Red Famine

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Sometimes a book makes you physically ill just by reading it. This is the case of the Holomodor, where the genocide of the Ukranian people and its perpetrates are described in Red Famine. The worst parts were the denials and the justifications.

🎨 Impressions

It is an extremely important book, as recent events in Ukraine can testify to be. I felt it was a book that needed to be read. It goes through all the famines during the years from 1919 to 1933. I think of all the people who would rather deny than acknowledge, all the lies, all the moral high grounds, and the greed and

One of the most important books I have ever read is Animal Farm by George Orwell. It feels sickening in hindsight, to see the caricatures of the animals being brought to life again by the descriptions of Holomodor and the horrendous indifference to humans. Be aware of people who describe other people as sub-human or enemies.

How I Discovered It

I think Michael Malice recommended it on the Lex Fridman Podcast

Who Should Read It?

Everyone.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

The evilest people are those who are absolutely certain of the cause and are willing to do anything to achieve it.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger – hold – and extermination – mor.
Ukraine – the word means ‘borderland’ in both Russian and Polish
The expansion was not accidental: the regime knew that famine would bring gold into the state coffers. Following the Torgsin’s high turnover in 1932 – in that year the shops brought in 21 tonnes of gold, one and a half times the amount mined by Soviet industry – the state greedily set the 1933 target at more than double that number. The Torgsin income briefly became a crucial factor in Soviet international trade: during the years 193 the gold and other valuable objects that the state obtained through the Torgsins would pay for a fifth of Soviet hard currency expenditure on machinery, raw materials and technology.
‘L’Ukraine a toujours aspiré à être libre,’ wrote Voltaire after news of Mazepa’s rebellion spread to France: ‘Ukraine has always aspired to be free.’
John Hughes, a Welshman, founded the city now known as Donetsk, originally called ‘Yuzivka’ in his honour. Russian became the working language of the Donetsk factories. Conflicts often broke out between Russian and Ukrainian workers, sometimes taking the ‘most wild forms of knife fights’ and pitched battles.
We shall not enter the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor. Leon Trotsky,
Unexpectedly, the Russian revolution put them at the centre of international events. It also brought them fame and power for the very first time. It rescued them from obscurity, and validated their ideology. The success of the revolution proved, to the Bolshevik leaders as well as to many others, that Marx and Lenin had been right.
On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had ‘no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry’, as a recent biographer has written.
By 1919, Lenin’s telegram – ‘For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!!!’ – had become the single most important description of Bolshevik attitudes and practice in Ukraine.
Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to ‘eliminate middlemen’ and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.
In Kazakhstan the regime blocked traditional nomadic routes and requisitioned livestock to feed the Russian cities, creating terrible suffering among the ethnic Kazakh nomads. More than a third of the entire population, 1.5 million people, perished during a famine that barely touched the Slavic population of Kazakhstan. This assault on the nomads, sometimes called ‘sedentarization’, was another form of Sovietization and a clear attack on a recalcitrant ethnic group.
Year after year the Soviet leadership was surprised by the hunger and shortages that their ‘confiscate and redistribute’ system had created. But because state intervention was supposed to make people richer, not poorer, and because the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers – ‘speculators’ – who made their living by physically carrying food from farms into towns
Josef Reingold, the Chekist in charge, euphemistically referred to this program as ‘de-cossackization’. In fact, it was a massacre: some 12,000 people were murdered after being ‘sentenced’ by revolutionary tribunals consisting of a troika of officials – a Red Army commissar and two party members – who issued rapid-fire death sentences.
During his reign the okhrana, the imperial secret police, had produced the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a notorious forgery that depicted a Jewish plot to govern the world.
Of all the many things that were lost in the propaganda war between the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalism, none disappeared more quickly than nuance.
Hoover worried that ARA personnel had to control the process or aid would be stolen.
Lenin fumed and called Hoover ‘impudent and a liar’ for making such demands and raged against the ‘rank duplicity’ of ‘America, Hoover and the League of Nations Council’. He declared that ‘Hoover must be punished, he must be slapped in the face publicly, for all the world to see’, an astonishing statement given how much aid he was about to receive.
Most believed that the initial Soviet opposition to their relief programme in Ukraine was politically inspired. Southern Ukraine, one of the worst-hit regions in the whole of the USSR, had also been a Makhno and Cossack stronghold. Perhaps Soviet authorities were ‘willing to let the Ukraine suffer, rather than take the chance of new uprisings which might follow foreign contact’, the Americans mused.
At least 23,000 people died directly of hunger in the scarcely remembered smaller famine of 1928–9, and another 80,000 died from disease and other knock-on effects of starvation.
It is not possible that there is no bread. If they gave us rifles we would find some.
They set high prices for industrial goods and low prices for agricultural products (hence the designation ‘scissors crisis’), which created an imbalance
For the Communist Party the crisis threatened to overshadow an important anniversary: ten years after the revolution, living standards in the Soviet Union were still lower than they had been under the tsars.
contained no evidence of foreign contacts or revolutionary conspiracies. Yefremov nevertheless ‘confessed’, after being told that there was no other way to save his wife from arrest and torture.
‘It is better to be a good farmer in America than a bad one in Russia and be called a kulak.’
Even when not out on raiding parties, the brigades and their leaders collected information about food and who might have it. Informers were recruited to help out the activists. In some villages special boxes were set up where people could deposit anonymous confessions or information as to the whereabouts of their neighbours’ hidden grain.26 Hanna Sukhenko remembered that it was ‘popular’ to inform, because when a person found someone else’s food, he or she was given up to a third of it as a reward.
Like the central planners of the same era, the OGPU was nothing if not ambitious. Of all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks: 15,000 of the most ‘diehard and active kulaks’ were to be arrested, 30,000–35,000 kulak families were to be exiled, and all 50,000 were to be removed to the Northern Krai, the northern Russian region near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea.
Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks.
As elsewhere in the USSR, children were instructed to denounce their parents, and were questioned at school about what was going on at home.
This most visceral and immediate form of resistance continued well into the following year and beyond. Between 1928 and 1933 the numbers of cattle and horses in the USSR dropped by nearly half. From 26 million pigs, the number went down to 12 million. From 146 million sheep and goats, the total dropped to 50 million.5 Those who did not slaughter their animals protected them ferociously.
Many decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the grandson of kulaks, described the collective farms as ‘serfdom’.
Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages. Stalin himself had received reports explaining exactly what was wrong with the collective farms, describing their inefficiency in great detail
Given the scale of the food shortages it was hardly surprising that the peasants balked, that spring, and, as in 1921, refused to sow their land: if they planted their last remaining kernels of seed grain, then they would have nothing to eat. They must also have known that whatever they did manage to grow would be confiscated. In April 1932 the OGPU raised the alarm: more than 40,000 households were not going to plant anything at all.
Mykola Kostyrko, an engineer who lived in Odessa at the time, remembered ‘foreign vessels’ coming into the port: ‘they exported everything in order to get foreign capital for the “needs of the state” to buy tractors and for propaganda abroad’. At one point, he remembered, longshoremen in Odessa refused to load pigs onto a ship. A detachment of Red Army soldiers was sent to do it for them.
Years later, Susannah Pechora, a Gulag prisoner in a later period, recalled meeting a fellow prisoner, a former peasant. Upon being given her meagre daily ration, the woman sighed and stroked the small, hard chunk of bread. ‘Khlebushka, my little bit of bread,’ she purred, ‘and to think that they give you to us every day!’
Several sets of directives that autumn, on requisitions, blacklisted farms and villages, border controls and the end of Ukrainization – along with an information blockade and extraordinary searches, designed to remove everything edible from the homes of millions of peasants – created the famine now remembered as the Holodomor. The Holodomor, in turn, delivered the predictable result: the Ukrainian national movement disappeared completely from Soviet politics and public life. The ‘cruel lesson of 1919’ had been learned, and Stalin intended never to repeat it.
‘The passport system laid an administrative and judicial cornerstone for the new serfdom and tied down the peasantry as it had been before the emancipation of 1861.’
He had also travelled around the decimated countryside and witnessed the growing numbers of starving peasants, and he returned to Kharkiv devastated. He told a friend that the famine he had witnessed was a purely political construction, ‘designed to solve a very dangerous Ukrainian problem all at once’.
I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. ‘They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash’ – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating … Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows,
Kopelev himself found the task ‘excruciating’, but he also learned that constant repetition of hateful propaganda helped him steel himself to the task at hand: ‘I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.’
Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything. Ilya Ehrenburg, 1934
Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine. One woman told her village that while she would always be able to give birth to other children, she had only one husband, and she wanted him to survive. She duly confiscated the bread her children received at a local kindergarten, and all her children died
‘There were no funerals,’ recalled Kateryna Marchenko. ‘There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry.’
Emotions about the cow ran high. Petro Mostovyi in Poltava province remembered that the family cow was so precious that his father and older brother guarded it with a gun and pitchforks.
To feed their cow, Mariia Pata’s family had to take the roof thatch off their house, rip it into small pieces, and soften it with boiling water so that the animal could eat.25
Ihor Buhaievych and his grandmother survived in Chernihiv province on dried bread crusts that his mother mailed in packages from Leningrad, where she had managed to find a job. That helped keep them alive until the local post office informed the activist brigade, which began confiscating some of the crusts. Later, Ihor’s mother came home and managed to take him to Leningrad herself.
3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million
Nikita Khrushchev denounced these mass population transfers, and joked that ‘Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, (Stalin) would have deported them also.’ The official transcript recorded that this remark sparked ‘laughter and animation in the hall’.
Sergio Gradenigo, the observant Italian consul in Kharkiv, reported to Rome a conversation with an unnamed acquaintance who had agreed that the ‘Russification of Donbas’ was underway. He linked the policy to the closure of Ukrainian-language theatres, the restriction of Ukrainian opera music to just three cities, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, and the end of Ukrainization.
There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. Walter Duranty, The New York Times, 31 March 1933
Rather than accept the result, Stalin abolished it. Meetings were called; expert panels were created. A special Central Committee resolution declared the census badly organized, unprofessional, and a ‘gross violation of the basic fundamentals of statistical science’.
With publication of the 1939 census the great famine vanished not only from the newspapers but from Soviet demography, politics and bureaucracy.
Gradenigo, the Italian consul who lived in Kharkiv between 1930 and 1934, understood both the scale of the famine and the impact it had on the Ukrainian national movement. He did not doubt that ‘the hunger is principally the result of a famine organized in order to teach a lesson to the peasants’:
Andrew Cairns, who travelled through Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932 on behalf of the Empire Marketing Board. Cairns reported seeing ‘rag-clad hungry peasants, some begging for bread, mostly waiting, mostly in vain, for tickets, many climbing on to the steps or joining the crowds on the roof of each car, all filthy and miserable and not a trace of a smile anywhere’. He also concluded that the government’s grain export plan was ‘ridiculous’ and could not be fulfilled.
flavour of the cynical weariness with which at least some of the Soviet intelligentsia received these pompous outsiders can be deduced from Andrey Platonov’s play, Fourteen Little Red Huts. Platonov’s play features a visiting foreign intellectual who demands, ‘Where can I see socialism? Show it to me at once. Capitalism irritates me.’
Duranty, British by birth, had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and sceptical ‘realist’ trying to listen to both sides of a story.
Duranty’s accounts chimed with their general worldview and attracted wide attention: in 1932 his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize. Soon afterwards, Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where the Democratic presidential candidate peppered him with queries. ‘I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating,’ Roosevelt told another reporter.
‘I tramped through the black earth region,’ he wrote, ‘because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.’
Censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition’.
Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes – the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully – encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too.
Three decades later, Prokopenko managed to read a poem on a local television station, including a line about ‘people black with hunger’. A threatening visit from local authorities followed, but that left him even more convinced that the USSR was responsible for the tragedy.
Tottle’s book posited, among other things, that the Ukrainian diaspora were all ‘Nazis’; that the famine books and monographs constituted an anti-Soviet, Nazi propaganda drive that also had links to Western intelligence.
Those who lived through the Ukrainian famine always described it, once they were allowed to describe it, as an act of state aggression. The peasants who experienced the searches and the blacklists remembered them as a collective assault on themselves and their culture. The Ukrainians who witnessed the arrests and murders of intellectuals, academics, writers and artists remembered them in the same way, as a deliberate attack on their national cultural elite.
Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who invented the word – combining the Greek word ‘genos’, meaning race or nation, with the Latin ‘cide’, meaning killing – studied law at the University of Lviv, then called Lwów, in the 1920s.
Medvedev told the president of Azerbaijan that he could ‘forget about Nagorno-Karabakh,’ a region disputed by Azerbaijan and Armenia, unless he voted against a proposal to call the Holodomor a genocide.
Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s – the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers – continues to matter. Even three generations later, many of contemporary Ukraine’s political problems, including widespread distrust of the state, weak national institutions and a corrupt political class, can be traced directly back to the loss of that first, post-revolutionary, patriotic elite.