What Is the Ukraine Famine Disaster of 1932-1933?

Human populations throughout history have endured severe widespread food shortages called famines, which result in hunger, starvation and death. One modern-day famine engulfed Ukraine in 1932-1933, leading to death by starvation of millions of people of all ages. The famine resulted from Joseph Stalin’s deliberate use of organized mass starvation to crush peasant resistance to collectivizing their farms. This famine, which Ukrainians call the “holodomor”, is perhaps the only case in history of a purely man-made famine.*

Ukrainian embroidery pattern. Source: http://www.brama.com/art/pics/vysh1.jpg

Ukranian embroidery pattern. Source: http://www.brama.com/art/pics/vysh2.jpg

Why is knowing more about the holodomor important? This knowledge improves our understanding of the challenges facing Ukraine today as it tries to shed itself of seventy years of Soviet communist creed and culture (see also Biot #159). Indeed, the U.S. Department of State today

“attaches great importance to the success of Ukraine's transition to a democratic state with a flourishing market economy. Following a period of economic decline [after the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, resulting in a newly independent Ukraine] characterized by high inflation and a continued reliance on state controls, the Ukrainian government began taking steps in the fall of 1999 to reinvigorate economic reform that had been stalled for years due to a lack of a reform majority in the Ukrainian parliament.”

The Ukrainian government's stated determination to implement comprehensive economic reform is a welcome development, and the U.S. is committed to strengthening its support for Ukraine as it continues on this difficult path. Bilateral relations suffered a setback in September 2002 when the U.S. Government announced it had authenticated a recording of President Kuchma's July 2000 decision to transfer a Kolchuga early warning system to Iraq. The Government of Ukraine denied that the transfer had occurred. U.S. policy remains centered on realizing and strengthening a democratic, prosperous, and secure Ukraine more closely integrated into European and Euro-Atlantic structures…On December 25, 1991, the United States officially recognized the independence of Ukraine. It upgraded its consulate in the capital, Kiev, to embassy status on January 21, 1992.””**

CIA map of Ukraine
Source: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/up.html

Ukraine is rich in agricultural, industrial, and mineral resources, and has served for centuries as Russia’s bread basket and sugar bowl. As a result, holding on to Ukraine was essential for the fledgling Soviet regime following the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The character of Ukrainian culture made assimilation into the communist world difficult. “Throughout their history the Ukrainians have been largely a people of free warriors (the Kozaks) and of peasant farmers,” wrote the late Christian Science Monitor journalist and author William Henry Chamberlin (1897-1969) in his 1944 book titled “The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation.”*** Chamberlin’s wife was Ukrainian, which in large part accounted for the regularity with which they traveled to Ukraine, including immediately upon the Soviets reopening the region to foreign press in 1933.

“In this strong peasant background,” Chamberlin continued, “one may find the origin of some very attractive traits in the Ukrainian national character, frankness, simplicity, open-hearted hospitality, and…the love of liberty…But the love of liberty, in itself, is not enough. It is likely to burn out in futile explosions unless it is accompanied by a capacity for democratic self-discipline.”(p.6) Ukrainians have “been more capable of rebelling against a bad government than of creating a good government,” Chamberlin sadly wrote. “It is the lack of this capacity that explains the failure of various attempts [in the past] to create a Ukrainian sovereign state.”

The Soviet Government proclaimed the Ukraine a Soviet Republic on December 18, 1918, and initially worked to win over the Ukrainians by assuring them of their cultural (but not political and economic) equality. “The Ukraine passed through much the same stages of economic and social development as the other regions of the Soviet Union,” wrote Chamberlin. “The 1920s represented a relatively mild period, particularly following Lenin’s adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) with its legalization of private trade and abandonment of the previous policy of requisitioning the peasants’ surplus produce.” (p. 56) But when Stalin took the helm following Lenin’s death in 1924, he contrived a return to a stricter vision of Marxism through adoption of the First Five Year Plan in late1928 (1929-1933).

The two goals of the Soviet Government’s First Five Year Plan were 1) to accelerate industrial development at a very rapid pace and 2) to replace individual with collective farming. The reasoning went that collective farming by groups of 50-100 or more peasant families in state-owned farms would boost agricultural productivity, which was desperately needed to finance construction of new plants and purchase foreign-made machinery, particularly in the absence of foreign capital.

“The instinctive peasant reluctance to surrender his individual land holding was especially strong in the Ukraine, and the arbitrary and violent methods employed to promote collective farming led to two great and little known tragedies in Ukrainian history, the liquidations of the kulaks as a class and the famine of 1932-1933,” wrote Chamberlin (p. 57) Everywhere Chamberlin went in the Ukrainian countryside before the famine, he heard “dinned into my ears” that “the peasants were not receiving what they considered a fair equivalent in manufactured goods and other city products for the grain and other foodstuffs which they were expected and, during the Five Year Plan, required to give up to the government collectors.” (p. 57) The Soviet Government’s secret political police responded by systematically purging genuine or suspected Ukrainian nationalists, which included all of Ukraine’s educated class (e.g., doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergy, writers) and well-off peasants (the kulaks).

The Soviet Government did not stop at liquidating Ukrainian leadership. In the autumn of 1932, it began exterminating millions of regular peasants. “Despite the meager harvest, the peasants could have pulled through without starvation if there had been a substantial abatement of the requisitions of grain and other foodstuffs. But the requisition s were intensified, rather than relaxed; the Soviet Government was determined to ‘teach the peasants a lesson’ by the grim method of starvation, to force them to work hard in the collective farms,” wrote Chamberlin.

Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent to Moscow who died in 1957 and is now considered by many as a Stalin apologist (and therefore hated by many Ukrainians), nonetheless acknowledged the famine in the following passage from his 1944 book titled “ USSR: The Story of Soviet Russia (pp.194-5), as quoted by Andrew Gregorovich in “Black Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933” at : http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/gregorovich/.

“ In April, 1933, I [Walter Duranty] traveled through Ukraine to Odessa, and ... a Red Army brigade commander (General) told me: 'We had a communal farm in Ukraine attached to my regiment…Everything went well until a year ago (1932). Then the whole set-up changed. We began to get letters asking for food. Can you imagine that, that they asked food from us? We sent what we could, but I didn't know what had happened until I went to the farm only a month ago (March 1933). My God, you wouldn't believe it. The people were almost starving. Their animals were dead. I'll tell you more, there wasn't a cat or dog in the whole village, and that is no good sign ... Instead of two hundred and fifty families there were only seventy-three, and all of them were half-starved. I asked them what happened. They said 'Our seed grain was taken away last spring.' They said to me, 'Comrade Commander, we are soldiers and most of us are Communists. When the order came that our farm must deliver five hundred tons of grain, we held a meeting. Five hundred tons of grain! We needed four hundred tons to sow our fields, and we only had six hundred tons [bolding by editor]. But we gave the grain as ordered." What was the result? I asked the brigade commander. ‘Barren fields,’ he told me. ‘Do you know that they ate their horses and oxen, such as was left of them? They were starving, do you know that? Their tractors were rusty and useless; and remember, these folks weren't kulaks, weren't class enemies. They were our own people, our soldiers. I was horrified ...’"

Chamberlin noted that early in 1933 the Ukraine was declared out of bounds for foreign correspondents who might make the world aware of the famine. “Moscow [where Chamberlin was living] was flooded with rumors of widespread starvation, of carts going about the stress of Poltava and other towns, picking up the dead. In the autumn of 1933, when the ban on travel in the Ukraine by foreign journalists was lifted, I went with my wife, who was herself born in the Ukraine, to learn at first hand what had happened in the Ukraine.” (p. 60)

Chamberlin observed “a gigantic tragedy.” “What had happened was not hardship, or privation, or distress, or food shortage, to mention the deceptively euphemistic words that were allowed to pass the Soviet censorship, but stark, outright famine, with its victims counted in the millions. No one will probably ever know the exact toll of death, because the Soviet Government preserved the strictest secrecy about the whole question, officially denied that there was any famine, and rebuffed all attempts to organize relief abroad.”

Local Soviet officials admitted to Chamberlin that the death rate was “not less than ten percent” meaning that, assuming a ten percent figure across all villages, the number of deaths in Ukraine “must have been over three million.” (p. 62) While no official statistics about this tragedy have been published there is circumstantial evidence showing how the population growth of Ukraine was retarded (see table below).*****:

Editor’s Note:

William Henry Chamberlin no doubt would be a gratified observer of the current situation in Ukraine, which includes the election to the office of president the charismatic, Ukrainian-speaking, dioxin-poisoned Viktor A. Yushchenko who is married to Kateryna Yushchenko-Chumachenko, a Ukrainian-American born in Chicago. Yushchenko, a banker by background, was born into a family of teachers on February 23, 1954 in a small village (Khoruzhivka, Sumy Oblast) in northeastern Ukraine. His parents clearly survived the famine of 1932-1933. As a politician, Viktor Yushchenko is a moderate, West-friendly Ukrainian nationalist who advocates massive privatization of the economy. He has pledged to fight corruption as the first task of his presidency in a country that currently, according to Transparency International's 2004 ranking of corrupt nations, ranks #128 (out of 146), nestled between Sudan and Cameroon.******

Viktor Yuschenko voting in Kiev on December 26, 2004.
Source: http://www.yuschenko.com.ua/eng/

By contrast, Yushchenko’s rival for the presidency was the Russian-speaking Communist, Viktor Yanukovych, who was born in 1950 in the working class neighborhood of a suburb of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Yanukovych favored tighter integration with Russia, making Russian a second official language and criticizing the West. He also confronted the Ukrainian nationalism movement of his opponent and criticized western (farming) Ukrainian regions.

Ukraine’s historic problem of Russian communist domination continues today. We will watch in hopes of seeing the Ukrainian people disprove Chamberlin’s assessment that Ukraine has “been more capable of rebelling against a bad government than of creating a good government.”

Sources:

*Robert Conquest is quoted in “Nationalism and Genocide: The Origin of the Artificial Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine” by Valentyn Mmoroz, Institute for Historical Review. Paper presented to the Sixth International Revisionist Conferences, Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1986. Available at: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/nationalism.htm.

**“Background Note: Ukraine”, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, December 2004, available at: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3211.htm.

***William Henry Chamberlin: The Ukraine: a Submerged Nation. Macmillan Company, NY, 1944.

**** “ Yushchenko Pledges to Make Fight Against Corruption in Ukraine a First Priority” by Mara D. Bellaby, Associated Press Writer AP story January 2, 2005, available at: http://www2.volstate.edu/kbell/Articles/corruption_in_ukraine.htm Accessed July 6, 2005

***** “The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine: what happened and why” by Dr. James E. Mace, available at: http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/078320.shtml.

****** Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2004 at: http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2004/cpi2004.en.html.