#red famine

“The horror, the exhaustion, the inhuman indifference to life and constant exposure to the language of hatred left their mark. Combined with the complete absence of food they also produced, in the Ukrainian coutryside, a very rare form of madness: by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread. Even more extraordinarily, its existence was no secret, not in Kharkiv, Kyiv, or Moscow.

Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation. But although the phenomenon was widespread, it never became "normal," and - despite the assertion by the machine tractor station official that people were unaffected by cannibalism - it was rarely treated with indifference. Memories of cannibalism often divide between those who heard stories of it having taken place in other distant villages and those who recall actual incidents. The former, distant in either time or space, do sometimes describe cannibalism as having become "ordinary.” Ten years after the famine, a traveller in Nazi-occupied Ukraine claimed to have met "men and women who were openly said to have eaten people ... the population considers such cases the result of extreme need, without condemning them." A report from the head of the OGPU in Kyiv province to his superiors in the Ukrainian CPU also mentions cannibalism becoming a "habit." In some villages, "the view that it is possible to consume human meat grows stronger every day. This opinion spreads especially among hungry and swollen children." (page 256)

“For all of these reasons, estimates of the numbers of dead have in the past ranged widely, from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, 7 million or even 10 million. But in recent years a team of Ukrainian demographers have looked again at the numbers that were tabulated at the district and provincial level, then passed on to Kharkiv and Moscow, and have come up with better answers. Arguing that "there was some falsification of cause of death in death certificates, but the number of registered deaths was not tampered with,” they have sought to establish reliable numbers of "excess deaths," meaning the number of people who died above an expected average. They have also looked at “lost births," or the numbers of births that did not occur, by comparison to what would have been expected, because of the famine.' Thanks to their work, agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 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. These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards.

The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number. The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per cent of the deaths took place in 1933, and most of those in the first half of the year, with the highest numbers of casualties in May, June and July.

But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932-4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years.

By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five. These extreme statistics reflect, simply, the very high death rates in that year of children.” (pages 279, 280)

“This public, international appeal for help, the only one of its kind in Soviet history, produced fast results. Several relief organizations, including the International Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC, or simply “Joint”), would eventually contribute to the relief effort, as would the Nansen Mission, a European effort put together by the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. But the most important source of immediate aid was the American Relief Administration (ARA), which was already operating in Europe in the spring of 1921. Founded by future president Herbert Hoover, the ARA had successfully distributed more than $1 billion in food and medical relief across Europe in the nine months following the 1918 armistice. Upon hearing Gorky’s appeal, Hoover, an astute student of Bolshevik ideology, leapt at the opportunity to expand his aid network into Russia. 

Before entering the country, he demanded the release of all Americans held in Soviet prisons, as well as immunity from prosecution for all Americans working for the ARA. Hoover worried that ARA personnel had to control the process or aid would be stolen. He also worried, not without cause, that Americans in Russia could be accused of espionage (and they were indeed collecting information, sending it home and using diplomatic mail to do so). 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. But the scale of the famine was such that Lenin eventually yielded.

In September 1921 an advance party of ARA relief workers reached the city of Kazan on the Volga, where they found poverty of a kind they had never seen before, even in ravaged Europe. On the streets they met “pitiful-looking figures dressed in rags and begging for a piece of bread in the name of Christ.” In the orphanages they found “emaciated little skeletons, whose gaunt faces and toothpick legs…testified to the truth of the report that they were dying off daily by the dozen.” By the summer of 1922 the Americans were feeding 11 million people every day and delivering care packages to hundreds of thousands. To stop epidemics they provided $8 million worth of medicine as well. Once their efforts were underway, the independent Russian famine relief committee was quietly dissolved: Lenin didn’t want any Russian organization not directly run by the Communist Party to gain credibility by participating in the distribution of food. But the American aid project, amplified by contributions from other foreign organizations, was allowed to go ahead, saving millions of lives. 

Yet even within this ostensibly outward-looking, genuine and robust response, there were some discordant notes. Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership—just as it would a decade later—never relinquished its desire for hard currency. Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery. By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread and foreign aid was still coming in. This was no secret: Hoover fulminated against the cynicism of a government that knew people were starving, and yet exported food in order to “secure machinery and materials for the economic improvement of the survivors.” A few months afterwards the ARA  (American Relief Administration) left Russia for precisely this reason. 

As it would a decade later, the authorities’ reaction to the famine also differed between Russia and Ukraine. Like their Russian colleagues, the Ukrainian communists set up a famine committee. But the purpose of the committee was not, at first, to help Ukrainians. In its September 1921 resolution “on the campaign against hunger,” the Politburo noted that many districts in northern Ukraine could be “fully provided by their provincial and county funds.” It therefore instructed the Ukrainian famine committee to direct any surplus Ukrainian grain—and there was some, in the northern parts of the republic not affected by the famine—to the starving Russian provinces of Tsaritsyn, Uralsk, Saratov and Simbirsk, not to the starving people of southern Ukraine. At about the same time Lenin wrote to Rakovsky, then still the leader of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, to remind him that he was expecting food and cattle from Kyiv and Kharkiv to be sent to Russia too.

By late autumn 1921, with food shortages worsening, Lenin’s tactics sharpened. Although he had already halted food collections in the worst-affected parts of Russia, the Soviet leader ordered even more pressure to be put on peasants in better-off provinces; Ukraine, despite the disaster in its southern and eastern provinces, was deemed to be one. Lenin sent frequent requests to Kharkiv for more grain. He also suggested new tactics: those who refused to turn over grain should face fines and prison—or worse. 

In November, Lenin specifically ordered “harsh revolutionary methods,” including the taking of hostages, to be used against peasants who refused to hand over their grain. This form of blackmail, used with such powerful effect against the Jews during the civil war and the pogroms, was now deployed to facilitate collection of this precious commodity. Lenin gave the grain collection teams and komnezamy a clear order: “In every village take between 15 and 20 hostages, and, in case of unmet quotas, put them all up against the wall.” If that tactic failed, hostages were to be shot as “enemies of the state.” Pressure from above was accompanied by propaganda below. In the Mykolaiv province of southern Ukraine, where famine was already beginning to bite, posters exhorted “Workers of Mykolaiv, help the starving of the Volga.”

The men of the ARA also noticed Lenin’s different treatment of Ukraine and Russia, and recorded it in their notes and memoirs. Initially, the authorities in Moscow did not tell the Americans about food shortages in Ukraine at all. The organization instead learned of the famine in southern Ukraine from the Joint Distribution Committee, which received reports of mass starvation there and passed them on to the ARA and others. 

More peculiarly, the ARA’s first requests for permission to visit Ukraine were turned down on the grounds that northwestern Ukraine was still producing plenty of grain and the republic had no need of special help. When two ARA officials finally managed to travel to Kharkiv in November 1921, they were met with a cool welcome. Mykola Skrypnyk, at that time the Ukrainian Commissar of Internal Affairs, received the Americans and told them they could not operate in the republic because Ukraine, unlike Russia, did not have an agreement with the ARA. The men were “partly amused, partly irritated,” and insisted that they were interested in famine relief, not politics. Skrypnyk responded that Ukraine was a sovereign state, and not part of Russia: “you are mixing in politics when you differentiate between the two republics; when you treat with one, and refuse to do so with the other, when you regard one as a sovereign state and the other as a subject state.” Given that Ukraine was at that time contributing to the relief of the Soviet famine, was subject to Soviet laws and confiscatory Soviet agricultural policy, Skrypnyk’s insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty in the matter of famine relief was absurd.”