Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book on the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (1 of 12)
Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book on the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (1 of 12)
What was the famine/Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine? (Part 1)
This is the first of a series of posts about some of the issues raised by Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine (2017) on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in the context of competing national narratives in present-day eastern Europe.
Anne Applebaum wrote a major book on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 that is also known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for death by starvation), Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).1
As the title indicates, there is a definite political theme to the book.
Applebaum basically makes the following case about the famine:
The famine was deliberately inflicted.
Communist ideology and particularly the Soviet Marxist understanding of the social role of peasants was a major cause.
Hostility to Ukrainian nationalism was a central focus of Stalin and the Soviet leadership in their approach.
The famine should be considered a genocide.
I’m going to discuss this is a series of posts.
First, a sketch of what the famine/Holodomor was.
Second, an explanation of why the “genocide” designation is complicated.
Third, a description of the larger (1917-1933) historical context.
Fourth, comments on Applebaum’s analysis of the famine.
What was the Holodomor/famine of 1932-33?
As it turns out, the current Britannica entry for Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33) is also written by Anne Applebaum: “Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians.”2
Serhii Plokhy also cites 3.9 million as the death toll,3 though the figures can’t be said to be exact because of deficiencies in the contemporary record-keeping. In an evaluation published in 1979 while the Soviet Union still existed and the relevant files and records were much less accessible to researches than they later became, Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod estimated that as many as 3.5 million people died “almost surely [due to] the direct or indirect result of collectivization, most probably the product of the famine of 1932-1933.”4
The famine itself was not restricted to Ukraine. Parts of Russia, Kazakhstan and Moldova were also affected. It followed the initiation of a massive farm collectivization policy by the Soviet government designed to rapidly transition agriculture from being largely based on relatively small individual plots. Since Ukraine was and is a huge agricultural center, it became the primary focus of the policy.
It also coincided with a major push for to further industrialize the Soviet Union, which required considerable foreign currency reserves to purchase necessary materials. Sales of food were a key source to build foreign currency reserves.
Both the collectivization drive and the need for the foreign currency reserves involved production quotas that had to be met and delivered to the Soviet government for disposal. In the most direct sense, it was the grain quotas that were the cause of the famine.
The Holodomor has become a central event in the Ukrainian nationalist narrative with a strong anti-Russian emphasis, not just an anti-Soviet or anti-Communist one. Russia is internationally recognized as the legal successor state to the Soviet Union, so potential reparations claims are part of the picture.
Simultaneously with the collectivization and the starvation that ensued in 1932-33, the central Soviet government increased its political control of Ukraine, which included moving the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kharkiv to Kyiv, both names now familiar even to Americans due to the current war.
The Ukrainian Parliament in 2006 “after a controversial debate, parliament passed the law ‘On the Holodomor in Ukraine’, which enshrined in law the recognition of the Holodomor as a ‘genocide of the Ukrainian people’ and classified its denial as illegal.”5
A long list of other countries, including the United States and the EU as well as various EU countries separately, also have officially recognized the famine as genocide.
I will discuss the genocide question at more length in a later post. But - unlike with Hitler and the Nazis in the Holocaust, Arch Getty observed in 2018, “we still do not have a single document directly stating Stalin’s motivations and intentions aside from his demands for grain” during that period.6
There is no question that a large famine occurred. The most harrowing chapter in Applebaum’s book, Chapter 11 (“Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”) provides a string of dramatic anecdotes containing fairly graphic descriptions of the effects of starvation. The fact that the event was horrible is not seriously disputed.
On the matter of intent on the part of Soviet leadership, we could look at events like the execution of captured White (anti-Bolshevik) prisoners of war during the Civil War, mass imprisonment in labor camps, the Katyn massacre of 1939 in Poland, or massive relocations of targeted groups of people and see a clear intent to do those particular things and to take loss of life in stride.
In the question of what actions qualify as genocide, the population relocations may be more obvious candidates. The decision to collectivize agriculture on a massive scale in the 1930s also had a clear intent – to collectivize agriculture. Whether a deliberate famine was staged in 1932-33 with a clear, intentional purpose to kill large numbers of Ukrainian peasants is a different question.
The treatment of prisoners of war by the Soviets and the Germans in the Second World War was also ugly business, as Telford Taylor described:
Soon after the invasion of Russia, the Soviet authorities publicized captured German military orders declaring that the "supply of food to local inhabitants and prisoners of war is unnecessary humanitarianism," and calling for the most far-reaching confiscation of all things of value, down to children's boots. Russian prisoners of war in German hands froze and starved to death by the millions. …
German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front … died in captivity by the millions, [though] many survived.7
The point here is that actions and results do not always provide a clear picture of motive.
Applebaum, Anne (2017): Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. [London] : Allen Lane.
Applebaum, Anne (2023): Holodomor. Encyclopedia Britannica 05/16/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor> (Accessed: 2023-08-07).
Plokhy, Serhii (2021): The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, 129. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hough, Jerry & Fainsod, Merle (1979): How the Soviet Union Is Governed, 152. Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Kappeler, Andreas (2014, 5th ed.): Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine, 329. Nördlingen: C.H. Beck. (My translation from the German.)
Arch, Getty J. (2018): New Sources and Old Narratives. Contemporary European History 27:3, 451. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/new-sources-and-old-narratives/AEF7CAE70399A58F42A4F2414400E573>. (Accessed: 2023-21-07).
Taylor, Telford (1970): Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, 25-26, 40. New York: Bantam Books.