FAMINE
When the time arrived to announce the results of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin had to be creative. Exercising the privilege of power, he did not cite a single actual figure but simply proclaimed that the emperor was indeed wearing clothes. The Five-Year Plan, he said, had been fulfilled ahead of schedule!
29
Of course the investment of vast resources and tons of equipment purchased from the West did yield results. Many modern factories were built, and industrial production did increase significantly. But there was no miracle. The unachievable five-year targets were, predictably, not achieved. The actual production figures were not even close: 6.2 million metric tons of cast iron in 1932 instead of the desired 17 million; 21.4 million tons of petroleum instead of 45 million; 48,900 tractors instead of 170,000; 23,900 automobiles instead of 200,000.
30
The state of consumer goods manufacturing was particularly lamentable.
But the main problem with the First Five-Year Plan was that it established a ruinously inefficient approach to industrialization. Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable. The task of arriving at an approximation of these losses rests with historians. Much better known are the statistics from another tragic result of the Great Leap—the toll taken by the Great Famine.
This famine, which reached its peak over the winter of 1932–1933, took the lives of between 5 million and 7 million people.
31
Millions more were permanently disabled. In a time of peace and relatively normal weather, agriculturally rich regions were ruined and desolated. Although the famine was a complex phenomenon, posterity has every right to call it the Stalin Famine. The Stalinist policy of the Great Leap was its primary cause; moreover, it was Stalin’s decisions in 1932 and 1933 that, instead of easing the tragedy, made it worse.
The famine was the inevitable result of industrialization and collectivization. From a productivity standpoint, the kolkhozes were a poor substitute for the destroyed farms of those who had been branded “kulaks.” The only advantage of the kolkhozes was that they gave the state a convenient means of channeling resources out of the countryside. The exceptional exploitation of peasants had two effects: agricultural workers were physically weakened by hunger, and they were deprived of any incentive to work, leading to despondency and apathy. They knew in advance that everything they grew would be taken by the state, dooming them, at best, to semi-starvation. Several years of this policy led to a gradual decline in output. In 1932 the crops did not grow well and were also poorly harvested.
The state’s interests and those of the peasants were diametrically opposed. The state was extremely aggressive in taking from the countryside as many resources as possible. The peasants, like famine victims all over the world, used “the weapons of the weak.”
32
They sabotaged the fulfillment of their obligations to the state and tried to stash away stores to feed themselves. Stalin was well aware of the hostility of the forcibly collectivized countryside, but he placed the blame fully on the peasants’ shoulders. They had declared war, he proclaimed, against the Soviet government.
The looming crisis was obvious to everyone, including Stalin, long before the famine entered its most critical phase. There were obvious steps that, if they did not prevent the famine altogether, could at least have diminished its impact. The first would have been to establish set norms for grain deliveries to the state—in other words, a move from a system of confiscation to a system of taxes. This step would have given the peasants an incentive to boost production. Stalin, however, rejected this approach.
33
He preferred to take as much as possible from the countryside without any constraints. Another step to alleviate the famine might have been to reduce grain exports or even buy grain abroad. Such purchases were made on a limited basis during the spring of 1932, so they were in principle possible.
34
But Stalin refused to make further purchases. Any concessions that hinted at the misguidedness of the Great Leap were contrary to his nature and politically dangerous to his dictatorship. To alleviate the pressure on the peasants there would have to be a reduction in the pace of industrial growth. Reluctantly, Stalin did agree to such a reduction in 1933, but his slowness to take action cost millions of lives.
By the autumn of 1932, critical delays, stubbornness, and cruelty had led Stalin himself into a dead end. No good options remained. The harvest produced by the devastated countryside in 1932 was even worse than the poor harvest of 1931. Meanwhile, industrialization continued apace, and the Soviet Union’s foreign debt for purchases of equipment and raw materials reached new heights. Given these circumstances, there was only a little room to maneuver. The government could mobilize all available resources, or dip into reserves, or appeal for international aid, as the Bolsheviks had done during the famine of 1921–1922.
35
These measures came with economic and political costs, but they were possible. Stalin probably did not even consider them. Instead, the state intensified pressure on the countryside.
Documents discovered in recent years paint a horrific picture. All food supplies were taken away from the starving peasants—not only grain, but also vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Teams of marauders, made up of local officials and activists from the cities, hunted down hidden supplies—so-called
yamas
(holes in the ground), where peasants, in accordance with age-old tradition, kept grain as a sort of insurance against famine. Hungry peasants were tortured to reveal these
yamas
and other food stores, their families’ only safeguard against death. They were beaten, forced out into sub-freezing temperatures without clothing, arrested, or exiled to Siberia. Attempts by peasants dying of hunger to flee to better-off regions were ruthlessly suppressed. Refugees were forced to return to their villages, doomed to slowly perish, or be arrested. By mid-1933 some 2.5 million people were in labor camps, prisons, or exile.
36
Many of them fared better than those who starved to death “in freedom.”
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.