Applebaum’s presentation of the 1932-33 famine focuses on treating the event as a deliberate act of mass murder which was genocidal in being directed against people of Ukrainian nationality. This is a narrative which was long promoted by anti-Communist Ukrainian groups abroad and has become a critical part of the Ukrainian national narrative with a particular anti-Russian focus.
This is one 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. The first post can be found at this link.
It is easy to say that this or that has been left out or underplayed in a historical account. But it is sometimes the case that "what the historian leaves out can be far more significant and telling than what she puts in."1[1] But it’s an important consideration in evaluating Applebaum’s arguments.
In the first post in this series, it was noted that Applebaum makes her case in Red Famine for four points about the 1932-33 famine:
It 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. (This factor was discussed in previous posts,)
Deliberately inflicted?
Chapter 11 (Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933) begins with a string of dramatic anecdotes containing fairly graphic descriptions of the effects of starvation. But the presentation comes off as more than a bit voyeuristic and doesn’t tell the reader much more than: starving to death is painful and horrible. And that in the face of mass starvation normal standards of decency and social cohesion break down. It certainly makes those points.
But recounting various specific stories until it reads like a zombie novel or excerpts from the Marquis de Sade is more likely to leave the reader with a sick feeling than with better understanding. The purpose of this chapter seems to be mainly to provoke emotional revulsion at the horror of it.
She closes the chapter with this conclusion suggesting without elaboration that the Communist authorities were indifferent to cases of cannibalism. But she recounts several cases of the practice (complete with sickening details of the crimes) and states:
But if either Kharkiv or Moscow ever provided instructions on how to deal with cannibalism, or ever reflected more deeply on its causes, they haven't yet been uncovered. There is no evidence that any action was taken at all. The reports were made, the officials received them, and then they were filed away and forgotten.
With that chapter, it is not at all easy to tell where the historical account ends and the author’s sensationalism-tinged ideology begins.
There is no question that the famine resulted from the collectivization, the drastic grain requisitions that occurred at the same time, the social conflict with resistance from the peasants and the regime’s response (including large-scale deportation of kulaks), and the clearly inadequate response of the central government to the famine.
But was it deliberately inflicted? That is, did the Soviet leadership specifically set out from the start to cause a famine? There seems to be little actual evidence of that. Applebaum’’s arguments are inferential. If there is a “smoking gun” on this point., she does not bring it forward.
Was the inadequate response to the starvation crisis motivated by deliberate political or genocidal intentions against Ukrainians?
It takes her until Chapter 12 to provide examples of how state institutions actually helped in some cases to mitigate starvation deaths. And there she provides the description of how starving peasants were able to obtain some food in the nearby cities:
The fact that a bazaar - even the barest bazaar - was allowed to exist in urban Ukraine meant that there was, for some people, a lifeline. But the real reason why the cities were less desperate was rationing: workers and bureaucrats received food coupons. These were not available to everybody. According to a 1931 law, all Soviet citizens who worked for the state sector received ration cards. That left out peasants; it also omitted others without formal jobs. In addition, the size of rations was based not only on the importance of the worker, but also of his workplace. Priority went to key industrial regions, and the only one in Ukraine was Donbas. In practice, some 40 per cent of the Ukrainian population therefore received about 80 per cent of the food supplies. (p. 271-2)
It’s possible that systematic provision for food supplies that she describes here – even if was clearly inadequate – coexisted with a deliberate plan on the national government’s to starve millions of Ukrainian peasants to death. But Applebaum doesn’t address the seemingly obvious question here: if this was a deliberate genocide with an ethnonationalist aim, why did the government want to spare urban Ukrainians?
Eventually, she makes this argument, which also raises the question, is this really consistent with a deliberate plan for systematic ethnonationalist on the central government’s part?
[P]aradoxically, the most important source of help for the starving came from Soviet bureaucrats and Soviet bureaucracies. The historian Timothy Snyder has described how state institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, when they were still functioning, could rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and a parallel story can be told about Stalin's Soviet Union. While the Bolsheviks had systematically destroyed independent institutions, including churches, charities and private companies, state institutions remained - schools, hospitals, orphanages - and some of them were in a position to help. Some of them, theoretically, even had a mandate to do so. [my emphasis]
Especially since we are talking about a government that considered itself Marxist, it’s appropriate to say that there were contradictions in state policy toward the famine. But Applebaum is making the case that the famine was a deliberate genocide, consciously intended the national authorities. To make that case, one would need to explain how the supposed deliberately genocidal policies coexisted with seemingly contradictory features of that same government that she herself describes.
Because what she describes is a government that deliberately drove people into starvation and cannibalism, and at the same time ran state institutions and state policies that provided real (if inadequate) relief for people facing famine conditions.
None of these criticisms are any kind of excuse or justification for a situation in which 3.9 million people starved to death. But where it fits on the spectrum from tragedy and incompetence to murderously nationalist intentions is another question. Explanations that just dismiss the possibility that governments can just really screw things up without deliberately intending to are incomplete.
It’s important to note here that the accusation that Holodomor was a deliberate act of genocide is officially embraced by the nation of Ukraine and widely used in historical narratives that are applied to boost current national goals. Andreas Kappler explains:
The Holodomor, the terrible famine of 1932/33 brought on by Stalin, and its interpretation as the genocide of the Ukrainian people became a central element of national memory. On 28 November 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. Despite the differing assessments of famine as genocide, a clear majority of the population accepted the Holodomor (which was denied in Soviet times) as a central national topic of remembrance. It overarched regional differences, as it had claimed very large sacrifices in both central and eastern Ukraine.2 [my emphasis]
Kaiser, Menachem (2012) Unshared Histories: Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands". Los Angeles Review of Books 10/16/2012. <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unshared-histories-timothy-snyders-bloodlands/> (Accessed: 2023-16-07).
Kappeler, Andreas (2014, 5th ed.): Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine, 329. Nördlingen: C.H. Beck. My translation from the German.