Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (12 page)

One of the very last functions that the state performed was the disposal of dead bodies. As a Ukrainian student wrote in January 1933, the task was a difficult one: “The burial of the dead is not always possible, because the hungry die in the fields of wandering from village to village.” In the cities carts would make rounds early in the mornings to remove the peasant dead of the night before. In the countryside the healthier peasants formed brigades to collect the corpses and bury them. They rarely had the inclination or the strength to dig graves very deeply, so that hands and feet could be seen above the earth. Burial crews were paid according to the number of bodies collected, which led to certain abuses. Crews would take the weak along with the dead, and bury them alive. They would talk with such people along the way, explaining to the starving that they would die soon anyway, so what difference could it make? In a few cases such victims managed to dig their way out of the shallow mass graves. In their turn the gravediggers weakened and died, their corpses left where they lay. As an agronomist recalled, the bodies were then “devoured by those dogs that had escaped being eaten and had gone savage.”
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In fall 1933, in villages across Soviet Ukraine the harvest was brought in by Red Army soldiers, communist party activists, workers, and students. Forced to work even as they died, starving peasants had put down crops in spring 1933 that they would not live to harvest. Resettlers came from Soviet Russia to take over houses and villages, and saw that first they would have to remove the bodies of the previous inhabitants. Often the rotten corpses fell apart in their hands. Sometimes the newcomers would then return home, finding that no amount of scrubbing and painting could quite remove the stench. Yet sometimes they stayed. Ukraine’s “ethnographic material,” as one Soviet official told an Italian diplomat, had been altered. As earlier in Soviet Kazakhstan, where the change was even more dramatic, the demographic balance in Soviet Ukraine shifted in favor of Russians.
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How many people were killed by famine in the Soviet Union, and in its Ukrainian republic, in the early 1930s? We will never know with precision. No good records were kept. Such records as do exist confirm the mass scale of the event: public health authorities in Kiev oblast, for example, recorded that 493,644 people were going hungry in that region alone in the month of April 1933. Local authorities feared to record deaths by starvation and, after a while, were in no position to record anything at all. Very often the only instance of state power that had any contact with the dead were the brigades of gravediggers, and they kept nothing like systematic records.
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The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers executed. In 1933, Soviet officials in private conversations most often provided the estimate of 5.5 million dead from hunger. This seems roughly correct, if perhaps somewhat low, for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, including Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia.
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One demographic retrojection suggests a figure of about 2.5 million famine deaths for Soviet Ukraine. This is too close to the recorded figure of excess deaths, which is about 2.4 million. The latter figure must be substantially low, since many deaths were not recorded. Another demographic calculation, carried out on behalf of the authorities of independent Ukraine, provides the figure of 3.9 million dead. The truth is probably in between these numbers, where most of the estimates of respectable scholars can be found. It seems reasonable to propose a figure of approximately 3.3 million deaths by starvation and hunger-related disease in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933. Of these people, some three million would have been Ukrainians, and the rest Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and others. Among the million or so dead in the Soviet Russian republic were probably at least two hundred thousand Ukrainians, since the famine struck heavily in regions where Ukrainians lived. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand more Ukrainians were among the 1.3 million people who died in the earlier famine in Kazakhstan. All in all, no fewer than 3.3 million Soviet citizens died in Soviet Ukraine of starvation and hunger-related diseases; and about the same number of Ukrainians (by nationality) died in the Soviet Union as a whole.
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Rafał Lemkin, the international lawyer who later invented the term
genocide
, would call the Ukrainian case “the classic example of Soviet genocide.” The fabric of rural society of Ukraine was tested, stretched, and rent. Ukrainian peasants were dead, or humbled, or scattered among camps the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Those who survived carried feelings of guilt and helplessness, and sometimes memories of collaboration and cannibalism. Hundreds of thousands of orphans would grow up to be Soviet citizens but not Ukrainians, at least not in the way that an intact Ukrainian family and a Ukrainian countryside might have made them. Those Ukrainian intellectuals who survived the calamity lost their confidence. The leading Soviet Ukrainian writer and the leading Soviet Ukrainian political activist both committed suicide, the one in May and the other in July 1933. The Soviet state had defeated those who wished for some autonomy for the Ukrainian republic, and those who wished for some autonomy for themselves and their families.
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Foreign communists in the Soviet Union, witnesses to the famine, somehow managed to see starvation not as a national tragedy but as a step forward for humanity. The writer Arthur Koestler believed at the time that the starving were “enemies of the people who preferred begging to work.” His housemate in Kharkiv, the physicist Alexander Weissberg, knew that millions of peasants had died. Nevertheless, he kept the faith. Koestler naively complained to Weissberg that the Soviet press did not write that Ukrainians “have nothing to eat and therefore are dying like flies.” He and Weissberg knew that to be true, as did everyone who had any contact with the country. Yet to write of the famine would have made their faith impossible. Each of them believed that the destruction of the countryside could be reconciled to a general story of human progress. The deaths of Ukrainian peasants were the price to be paid for a higher civilization. Koestler left the Soviet Union in 1933. When Weissberg saw him off at the train station, his parting words were: “Whatever happens, hold the banner of the Soviet Union high!”
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Yet the end result of the starvation was not socialism, in any but the Stalinist sense of the term. In one village in Soviet Ukraine, the triumphal arch built to celebrate the completion of the Five-Year Plan was surrounded by the corpses of peasants. The Soviet officials who persecuted the kulaks had more money than their victims, and the urban party members far better life prospects. Peasants had no right to ration cards, while party elites chose from a selection of food at special stores. If they grew too fat, however, they had to beware the roving “sausage makers,” especially at night. Rich women in Ukrainian cities, usually the wives of high officials, traded their food rations for peasant embroidery and ornaments stolen from country churches. In this way, too, collectivization robbed the Ukrainian village of its identity, even as it destroyed the Ukrainian peasant morally and then physically. Hunger drove Ukrainians and others to strip themselves and their places of worship before it drove them to their deaths.
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Although Stalin, Kaganovich, and Balytskyi explained the repressions in Soviet Ukraine as a response to Ukrainian nationalism, Soviet Ukraine was a multinational republic. The starvation touched Russians, Poles, Germans, and many others. Jews in Soviet Ukraine tended to live in towns and cities, but those in the countryside were no less vulnerable than anyone else. One day in 1933 a staff writer for the party newspaper
Pravda
, which denied the famine, received a letter from his Jewish father. “This is to let you know,” wrote the father, “that your mother is dead. She died of starvation after months of pain.” Her last wish was that their son say kaddish for her. This exchange reveals the generational difference between parents raised before the revolution and children raised thereafter. Not only among Jews, but among Ukrainians and others, the generation educated in the 1920s was far more likely to accept the Soviet system than the generations raised in the Russian Empire.
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German and Polish diplomats informed their superiors of the suffering and death of the German and Polish minorities in Soviet Ukraine. The German consul in Kharkiv wrote that “almost every time I venture into the streets I see people collapsing from hunger.” Polish diplomats faced long lines of starving people desperate for a visa. One of them reported: “Frequently the clients, grown men, cry as they tell of wives and children starving to death or bursting from hunger.” As these diplomats knew, many peasants in Soviet Ukraine, not only Poles and Germans, hoped for an invasion from abroad to release them from their agony. Until the middle of 1932, their greatest hope was Poland. Stalin’s propaganda had been telling them for five years that Poland was planning to invade and annex Ukraine. When the famine began, many Ukrainian peasants hoped that this propaganda was true. As one Polish spy reported, they clung to the hope that “Poland or for that matter any other state would come and liberate them from misery and oppression.”
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When Poland and the Soviet Union signed their nonaggression pact in July 1932, that hope was dashed. Thenceforth the peasants could only hope for a German attack. Eight years later, those who survived would be in a position to compare Soviet to German rule.

The basic facts of mass hunger and death, although sometimes reported in the European and American press, never took on the clarity of an undisputed event. Almost no one claimed that Stalin meant to starve Ukrainians to death; even Adolf Hitler preferred to blame the Marxist system. It was controversial to note that starvation was taking place at all. Gareth Jones did so in a handful of newspaper articles; it seems that he was the only one to do so in English under his own name. When Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna tried to appeal for food aid for the starving in summer and autumn 1933, Soviet authorities rebuffed him nastily, saying that the Soviet Union had neither cardinals nor cannibals—a statement that was only half true.
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Though the journalists knew less than the diplomats, most of them understood that millions were dying from hunger. The influential Moscow correspondent of the
New York Times
, Walter Duranty, did his best to undermine Jones’s accurate reporting. Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, called Jones’s account of the famine a “big scare story.” Duranty’s claim that there was “no actual starvation” but only “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition” echoed Soviet usages and pushed euphemism into mendacity. This was an Orwellian distinction; and indeed George Orwell himself regarded the Ukrainian famine of 1933 as a central example of a black truth that artists of language had covered with bright colors. Duranty knew that millions of people had starved to death. Yet he maintained in his journalism that the hunger served a higher purpose. Duranty thought that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Aside from Jones, the only journalist to file serious reports in English was Malcolm Muggeridge, writing anonymously for the
Manchester Guardian
. He wrote that the famine was “one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe that it happened.”
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In fairness, even the people with the most obvious interest in events in Soviet Ukraine, the Ukrainians living beyond the border of the Soviet Union, needed months to understand the extent of the famine. Some five million Ukrainians lived in neighboring Poland, and their political leaders worked hard to draw international attention to the mass starvation in the Soviet Union. And yet even they grasped the extent of the tragedy only in May 1933, by which time most of the victims were already dead. Throughout the following summer and autumn, Ukrainian newspapers in Poland covered the famine, and Ukrainian politicians in Poland organized marches and protests. The leader of the Ukrainian feminist organization tried to organized an international boycott of Soviet goods by appealing to the women of the world. Several attempts were made to reach Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president of the United States.
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