The famine of 1932–33 (Holodomor)

The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33—a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated five million people who died in the Soviet Union, almost four million were Ukrainians. The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of socialist property a capital crime, leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing as little as a sack of wheat from state storehouses. The rural population was left with insufficient food to feed itself. The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief. In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period.

The famine subsided only after the 1933 harvest had been completed. The traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed, and settlers from Russia were brought in to repopulate the devastated countryside. Soviet authorities flatly denied the existence of the famine both at the time it was raging and after it was over. It was only in the late 1980s that officials made a guarded acknowledgement that something had been amiss in Ukraine at this time.

Russification

In parallel with the industrialization and collectivization drives, the Soviet regime commenced a campaign against “nationalist deviations” that escalated into a virtual assault on Ukrainian culture. Repression of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930 and the arrest and exile of its hierarchy and clergy. A clandestine organization, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, was purportedly uncovered by the secret police in 1929. In 1930 its alleged leaders—including the foremost Ukrainian literary critic of his time, Serhii (Serhy) Yefremov—faced a show trial and were sentenced to terms in labour camps. Arrests, followed by imprisonment, exile, or execution, decimated the ranks of intellectuals, writers, and artists; some, like Khvylovy, committed suicide in protest. In all, some four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite was repressed or perished in the course of the 1930s. By late 1933 Ukrainization had come to a halt, and a policy of Russification commenced.

The CP(B)U itself emerged from the Stalinist upheavals greatly altered in composition and character. Kaganovich returned in 1928 to Moscow; his place as party chief was taken by Stanislav Kosior, who was joined in 1933 by Pavel Postyshev as second secretary, who was sent from Moscow with a large contingent of Russian cadres. A series of purges from 1929 to 1934 largely eliminated from the party the generation of revolutionaries, supporters of Ukrainization, and those who questioned the excesses of collectivization. Mykola Skrypnyk, the most prominent Ukrainian Old Bolshevik, committed suicide in 1933. Though party ranks and leadership positions were now filled by Stalin loyalists, a new wave of purges during 1936–38 halved the CP(B)U’s membership, while 99 of 102 members of the party’s Central Committee were shot. Postyshev and Kosior were removed from their party posts and subsequently executed. In 1938 Nikita Khrushchev arrived from Moscow with a large number of Russian communists to take over the leadership of the CP(B)U. Finally, on the eve of World War II, both the terror and the turmoil in the party began to subside. (See also purge trials.)