops, which purchased gold from the rural population. The opening of such a system of shops by the state was possibly eerily coincidental. Some took the last of their valuables across the border to Russia and Belarus, hoping to exchange them for meagre amounts of foodstuffs. As in other severe famines, there were reports of cannibalism. Most victims were buried in unmarked mass graves.

In 1933, local officials organized simple creches where starving children would receive a small, but regular, ration of porridge. This was a lifeline for many with survivors later commenting that the state save their lives amid the famine. Yet it was the same state that has taken food from them and their parents, creating that very famine. Moreover, while Ukrainians continued to die of starvation throughout the first half of 1933, the USSR proceeded to ship millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain abroad in hopes of securing more international influence amid the Great Depression. The leadership was acutely aware of the situation on the ground yet chose not to help majority of the starving and to export available resources instead.

The famine subsided in the late summer of 1933, when the new harvest was taxed rather than confiscated and farmers were permitted to keep small private allotments. Millions lost their lives in the meantime with thousands of survivor accounts describing unimaginable trauma. Unable to leave the village, those who remained had to rebuild their lives under the gaze of the officials who had overseen the recent period of starvation. Horrifically, victims were not even allowed to mourn their dead. One even faced accusation of anti-Soviet propaganda for mentioning the famine in public, just like the collective farmer referenced in the opening of this chapter. Stripped of their possessions or anything that reminded them of life before the famine, Ukrainian peasants became Soviet, or so it seemed.