Documenting a Tragedy

David Marples

This week, Ukrainians worldwide are commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-33, known as the Holodomor (Death by Hunger).

In the period 2005-2009, when Viktor Yushchenko was president of Ukraine, several archival collections on the Famine-Holodomor of 1932-33 were made available to researchers, which supplemented earlier information gathered mainly from eyewitness reports. Perhaps the most important of these were reports from the Soviet secret police files (then called the OGPU, from 1934, the NKVD).

With the demise of the Yushchenko government in the 2010 presidential elections, the authorities have done a U-turn on the Famine question. The Ukrainian Security Service, has custody of OGPU files, but under the new leadership of Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, they are no longer freely disseminated, and the new president Viktor Yanukovych has denied that the Famine was an act of Genocide. On the contrary, Yanukovych, who has frequently wavered on this topic, appears to adhere to the Russian perspective that famines were a general phenomenon across the Soviet grain growing regions in 1932, including the Volga region, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and even Belarus.

It is true that Famine was widespread in the spring and summer of 1932, but many events that took place later in the year, and in the brutal year of 1933 were unique to Ukraine and the North Caucasus, particularly the Kuban region, which was composed of about 60% Ukrainians. And this is evident from the OGPU documents released over the past two decades, as well as the Central Archives of the Ukraine Famine in Kyiv.

It is well known that the great upheaval of collectivization and the removal of richer (“kulak”) families had a devastating impact on Soviet farms. The subsequent imposition of grain quotas by Stalin’s regime was to ensure that deliveries were transported to the towns or the Far East before the families could feed themselves. The other objective was to export grain in exchange for raw materials for the industrialization program.

A widespread drought in 1931 exacerbated the situation, but it did not lead directly to Famine. In theory farms can feed themselves. But they were not allowed to. Not only grain was confiscated from Ukrainian villages, but also seed grain, and subsequently meat, potatoes, and other crops as a penalty for failing to meet grain deliveries.

Lazar Kaganovich devised the idea of a “blackboard” (sometimes it is referred to as a ‘blacklist’) for those villages in North Caucasus that failed to meet quotas. They were then isolated, trading ended, and no one was allowed to enter or leave. The “blackboard” was soon extended to the Ukrainian SSR.

Stalin, together with his associates Molotov and Kaganovich, railed against Ukrainian party and government leaders (Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar) for their weakness and failure to take more ruthless measures. Though Ukraine’s grain quota was twice reduced, it was still well beyond farmers’ capacity to meet. Therefore the Soviet leadership took several measures calculated to transform a severe situation into a catastrophe.

First, Ukrainian leaders were bypassed. Instead, in November 1932, Molotov led a Commission to Ukraine and Kaganovich to the North Caucasus to impose order. In January 1933, Stalin sent a personal emissary, Pavel Postyshev with full authority in Ukraine as well as Vsevolod Balytsky, who took over the republican OGPU. While Postyshev used the army and local activists to take “hidden” supplies from the villages, cordoning off and starving villages that failed to meet quotas, Balytsky instituted repressions from early 1933, claiming that a mass uprising of Ukrainian nationalists had been planned for the spring of 1933 with the aid of outside forces from Poland.

The consequences were not merely devastating starvation, but wholesale arrests, deportations, and executions, none of which occurred elsewhere in the USSR.

In January, the OGPU reported 436 “terrorist acts” in Ukraine during the grain procurement campaign. About 38,000 arrests had been made, and 391 “anti-Soviet, kulak, counter-revolutionary groups” had been uncovered. Over 6,600 arrests had been made on collective farms, mostly comprised of the farms’ leadership. By January, over 8,000 had been dispatched to concentration camps.

By mid-February, the situation had escalated. The OGPU set up a “shock-operational group” in 200 districts of Ukraine and at railways stations and border crossings. It sent word to Stalin that “we are clashing with a single, carefully elaborated plan for an organized armed uprising in Ukraine by the spring of 1933, with the goal of removing Soviet power” and setting up an independent, capitalist, Ukrainian state. Needless to say, these groups had to be eradicated and thousands were subsequently deported.

No serious evidence of a planned uprising has ever emerged. Stalin was afraid of “losing Ukraine” as he wrote to Kaganovich and saw plots and plotters everywhere. Balytsky chose to feed his fertile imagination.

The repression of Ukraine’s villages led to a mass exodus of men-folk while those remaining behind simply starved. In February 1933 alone, about 85,000 peasants had fled the Ukrainian countryside. The vast majority were detained at the border and returned to their villages, or else arrested and sent to labor camps. Border crossings from North Caucasus to Ukraine, and from Ukraine into Belarus and Russia were closed. The OGPU noted that these had been escape routes in 1932 and were not about to make the same mistake again. It urged the rooting out of those peasants who had managed to get laboring jobs in the cities.

The OGPU documented the starvation in turgid accounts that nonetheless allow the reader some insights into the situation. Though some reports attribute starvation to failure to work sufficient hours or poor collective farm construction, others acknowledge that even those who had worked hard were starving.

One report from Kyiv region in late February 193–based on 40% of the districts–noted that over 210,000 people were starving and an additional 12,800 had already died. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the regional authorities proposed on February 28 to set up nurseries to feed 70,000 children, 50,000 pre-school-age children, and 300,000 adults.

The scale of the tragedy, in what had been the most productive grain-growing republic of both the Russian Empire and the 1920s USSR, is hard to fathom. The Italian Consul in Kharkiv (which remained Ukraine’s capital until 1934) reported that some 40-50% of peasants had died and estimated the death toll at around 9 million.

But we do not know the death toll. No one was counting the bodies, many of which lay for days unburied or were dumped into mass graves. The consensus among scholars is between 3 and 5 million deaths based on censuses of 1926, 1937, and 1939, but the precise number may never be determined.

Starvation and repressions achieved one of Stalin’s expressed goals: to bring the errant Ukrainian republic into the Soviet fold and punish the recalcitrants. The policy of developing Ukrainian culture and language—initiated in the 1920s, ironically under the tutelage of Kaganovich, then head of the Ukrainian Communist Party—was ended and its chief proponent, Mykola Skrypnyk, committed suicide in July 1933.

The Purges of the 1930s later removed practically all the perpetrators of the Famine at the republican level. Postyshev, Stalin’s local plenipotentiary, was executed in February 1939 (the precise date is uncertain). The entire leadership of the Ukrainian Communist Party was eliminated. Depopulated villages were refilled with families from other regions. The Famine was then systematically concealed from the public and the outside world for the next 54 years.

The late James E. Mace, former head of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, called Ukraine a “post-genocidal society.” This is a pertinent epithet for “Eastern Ukraine,” or Soviet Ukraine as it existed in 1932-33, which never fully recovered and where present-day residents still have problems coming to terms with the crimes committed in 1932-33 because essentially this heartland of Ukraine was systematically “denationalized” and eradicated by the Soviet regime.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Kyiv Post and Edmonton Journal.

Flawed by Design: the Local Elections in Ukraine

By Mykola Riabchuk

On the eve of Ukrainian local elections scheduled for October 31 relatively few people and virtually no experts believed they would be free and fair – and with good reason. The first shot at the optimists’ hopes was fired shortly after the presidential elections, as the new parliamentary majority and new government were created in a patently unconstitutional way under the leadership of President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. One of their first decisions, rubber-stamped by the now-obedient parliament without any discussion, was cancellation of local elections scheduled by the Ukrainian Constitution to be held in May and their eventual (and, again, absolutely illegal) rescheduling in October.

The reason behind this delay was patently obvious. The victorious team was not ready yet to begin another triumphant campaign after taking office in March. They needed some time to fix the playing field in the most beneficial way for themselves. Step by step, they changed radically the electoral law, stacked both central and local electoral commissions with their loyalists, subordinated completely the administrative courts that are in charge, inter alia, of solving electoral disputes, replaced all the governors and local presidential representatives that supervise the process, placed unscrupulous allies in charge of all the law-enforcement agencies, and hired even more unprincipled hacks to run national TV and radio.

Yet, even more importantly, they sent clear symbolic signals to both their supporters and opponents, but primarily to those who stood on the sidelines, reluctant and hesitant. The signals left little doubt about who was coming back to power and what kind of policies would be implemented. The police, for the first time since the Orange revolution, encroached upon people’s constitutional right for peaceful protests, restraining arbitrarily, on many occasions, their freedom of assembly. The secret police harassed demonstratively journalists, scholars, and NGO activists. Tax authorities intimidated disobedient businessmen, including media-owners, suggesting that there would be problems for those who would not tow the line. And prosecutors, in the best traditions of selective application of law, have arrested a number of opposition figures on corruption charges, all of which, so far, have been broadly trumpeted but poorly substantiated.

In brief, the new authorities have effectively redeployed all the mechanisms of Kuchma’s notorious “blackmail state” that had been abandoned but never disbanded after the revolution by President Yushchenko and his team. Now, the entire nation is paying the price for the inability of the Orange leaders to clean house, eradicate corruption, and introduce the rule of law.

As the elections neared and all the power was being concentrated increasingly in the hands of Yanukovych and his lieutenants, the dirty electoral tricks from the Kuchma era resurfaced conspicuously. Here and there, reports surfaced about the most inconvenient opposition candidates who were either barred from running, or bribed or intimidated to withdraw their candidacy, or stand aside. The most incompliant were arrested on the traditional “corruption” charges that could not necessarily be proved but would certainly eliminate the rival from the impending elections.

Tymoshenko and her “Batkivshchyna” party were considered the main rivals of the incumbent authorities, so the dirtiest tricks were directed primarily against them. The most outrageous was probably the creation of bogus parties under the same name that were slavishly registered by the election commissions, while the authentic “Batkivshchyna” documents were rejected. As a result, Tymoshenko’s party was effectively excluded from the elections in at least three crucial regions – Lviv, Kyiv, and Ternopil.

The far-right “Svoboda” appeared to be the main beneficiary of this game. They won a plurality of 30-35% in the three oblasts of Halychyna and mad significant advances in the Kyiv oblast, accumulating a respectable 5% on the national scale that, if repeated eventually in the 2012 parliamentary elections, would qualify them for seats in the Rada. For the Party of Regions it was actually a win-win situation. Having no chance to beat Tymoshenko in her western strongholds, they used “Svoboda” to undermine her strength and, at the same time, to discredit the opposition – both domestically and internationally – as dangerous radicals, nationalists, even crypto-fascists. At the same time, they understand well that “Svoboda,” unlike “Batkivshchyna,” has no chance of expanding significantly beyond Western Ukraine to challenge the Party of Regions in its traditional strongholds. Therefore, all the national TV channels (otherwise effectively censored by the authorities) hosted eagerly the “Svoboda” leaders in their political talk shows while Tymoshenko and her close associates were effectively blacklisted from the same “pluralistic” programs.

The day of the elections did not bring much violence but it brought considerable chaos. Long lines queued outside the polling stations and many voters gave up the wait, rendering the turnout unusually low for Ukraine, while many more remained at home because the bulletins disseminated by the authorities seemed to indicate there was no real choice of candidates. An unusually high number of voters (7%) voted against all candidates – probably for the same reason. In at least two places, Yasynovata (Donetsk oblast) and Kamyanets-Podilsky, where popular local leaders supported by opposition were barred from standing, the “against all” vote reached 30%. The disorder was exacerbated at various polling stations as uncounted bulletins were found and observers expelled; some members of the commissions left, or were locked out, or reportedly bribed or forced to sign fixed protocols, and more.

The final results had not been announced a week later, when this article went to press. Local results were announced wholesale by the district commissions rather than at each polling station as required by law. In all the districts where the exit polls showed the Party of Regions candidates lagging closely behind their rivals (for example, in Odesa, Luhansk, and Kharkiv), the official results reversed those standings.

Impartial observers are unanimous: “Ukraine’s Oct. 31 local elections did not meet standards for openness and fairness set by the presidential elections earlier this year.” Or, as the Kyiv Post editor put it more straightforwardly: “Yanukovych, still hobbled by his complicity in fraudulent elections during the era of ex-President Leonid Kuchma, had a chance to show he is a democratic leader. Instead, the president showed he’s the same old conniver unworthy of leading a great nation of 46 million people.” Alas, that’s true.

But what does this unpleasant result mean for the country?

First, the Party of Regions has advanced further in monopolizing all branches of power and consolidating its authoritarian rule. In terms of the popular vote it received a mere plurality of around 36% – much less than its candidate Viktor Yanukovych attained nine months ago in the second round of the presidential elections (49%), but roughly the same proportion he got in the first round. Yet, in practical terms, the electoral system adjusted by the Party of Regions to their particular needs, gives them multiple advantages. Only half of the local deputies are elected from the party lists. The first-past-the-post system apparently enhances the authority of Yanukovych’s party as it is the biggest one and endows it with a vested interest in splitting and cloning the opposition parties as much as possible, as well as in rigging election results because even minor manipulations of such a system can be crucial.

The remaining half of the elected local deputies are the so-called “independents,” even though they are nominated by different parties. Most of them are local officials or businessmen highly vulnerable to official blackmail, bribery, and intimidation. The majority, as we know from the Kuchma era, end up in the government camp – the only place where they can secure their business.

So, the Party of Regions has a good chance to create a majority not only in its traditional strongholds in the south east but also in most oblasts and towns of central Ukraine, governed until recently by “Batkivshchyna” and other “Orangists.” In some cases, the Communists who gained their usual 5%, will be employed as allies, in other cases Tigipko’s “Strong Ukraine” (4%) or Yatseniuk’s “Front of Changes” (7%) might be lured into a coalition. In any case, the Party of Regions will be able to increase its grip over the country, which will likely result in further crackdowns on the independent mass media, NGOs, political opposition, and disloyal (or not loyal enough) businesses.

Yet, this outcome may not make Yanukovych’s life easier. As Yulia Mostova remarked poignantly in a recent issue of Dzerkalo tyzhnia, by eliminating the opposition he becomes his own worst enemy (http://www.dt.ua/1000/1550/70762/). He cannot satisfy the Westerners who expect from him the promised reforms, not just moribund authoritarian “stability.” Nor can he satisfy the Kremlin, which requires more “integration” moves from him and demands that more and more national assets be given up. Something should be certainly done for the radical reform of the country but the incumbent president’s ability to achieve anything other than augmenting rampant corruption looks even less feasible than before the elections.