At its peak in late 1932 and early 1933, the famine afflicted an area populated by more than 70 million people: Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and some Russian provinces. This does not mean that the remaining Soviet population of 160 million was eating normally. Many in regions not officially in a state of famine lived on the edge of starvation. The entire country was hit by epidemics, primarily typhus. Millions suffered serious illnesses, were left disabled, or died several years after the famine from the damage it had inflicted on their bodies. And no statistics can measure the moral degradation it caused. Secret OGPU and party summaries (svodkas), especially during the early months of 1933, are filled with accounts of widespread cannibalism. Mothers murdered their children, and deranged activists robbed and tormented the population.
While the entire country suffered from famine and mass repression, Ukraine and the North Caucasus were the most affected.37 It was in these two important regions of the USSR where the policy of punishing grain requisitions and terror were most brutally applied. Two interrelated reasons explain Stalin’s focus on these areas. The first could be described as economic. Ukraine and the North Caucasus supplied as much as half of all grain collected by the state. But in 1932–1933 they turned over 40 percent less than the previous year. While this decline was partially compensated by Russian grain-producing areas, which despite going hungry had significantly overfulfilled their plans, they could not completely make up the shortfall. In 1932 the state collected almost 20 percent less grain than in 1931.38 These figures partially explain the demands Stalin placed on Ukraine and the North Caucasus. He wanted “his” grain and was infuriated that they were not providing it.
Second, Stalin saw the crisis of 1932 as the continuation of the war against the peasantry and as a means of consolidating the results of collectivization, and he had a point. In a letter to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov on 6 May 1933, he wrote: “The esteemed grain growers were in essence waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war by starvation.”39 He undoubtedly considered the peasantry of Ukraine and the North Caucasus to be at the forefront of this peasant army battling the Soviet government. These regions had always been hotbeds of anti-Soviet sentiment, and Ukraine had been at the forefront of the anti-kolkhoz movement in 1930. Repeated incidents of unrest flared up in both Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1931–1932. A further cause for concern was Ukraine’s border with Poland. Stalin feared that Poland, in its hostility toward the USSR, could exploit the Ukrainian crisis.40 Overall, as Hiroaki Kuromiya points out, Stalin was suspicious of all peasants, but “Ukrainian peasants were doubly suspect both for being peasants and for being Ukrainian.”41
By proclaiming grain collection to be a war, Stalin was untying his own hands and the hands of those carrying out his orders. The ideological basis for this war was the Stalinist myth that “food difficulties” resulted from acts of sabotage by “enemies” and “kulaks.” Any suggestion of a link between the crisis and government policy was categorically rejected. By blaming all food shortages on “enemies” and on the peasants themselves while also promoting the idea that the scale of the famine was being maliciously exaggerated, Stalin relieved himself and the central government of any obligation to help the hungry. A statement by the general secretary in February 1933 at a congress of kolkhoz shock workers shows the depth of his cynicism: “One of our achievements is that the vast masses of the poor peasants, who formerly lived in semi-starvation, have now, in the collective farms, become middle peasants, have attained material security.… It is an achievement such as has never been known in the world before, such as no other state in the world has yet made.”42 This statement came at a time when thousands were dying every day.
Stalin could not deceive everyone. In May 1933, as the famine raged, he met with Colonel Raymond Robins, an American progressive who sympathized with Soviet Russia. Robins was famous for his meetings with Lenin as a member of the Red Cross mission to Russia in 1917–18. Counting on Robins’s help in strengthening relations with the United States, Stalin was friendly toward the American and adopted a tone of sincerity and candor. He knew that Robins was well informed about Soviet realities and did not dare deny that his country was afflicted by famine. In response to a direct question about the poor harvest of 1932, Stalin, after some lengthy equivocation, did admit that “some peasants are currently starving.” The reasons he gave for the famine exhibited impressive inventiveness and imagination. Parasitically inclined peasants, he argued, who had joined the kolkhozes late and were not earning anything through them, were the ones starving. Independent peasant farmers who did not work on their own plots but lived by stealing grain from kolkhozes were also “going terribly hungry.” They supposedly were left with nothing to eat after the introduction of harsh penalties for theft.43 To top off these lies, Stalin assured Robins that the state was helping the victims of famine, even though the kolkhoz members themselves were against such aid: “The kolkhozniks are really mad at us—you shouldn’t help idlers, let them die. That’s how they are.”44 Robins was probably not convinced, but as a true diplomat, he did not press Stalin.
While it is difficult to know how much Stalin believed of his own explanations, his conversations with Robins tell us something about his thinking. First, he apparently knew about the famine and recognized it as an actual fact, not a fiction made up by “enemies.” Second, he does not appear to put much store in his own accounts of underhanded plotting by enemies and wreckers. He does not mention this “problem” once in his talks with Robins, which may suggest an awareness of the true causes of the famine and its ties to collectivization. It is doubtful, however, that he ever admitted any mistakes, even to his closest associates. Only mythic explanations of reality served his purpose. Claims about enemies, sabotage by peasants, or mistakes by local bosses permitted him to deflect guilt and doom millions without wavering.
Stalin’s comments do not reveal exactly what he knew about the famine. What did he have in mind when he admitted to Robins that some peasants were “going terribly hungry”? Did he see in his mind’s eye images of walking skeletons; desperate people foraging through buried animal remains; mothers, mad from hunger, murdering their own children? Probably not. He only encountered ordinary people at orchestrated events, and Moscow, which he regularly saw from his car window, was the relatively well-fed façade of Soviet power. OGPU reports that have recently come to light offer a detailed description of the famine, of cannibalism, and spreading anti-Soviet sentiments among the populace.45 But we do not know whether Stalin read these reports. One compelling document we do know he read is Mikhail Sholokhov’s letter of 4 April 1933.46 In horrific detail, the appalled writer described what was taking place near his home in Veshenskaya, in the Northern Caucasus:
I saw things that I will remember until I die.… During the night—with a fierce wind, with freezing temperatures, when even the dogs hide from the cold—families thrown out of their homes [for failure to fulfill their grain quotas] set up bonfires in the lanes and sat near the flames. They wrapped the children in rags and placed them on ground that had been thawed by the fire. The unceasing crying of children filled the lanes.… At the Bazkovsky kolkhoz they expelled a woman with a baby. She spent the night wandering through the village and asking that she and the baby be allowed inside to get warm. No one let her in [there were severe penalties for aiding “saboteurs”]. By morning the child had frozen to death in the mother’s arms.