Designer Famine

Stalin and the Bolsheviks staged a starvation genocide in Ukraine that was kept secret for decades.

Feb 22, 2023

Ninety years ago in a land that today urgently commands the world’s attention, the nascent Soviet Union—beginning with its Five Year Plan to fuel industrialization—orchestrated an extermination of Ukrainians. Those people and their inherited agrarian order, nationalist stirrings, and values of self-reliance endured a methodical campaign to purge them of their identity as part of forced collectivization of agriculture.

After the fall of the Russian empire, Ukraine was free but by 1922, the USSR forcibly integrated the nation, and it became known as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Slightly smaller than Texas, Ukraine is the largest country located wholly on European soil, and has long been known as the breadbasket of Europe. The richness of its soil is comparable to the deep black loam of the Red River Valley of the north in the United States. According to the 1926 census in Soviet Ukraine, farming communities made up 89 percent of the population.

A number of ruthless communist policies resulted in the deaths of roughly 13 percent to 15 percent of Ukraine’s population. Scholars debate the actual death toll; it seems to be somewhere between four million and 10 million people. (By comparison, the population of Washington state is 7.7 million.) One estimate of eight million total deaths includes three million children. After a showcase purge of the cultural and spiritual leaders, the far-left Bolsheviks party committed to implementing strategies, backed by militarized Soviet police, that guaranteed millions of rural peasants would die. And they did. The terror-famine, known now as the Holodomor, hunger-death, played out in 1932 and peaked in 1933.

This man-made starvation didn’t really make the news. Any mention of the famine was forbidden in the USSR; foreign correspondents were not allowed on Ukrainian soil; the 1937 census, which findings showed a drop in the Ukraine population, was never made public. Even those census workers were arrested and some executed. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin destroyed archives and made sure death certificates cited “freezing” or “pneumonia” as causes of death, for example—not “starvation.” At least one journalist and several photographers tried to expose the crisis, but Stalin managed to control the narrative. The regime denied any artificial famine goings-on in the Ukrainian province, and the international press went along with this. And, it’s said, the West didn’t want to get involved in Soviet politics.

The Holodomor is controversial. As with the Holocaust, there are deniers. There is also modern propaganda regarding the event, and you can clock it easily if you read comments under Instagram posts about the Holodomor. The bots are buggy and repeat the same script over and over again throughout the thread. The main thrust of the counter narrative is that it’s not fair to say that Ukraine was targeted for genocide. News items in general acknowledge other parts of the USSR that also suffered from collectivization efforts. There were more than 100 nationalities living under the central authority. For the purposes of this article, which explores only details related to the Ukrainian theater, the hunger death was a genocide.

Stalin and the Bolsheviks manufactured this systematic famine with bias. It was economic policy. The Soviet Union intended to fuel a late-to-the-game industrial revolution by selling grain to the West. At the time, Russian agriculture was functioning barely at survival level. To fund building up industries like electricity, coal, and steel, Stalin set in motion brutal collectivization processes designed to extract grain, sugar, and wealth; control labor; and crush Ukrainian self-determination.

Following the Russian Civil War, the Ukrainian people were reportedly dispirited. The Bolsheviks had exterminated capitalists and then anarchists. Millions of people had been executed on the spot, shot, or sent to labor camps. In the 1920s, under the collectivism policy, the central Soviet authority closed churches, burned icons, and arrested priests in Ukraine. It imprisoned, exiled, or executed tens of thousands of intellectuals, teachers, writers, scientists, and other cultural leaders. “That’s how communism takes over,” says a source, who prefers to be anonymous. “They believe they are building a bright future. People dressed in clothes that signaled they were with the communist party.”

Collectivization efforts included the establishment of kolkhoz—that is, communal farms—that combined, say, 80 small farms into one big farm. In 1929-1930, the farmers were deprived of their property. Land and livestock were transferred to state-owned farms, and farmers expected to work as day laborers. “Successful independent farmers in Ukraine didn’t want to voluntarily join in kolkhoz with lazy poor ones,” according to a source. But peasant revolts were brutally suppressed.

The Red Army was huge, well-fed, and armed. It was a machine. The Ukrainians did not bear arms. They had no fitting defense. The people did not consider hurling stones at the KGB, to somehow divert it from its mission of coordinating mass purges and consolidating power. The people didn’t have a chance.

L’Ukraine a toujours aspirè à être libre, wrote Voltaire, considered one of the greatest of all French writers, in 1708. “Ukraine has always aspired to be free,” he penned. “But as it is surrounded by Muscovy, the states of Grand Seigneur [Turkey], and Poland, it was compelled to seek a protector, and therefore a master, in one of these three nations.” Poland would treat it as a dependent, said Voltaire, and the Muscovite would enslave it.

In 1931, Stalin deliberately set impossible quotas for grain production. When quotas were not met, police swept farms and confiscated all the grain they could find. In 1932, Soviets collected four million tons of grain from Ukraine; a new law punished anyone caught hiding grain or bread with ten years of prison or the death penalty. Some party members sent letters to Stalin pleading for food relief.

Stalin disparaged Ukrainian farmers with a propaganda campaign. Anyone resistant to collectivization was labeled a kulak, the Russian term for a wealthy peasant, and depicted as a greedy exploiter, a parasite, and an enemy of the state. Down with the kulaks. Annihilate the kulak class. He seized the belongings of the so-called kulaks—and exiled, imprisoned, and executed them. For those peasants that remained, a famine was engineered to starve them.

The irony of murder by starvation for the people who grow the food gets lost in the fragments of oral history that have surfaced. The farmers were thought to carry the traditions, folklore, music, language, literature—the national spirit—of Ukraine. Their nationalism was treated as a serious threat to the Soviet state. It was a war of ideology intended to sever Ukrainians’ connection to the land. They would survive not by tending the earth; instead, the state would provide for livelihood. The peasant class would be sacrificed, and eliminated. This was a targeted extermination of peasantry, with mass graves for the starved.

People looked for food anywhere, in rivers or in the forests. They ate their animals and their pets. They caught birds and mice. They took any kind of sustenance from trees, eating bark. They ate the flesh of dead animals.

There were village scenes of police taking away the children of mothers who died of starvation, bloated bodies on the ground of those who couldn’t get up, and orphans living in the streets. Ravens ate unburied bodies. Swollen people lied in fields. So many of the dead were lying about. People had to step over them.

Anyone who spoke out was never seen again.

Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British journalist, the only foreign reporter known to have covered the terror genocide in Ukraine, described a scene from the peak of the famine in 1932, “At every [train] station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering icons and linen in exchange for a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows—infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks.”

The Bolsheviks drove to exact total submission from Ukraine. In August 1932, a law was enacted to make it possible to prosecute people for gleaning leftover grain from the fields. More than 200,000 people were sentenced under this law. In the fall and winter of 1932, police began confiscating not just grain but anything edible. The Bolshevik government began blacklisting farms and villages that didn’t meet grain quotas, prohibiting them from receiving supplies or participating in trade. This widespread and pernicious blacklisting was justified on grounds of infamy—with targets considered to be in gross violation of societal norms—and punishment fell on all residents of affected villages, including children. Some blacklisted areas could have death rates exceeding 40 percent. The Soviets closed the borders of Ukraine to block peasants from leaving the famine-affected areas to search for food; travel required a passport. It’s thought that hundreds of thousands of people were intercepted, turned back, or arrested for trying to get out. “Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers,” writes The Economist. “It was weaponized.”

In a review of the 2017 book “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine” by Anne Applebaum, The Economist summarizes the author’s depiction of the mass murder by starvation: “The book’s most powerful passages describe the moral degradation that resulted from sustained hunger, as family solidarity and village traditions of hospitality withered in the face of the overwhelming desire to eat. Under a state of siege by Soviet authorities, hunger-crazed peasants took to consuming grass, animal hides, manure, and occasionally each other. People became indifferent to the sight of corpses lying in streets, and eventually to their own demise.”

Another passage from author Timothy Snyder in his 2010 book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” delivers a grim summation:

Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.

One gets the idea that Ukrainians might be afflicted yet by this legacy of private suffering and public tragedy—and lineal reverberations—imposed on them by the arm of history. Breaking the taboo of cannibalism, from desperation, is a haunting heritage. By some accounts, the terror led a camp of Ukrainians to embrace Nazi ideology in World War II. In the 1960s and 1970s, people had relatives still serving prison time after the war, and their families were rumored to have machine guns and ammunition buried in their backyards; it was a running joke, apparently. “Red Famine” argues that the country’s “pathologies” including political passivity and tolerance of corruption can be traced back to the designer famine.

Maybe. Or maybe the Bolsheviks, in fact, failed to vanquish the soul of this nation. “Ukrainians are greedy, scheming, hardworking people who want to work and make good money,” says a source. “For decades, communists tried to eradicate these character traits and killed tens of millions.”

The designer famine execution comprised mostly rural areas. By the end of 1933, the central state had replaced 60 percent of the peasants’ leaders, and purged another 40,000 workers. During the starvation, Stalin quoted Vladimir Lenin, saying, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Food rationing was based on status markers such as where you lived, whether you worked, and what work you did. After its peak in May and June of 1933, the famine slowly subsided. It is thought that the regime rolled back the hunger games because of a depleted workforce. By 1934, most of Ukraine was collectivized. The Soviets had to rebuild the labor pool and brought in settlers, mostly Russians.

In Russia, Stalin denied that the starvation took place. The Soviet press was banned from reporting about famine, but Stalin allowed language—such as “food shortage” or “deficient food supplies”—that would effectively whitewash the situation. Foreign reporter for The New York Times, Walter Duranty, the chief correspondent stationed in Moscow, refuted the famine in his articles. “Soviet Not Alarmed Over Food Shortage,” read one of his headlines.

Duranty had received the Pulitzer Prize—and been cited for “dispassionate interpretive reporting”—for an eleven-part series that he wrote in 1931 about the USSR, much of it waxing in its descriptions of Bolshevik plans and progress. Says Applebaum, Duranty towed the line because it was good for his career. He defended Stalin, used approved euphemisms such as “malnutrition,” and (in that same March 1933 story) appeared to justify the use of force. “To put it brutally,” Duranty wrote, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He referred to reports of famine as exaggeration and malignant propaganda. Many other leftist journalists in the West sympathized with this brand of narrative. In short, there was an active cover up.

In 1933, Welsh writer Gareth Jones reported about the famine after he snuck into the province and set out on foot to interview ordinary Ukrainians. “Famine Rules Russia” was a headline. (The USSR was often referred to as Russia in that time.) “Russia today is in the grip of famine, which is proving as disastrous as the catastrophe of 1921, when millions died.” About the situation on the ground in Ukraine, he wrote, “Everywhere was the cry, ‘there is no bread; we are dying.’”

Duranty, with his great influence, countered Jones’ and reported there were no grounds for predictions of disaster. Russians were hungry, but not starving. Jones was killed in suspicious circumstances in Mongolia in 1935.

In 2003, the Times and the Pulitzer Prize Board came under pressure to revoke Duranty’s prize. (He died in 1957.) It was determined that such a move would be revisionist history, and fraught with the ramifications of assessing the past through the lens of the present. Says a source, “These were excuses for their refusal to address their pro-communist past.”

Beginning in 1933, famine-relief became yet another instrument of oppression, delivered based on ideological virtue. State aid was directed, first and foremost, to “conscientious” workers committed to maintaining the collective farm system. Even that assistance would have to be repaid with interest.

Of the estimated 70 million famine deaths in the 20th century, The Economist reports, at least 40 million occurred under communist regimes. Says the magazine, “What clearer illustration could there be of socialism’s impracticality than its repeated failure to feed its own people?”

In response to a comment downplaying the genocide on an Instagram post, one person spoke of her elders giving testimony of the famine years. “Ideologists always absolutize their teachings,” wrote that descendent of hunger survivors. “If you are not for them, you are considered an enemy. Ideologists consider themselves in the possession of the only truth, spreading death and cruelty wherever they go.”

Henry Kissinger is famous for saying—or not saying, depending on the source—that if you control the food, you control the people. “Most communist revolutionaries were good people with idealism,” says a source. “After a revolution is won, someone has to run things. Bureaucrats are better at it, and soon shoulder the idealists away. After which they put them up against the wall, to be sure.”

In contemporary Ukraine, Holodomor commemorations have taken place in cities across the country without state support. People taste dishes made of tree bark and mark uncelebrated weddings, unrealized talents, and meetings that never took place.