A review of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum (2017)
“The current disaster will lead to the colonisation of Ukraine by Russians. It will transform Ukraine’s character. In the near future there will be no reason to speak of Ukraine or Ukrainian people, simply because there will be no more ‘Ukrainian problem’ when Ukraine becomes an indistinguishable part of Russia…”
The quote above does not refer to the current military conflict in Ukraine nor to the prior crisis of 2014, where Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula while Ukraine’s experiment with democracy was on the brink—the precursor to the full-scale Russian invasion launched in early 2022.
The “disaster” in question, in fact, refers to the infamous famine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933. The cause of the famine was man-made: primarily as a consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and the implementation of collective farming—which faced steep resistance from Ukrainian farmers. This resistance, as we will explore, was perceived by Stalin (along with his predecessor Lenin) as evidence of a hostile Ukrainian independence movement that had to be eliminated by any means.
Anne Applebaum’s book, Red Famine, explores what is known more famously as the Holodomor: the famine that is considered to be a genocide committed by the Soviet Union against its Ukrainian subjects. This stance has been recently officially adopted by the House of Commons, following the famine’s ninetieth anniversary in 2023.
While strictly meaning “death by hunger”, the Holodomor has come to refer to the entire Stalinist campaign to destroy Ukrainian nationalism and identity, beginning at the end of the 1920s. In the eyes of Soviet leaders, as with those of modern-day Russia, the intention was and remains the total elimination of Ukraine as a sovereign entity. Vladimir Putin has openly declared his belief that the state of Ukraine is merely an artificial construct and that its territory is really an extension of Russia.
In this multi-part series, I aim to explore the historical relationship between the two warring states and the ideological motives that led to Putin’s fateful decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Russia’s fraternal neighbour. These arguments can extend back to the foundation of the Kievan Rus, the progenitor state of both Ukraine and Russia (and also Belarus), nearly a millennia ago; for this first part I will not be travelling back quite so far in my analysis—Applebaum starts her book with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which I believe serves as an appropriate starting place to explore a century of turmoil in Eastern Europe.
Land, bread, and peace
The Bolsheviks came to power by presenting themselves as the “vanguard of the proletariat”: appealing to the vast base of Russia’s soldiers, workers, and peasants, impoverished by the First World War, who would go on to overthrow the tsar. In establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, they abolished all other political parties and eliminated their opponents through violence and terror. Soon they had achieved absolute power.
Applebaum notes that “disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state” had been an integral part of Bolshevism, even before the revolution; all of the top Bolsheviks (including Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky) were products of the recently toppled Russian Empire, and so thoroughly rejected the concept of a distinct Ukrainian identity.
The Bolsheviks also had contempt for ideas of nationalism, fueling their suspicions towards Ukrainians’ ambitions for independence. Lenin, like Marx before him, had contradictory views on nationalism: it was simultaneously seen as a positive revolutionary force and at other times a distraction from the ultimate goal of universal socialism. Lenin had supported Ukrainian nationalism when it opposed the tsar and the Provisional Government of 1917—allowing for the Bolshevik coup d’etat later that year—yet objected to it when he perceived it as a threat to the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat.
Applebaum also highlights the influence of Stalin’s 1913 essay, Marxism and the National Question, in which he argued that comrades “must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds”. Once the Bolsheviks claimed power, Stalin assumed his role as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities; in dealing with the “Ukrainian problem”, Stalin aimed to both undermine the nationalist movement (the Bolsheviks’ greatest rival in the region) and secure Ukraine’s grain supply for the Red Army.
Food was a serious political tool, one the Bolsheviks were keenly aware of both during and after the revolution; whoever had bread would have followers, soldiers, and loyal friends; whoever could not feed their followers did not retain support for long. The Bolshevik leaders sought to exploit Ukraine’s food supply to maintain order within Russia and safeguard the revolution.
“The fate of the revolution depended on our ability to reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread.”
Lenin’s urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, what became known as “War Communism”: the state was to take control of the Ukrainian peasants’ grain, at gunpoint where necessary, and redistribute it to the Red Army, along with factory workers, party members, and other “essential” persons.
Ukraine’s peasants were accused of withholding surplus grain and waging a counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks. To eradicate this sabotage, Lenin created the chrezvychainaia komisiia—the “Extraordinary Commission”—also known as the Cheka. This was the birth of the notorious Soviet secret police: what would later become the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and today’s FSB—of which Vladimir Putin is an alumni and former director.
The Bolsheviks came to occupy Kyiv, more than once, during the civil war. There they immediately abandoned any ideas that they would be advocates for “Ukrainian liberation”. The Cheka carried out numerous arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, who were accused of “separatism”, while anti-Ukrainian rhetoric became widespread. Ukrainian culture came under attack, with the banning of the use of Ukrainian language in schools and newspapers, and local theatres were shut down.
Such measures, combined with the violent grain requisitions, prompted an uprising among Ukraine’s population that devastated the countryside and created divisions that fundamentally altered the Bolshevik perception of Ukraine; previously inclined to dismiss Ukraine as a mere province of “Southwest Russia” blessed with rich soil and abundant food, the Bolsheviks soon came to see their neighbours as a potential threat to Soviet power.
Lenin himself claimed that it would be a “profound and dangerous error” for the Soviets to underestimate Ukrainians’ nationalist sentiments.
The state of emergency employed during the civil war would be reintroduced by Stalin almost a decade later in 1928, bringing with it more repression and violence against Ukraine’s peasant population. Stalin, ideologically committed to the cause of collectivisation, believed the only solution to transform the Soviet economy was to “colonise” the peasants of Ukraine, who would be forced to pay tribute that funded the USSR’s rapid industrial development.
De-kulakisation and collectivisation
Much of this violence was directed at kulaks: wealthy peasants who were deemed “enemies of the people”. Lenin had previously described them as “vampires” and “plunderers of the people”, and pledged to wage a war against the counter-revolution of which he claimed they were the vanguard.
Stalin had explicitly linked the “national question” to Ukraine’s peasant population; in a speech in 1925 he declared that “the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army”. Stalin, as Applebaum notes, was concerned with the danger of “peasant armies” united behind a national cause, and Ukraine had both the most prominent nationalist movement and the largest peasant population at the time.
While the problem of Ukrainian national aspirations may seem distinct from the troubles caused by peasant resistance to Soviet grain procurement, the two issues had become interlinked in the minds of Stalin and the secret police, and the policy of collectivisation set out to eliminate them both.
Through collectivisation, its advocates believed, the peasant population would be transformed into a proletariat—devoid of any nationalist sentiment.
“The national question is purely a peasant question…the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers…which, like a millstone, grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This is the universal proletariat.”
Collectivisation became Stalin’s pet project, forced upon the countryside by urban outsiders who were “culturally alien” and, in the case of Ukraine, linguistically and ethnically alien as well. Yet, despite enforcement from above, the policy did find considerable support amongst the local population.
The Bolsheviks had made great claims during the revolution, promising wealth, land ownership, and power to the working classes, but in the turmoil of the civil war such promises had been broken and forgotten. Ten years on, the Bolsheviks sought to again exploit the peasantry and turn it against itself, and so used the kulaks as scapegoats.
Applebaum explores that the term “kulak” had always been vague and ill-defined, despite its widespread use by state officials and agitators. The notion of a “wealthy” peasant was a ridiculous one in the early Soviet Union: a wealthy man could be one who owned two cows instead of just one; it may also have been used to smear individuals who had enemies among the local population or authorities.
Once a peasant was branded a “kulak”, he was automatically a traitor, an enemy, and a non-citizen of the USSR. He lost his property rights, his legal standing, his home, and his place of work. His possessions no longer belonged to him. He would then be arrested and likely deported.
The high numbers of arrests and deportations of kulaks from Ukraine in the late 1920s clearly reflected Moscow’s perception of Ukrainian peasants as the greatest threat to Soviet political power. At least 100,000 deported peoples would fuel the rapid expansion of Soviet forced labour camps—what would eventually be known as the Gulag. In some regions, local officials sought an increase in the number of kulaks in order to meet the demands of manpower needed to staff the local coal mines and metalworks, all in an effort to meet the impossible requirements of Stalin’s Five Year Plans that aimed to radically restructure the Soviet economy.
The need to meet these higher demands also led to an increase in the use of anti-kulak rhetoric, which became more extreme over time. Agitators used the term “kulak-White-Guard-bandits” to describe opponents of collectivisation, stigmatising the kulaks as not only class enemies but as national enemies—agents of the White Guard—and criminals. To agitators, anyone who didn’t join the collective farms must by definition be part of the counter-revolution, part of the defeated Ukrainian national movement, and part of one of the many “enemies” of the Soviet regime.
The initial refusal to join the collective farms was itself a form of resistance: many Ukrainian peasants did not trust the Soviet state that they had fought against just a decade earlier. Peasants did not want to forfeit their property (namely cattle and tools) to what they considered an uncertain, and unreliable, regime. Many also had reason to fear that after the kulaks had been dealt with, the Soviets would turn on them next.
Applebaum chronicles the (sometimes violent) resistance of Ukrainian peasants that accompanied every stage of de-kulakisation and collectivisation, from the grain requisitions of 1928 to the deportations of 1930, continuing throughout 1931 and 1932, until hunger and repression finally rendered further defiance impossible.
From the beginning, resistance helped shape the nature of collectivisation: because peasants refused to cooperate, the idealistic young agitators from outside and their local allies grew angrier, their methods became more extreme and their violence harsher. Resistance, especially in Ukraine, also raised alarm bells at the highest level. To anyone who remembered the peasant rebellion of 1918-19, the rebellion of 1930 seemed both familiar and dangerous.
The policy of collectivisation itself need not have led to a famine on the scale of the one that would take place in 1932-33, but its brutal enforcement destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order. Old values—respect for property, for dignity, for human life—had been eroded.
Much of this would come to resemble the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the “Great Terror”—the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes—were on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued well after the Second World War; it would be taught to every successive generation of secret policemen as well as Communist Party leaders.
Death by hunger
Collectivization had utterly destroyed the feeling of “responsibility” among Ukraine’s peasants, which would go on to plague Soviet agriculture and industrial development for as long as it was in practice. This was obvious at the time, but it was not possible for even senior party officials to question the policy due to its close association with Stalin. Stalin could not be wrong, nor responsible for any failures, and so responsibility for the looming disaster was once again pinned on the lowest of Ukrainians.
Convinced that collectivisation was successful, the Kremlin made the decision to increase the export of Soviet grain. Grain was exchanged for hard currency, used to buy modern industrial equipment that would assist in the USSR’s economic transformation, but it also brought political power.
Applebaum points out the parallels between the future Russian use of gas as a weapon of influence, where Putin has frequently threatened to “turn off the taps” to dependent European states, and the Soviet use of cheap grain exports to ask for political favours. In one example, in 1920 the USSR demanded the Latvians recognise the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and threatened to withhold grain shipments.
These conditions exacerbated the ongoing famine in Ukraine, creating what we now know today as the Holodomor. Estimates of the numbers of dead agree on a total of roughly four million, although some range as high as seven or even ten million. The total population of Ukraine at the time was about 31 million, meaning that nearly 13 percent of the population perished in just over a year between 1932 and 1933.
The vast majority of these deaths were in the countryside, decimating the peasant population. In turn, much to Stalin’s desire, the famine had eliminated the danger of a mobilised Ukrainian nationalist movement led by a “peasant army”.
“The famine of 1932-33 was needed by the Soviet government to break the backbone of the Ukrainian opposition to complete Russian domination. Thus, it was a political move and not the result of natural causes.”
Stalin, characteristically, had no sympathy for such a catastrophic loss of life. He considered those who were starving to death not to be innocent, for they were traitors who conspired to undermine the proletarian revolution. They were waging “a war against Soviet power”. Using his twisted logic, Stalin saw the starving Ukrainian peasants not as victims, but as perpetrators who had brought their horrible fate upon themselves.
Stalin never admitted that any element of his policy—not collectivisation, not grain procurement, not the searches and the shakedowns that had intensified the famine in Ukraine—was wrong. Instead, he placed all responsibility for food shortages and mass deaths onto the shoulders of those who were dying in their millions.
“People said that the authorities wanted to exterminate Ukraine with hunger and settle the land with a Russian population so that Russia will be here.”
The famine had sufficiently weakened Ukrainian institutions, leaving them vulnerable to attempts from the Soviet regime to Russify the country and eliminate its distinct Ukrainian cultural identity.
During and after the famine, the Soviet state purged, arrested, and even executed tens of thousands of Ukrainian party officials. Their replacements often came directly from Moscow. In 1933 alone the Soviet Communist Party sent thousands of political officers to Ukraine from Russia. By the time of the outbreak of war in 1939, none of the Ukrainian Communist Party leadership had any connection with or sympathy for the national movement. By the time the war ended in 1945, the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust had devastated the republic and its institutions even further.
What followed was the slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine, and into depleted Ukrainian republican institutions: in the post-war period, over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine, and purges had created. Almost all the other minorities living in Ukraine had assimilated into the Russian-speaking majority. Peasants who moved from the countryside to the cities often switched from Ukrainian to Russian; the Russian language offered opportunities and advancement in industry—Ukrainian became simply a “backwards” language of the provinces.
Contemporary legacy
The famine had such a profound impact on the demography, psychology, and politics of Ukraine that it continues to shape the geopolitical thinking of both Ukrainians and Russians.
Applebaum explores the legacy of the Holodomor and its influence on the current relationship between the two states. She emphasises the elimination of Ukraine’s elite during the 1930s; many of contemporary Ukraine’s political problems, including widespread distrust of the state, weak national institutions, and a corrupt political class, can be traced directly back to the loss of that first, post-revolutionary, patriotic elite. In 1933 the men and women who could have led the country were eliminated in Soviet purges. Those who replaced them were frightened into silence and obedience; the state became a thing to be feared, not admired—politicians and bureaucrats were not to be seen as benign public servants but as tyrants and oppressors.
The Russification that followed the famine has also left its mark. Thanks to the USSR’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory, many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation with a separate history. Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties.
Ukraine’s contemporary linguistic battles date from the 1930s too. Paradoxically, Stalin reinforced the link between the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity when he tried to destroy them both. The same can be seen today, where thanks to Russian pressure, the nation is unifying behind the Ukrainian language as it has not done since the 1920s.
In Putin’s ramblings, it is possible to hear the echo of Stalin’s fear of Ukraine—or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia. Stalin was obsessed about loss of control in Ukraine, and about Polish or other foreign plots to subvert the country. A sovereign Ukraine could thwart the Soviet project, not only by depriving the USSR of its grain, but also by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries, and Ukrainian and Russian culture and language were closely intertwined. If Ukraine rejected both the Soviet system and its ideology, the rejection could cast doubt upon the whole Soviet project—as it did in 1991.
“The historically unprecedented physical extermination of the Ukrainian nation…is one of the central goals of the illegal programme of Bolshevik centralism.”
The current Russian government also believes that a sovereign, democratic, stable Ukraine, tied to the rest of Europe by links of culture and trade, is a threat to the interests of Russia’s leaders. After all, if Ukraine becomes too European—if it achieves anything resembling successful integration into the West—the Russians might ask, why not us?
Russia has embarked on extensive information campaigns to draw connections between Ukrainian nationalism and fascism. In 2014, Russian state media described Russian forces carrying out the invasion of Crimea as “separatist patriots” fighting against “fascists” and “Nazis”.
It is true that some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation, and that the Nazis were fully aware of the details of the famine, even using it in their propaganda against the Soviet Union. Yet this does not diminish the truth of the Holodomor nor alter its causes, which lie solely with the policy decisions of the Soviet state; associating the famine with fascism and nationalist sentiments are smears engineered by the Kremlin that persist until today. Even Christopher Hitchens felt obligated to mention Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in his discussion of the book, Harvest of Despair.
Applebaum’s book offers a harrowing overview of the Holodomor in great detail, and I would consider it essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the crimes of Lenin and Stalin’s regimes.
In the next part of this analysis, I will explore the legacy of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and how this has shaped Putin’s contemporary ideological perspective by providing him with the propaganda to justify his annexation of Crimea, and later full-scale invasion.