Stalin's Malicious Famine

Famine devastated Ukraine in the 1930s not merely as the result of terrible policy, but out of political malice.

Anne Applebaum explores the history in Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. She examines the years leading up to the famine, the Bolsheviks’ disdain for peasants and Ukrainians in particular, the efforts to destroy Ukraine’s intellectual class, agricultural collectivization’s failures, the dehumanizing use of the term “kulak,” the pitting of neighbors against each other, activists’ efforts to keep starving families from obtaining food, the soul-crushing effects of starvation, the political cover-up of the famine, and even some more recent Ukrainian history (before the current war, though, as the book was published in 2017).

Joseph Stalin would not want you to read this book. So read it. And study it carefully.

Accurate statistics proved elusive for decades. Estimates ranged from tens of thousands of deaths to 10 million deaths. According to Applebaum, meticulous work by recent Ukrainian demographers has produced more reliable figures: 3.9 million excess deaths and 0.6 million lost births. That equals 4.5 million missing Ukrainians, out of a population that had stood at roughly 31 million.

How it all unfolded is also highly unsettling, from the initial propaganda to the widespread suffering to the denial of reality itself.

What was a kulak? Ostensibly, a kulak was a wealthy peasant, but the elastic term stretched to encompass nearly anyone who was inconvenient to the Soviet Union.

Applebaum quotes the memoir of Ekaterina Olitskaia:

“Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks. A household that had two cows, a cow and a calf or a pair of horses was considered kulak. Villages that refused to give up excess grain or expose kulaks were raided by punitive detachments.”

Olitskaia went on to describe how peasants were ordered to uncover kulaks, so they would have to meet and decide “who was going to be a kulak.” Childless bachelors often received the designation.

Authorities even created an “under-kulak” enemy class—poor peasants who were allegedly under the thumbs of a kulak or who refused to join a collective farm. These peasants were believed to be beyond reeducation or redemption and were therefore vilified.

Red Famine also shows how starvation is a slow and agonizing way to die. Prolonged hunger poisons the mind as well as the body. Applebaum includes a quote from a Russian activist who was sent to Ukraine to help confiscate grain. Describing the children, this individual said:

“All alike: their heads like heavy kernels, their necks skinny as a stork’s, every bone movement visible beneath the skin on the arms and legs, the skin itself like yellow gauze stretched over their skeletons. And the faces of those children were old, exhausted, as if they had already lived on the earth for seventy years. And their eyes, Lord!”

Some victims finally did acquire food, but by that point their digestive systems had already broken down, and the act of eating killed them.

Others suffered from a “psychosis of hunger.”

“Over and over, survivors have written and spoken about how personalities were altered by hunger, and how normal behavior ceased. The desire to eat simply overwhelmed everything else—and familial feelings above all,” Applebaum writes.

Applebaum gives examples, such as one woman who stole her children’s bread so she and her husband could survive. The woman said that she only had one husband but could always have more children. Another couple gave up on their children and threw them into a deep hole, though neighbors heard the screams and rescued them.

Uliana Lytvyn, a survivor interviewed at the age of 80, recalled, “Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neither intellect nor consideration, neither sorrow nor conscience. This is what can be done to kind and honest peasant farmers.”

And even though there remained a stigma around cannibalism, some people did resort to eating human flesh to survive.

But Stalin wanted the world to believe that this wasn’t happening, that there were merely “food shortages.” Nothing to see here. Move along.

Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist, ventured into forbidden territory to witness the suffering firsthand. And he reported it, which of course earned him the ire of Soviet authorities—as well as the Moscow press corps.

“Of course, its members all knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were already beginning to look for ways to tell the same story,” Applebaum writes. Most of the press corps “closed ranks around Jones.”

Journalist Eugene Lyons said, “Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please a dictatorial regime—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation.”

Lyons added, “We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout ways that damned Jones as a liar.”

The New York Times’ Walter Duranty responded to Jones’s journalism with an article titled “Russians Hungry But Not Starving.”

It was in this article that Duranty callously declared, “To put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Read the book, which is about people, not eggs.

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