Food-procurement brigades sent out to parts of Ukraine in December followed Stalin’s orders for an attack on the “grain front.” Young idealists among the activists told themselves not to give in to “debilitating pity” as they tore apart homes and stables and turned people out in the street.34 They uncovered enough hidden stores to foster official thinking that wily peasants were hiding more. Any regional bosses who warned of the consequences were upbraided as “un-Bolshevik” in forgetting to put the “needs of the state first.”35
More was at stake than the grain harvest—there were additional concerns about Ukrainian nationalism. Back in 1923 Stalin had drawn up a flexible nationalities policy, according to which Moscow, far from crushing the nations and hammering everyone into Russians, instead supported the “forms” of nationhood, like native languages and culture. The regime would make people feel welcome in the new empire, encouraging education and the emergence of new elites. The hard-nosed realists knew there were risks in lifting up the illiterate and helping them to work out their own national identity. But the new rulers were willing to take those risks. To be sure, their nationalities policy added the important proviso that if tribes, ethnic groups, or whole nations in the USSR resisted national directives, undermined the Communist mission, or threatened the unitary state, then they would face terror and deportation.36 Therefore it was instructive that in December 1932, Stalin specifically changed the long-standing Soviet policy of recruiting as many Ukrainians as possible for the party and its leadership there.37
The Red Empire was going to become more centralized, particularly because the Soviet ruling elite had reached the conclusion that Ukrainian nationalism, which fueled resistance to collectivization, was ultimately responsible for the grain requisitions crisis.38
Stalin boasted at the January 1933 plenum of the Central Committee about getting 60 percent of the peasants collectivized and opening vast new areas to cultivation. Barely a whisper of concern was heard at these meetings, and the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party went so far as to celebrate the great victories of the five-year plan.39 In fact, famine was already stalking the countryside, yet Moscow gave instructions that officials in Ukraine, after allowing collective farms five days to hand over “hidden stocks” to meet their quota, could confiscate seed grains to make up what was missing.
Hunger began driving peasants from the countryside. During the first five-year plan, an estimated 12 million people fled to the city, where, after careful screening, it might be possible to obtain rations.40 On December 27, 1932, to control this tide of misery and want, the regime began issuing internal passports to city residents over sixteen years of age. Initially, the major cities, like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov, were covered; in early 1933 the official reach was extended to “first priority cities” Kiev, Minsk, Rostov, and far eastern Vladivostok; and soon it included major industrial centers like Kuznetsk, Stalingrad, and Baku. The passports were introduced in phases, and there were many gaps in the official network. Nevertheless, in the first year and a half of the passport law, at least 630,000 violators were found living illegally in the cities, more people were denied the precious documents, and still other fleeing peasants decided to turn back when they heard it was hopeless.41
On January 22, Stalin gave orders to stop the exodus from Ukraine and the Kuban (where many Ukrainians also lived). The attempt to flee the countryside was allegedly “organized by enemies” to discredit collectivization. Police were to set up barricades and arrest and deport kulaks and “counter-revolutionary elements.” They restricted the sale of railway tickets and soon extended these measures to cover hard-hit regions such as the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga. Other areas losing their population requested that Moscow impose travel restrictions to cover them as well.42
In spite of the undeniable evidence of famine in early 1933, Soviet authorities responded haltingly.43 Although Moscow ordered food aid, it was “paltry” given the desperate situation and went either to the cities or to peasants who were cooperating with collectivization. To be sure, the regime had already lowered quotas from stricken regions in 1931 in Kazakhstan and several other areas. The 1932 quota for Ukraine was down from the year before and then cut another 35 percent, but this came too late to avert famine in spring 1933.44 The Soviet government looked murderous, because it increased food exports between 1929 and 1931. Then it slowed the volume. Even so, at the height of the famine in 1933, the country was still selling abroad no less than 1,632 million tons of grain.45
The collectivization campaign in the countryside was almost like a war, and the fatalities resulting from violence, starvation, or famine-related disease have been estimated at between 4 and 8 million. The exact figures will never be known because deaths were not always recorded. The mortality rates of the USSR as a whole for 1930 to 1933 jumped by 83.9 percent, but those figures exclude hard-hit areas like Kazakhstan, where as many as a million people may have died. Around a million likely perished in the North Caucasus and the Black Earth regions. In Ukraine, however, mortality grew by 189.5 percent, and the figure for 1933 was triple what it had been the two previous years.46
Stalin shied away from inspecting the affected areas, even when he traveled south for three-month vacations in the summers of 1930, 1931, and 1932. In August the following year, by which time the worst of the famine and related diseases had passed, he went to Sochi again and en route reportedly “soaked up” everything he saw “like a sponge,” including abandoned villages and obvious signs of the disaster. That was what Voroshilov, who was with him, said. Although the Boss made decisions as he went, the only one relevant to the famine was in a letter to Kaganovich telling him to see to it that by early 1934 a resettlement committee would bring in ten thousand heads of families and their households to the Kuban and Terek district (just north of Georgia), as well as fifteen thousand to twenty thousand families to the steppe in Ukraine. He added that this part of the south was always short of labor. Thus, he refused to recognize the famine and its effects in any way, just as he had done two years earlier.47
Recently a number of respectable historians have accused Stalin of multiple genocides, including the mass deaths from this famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.48 Often what happened was that regional party bosses exaggerated their success and claimed even to be exceeding quotas. Moscow had allowed itself to believe the fables, in spite of growing evidence to the contrary, and so demanded more.
Was this intentional mass murder? Researchers have scoured the archives, but no documents have been found to substantiate the claim (expressed or implied) that Soviet leaders had motives resembling those that led to the Holocaust. While Moscow had special grievances with Ukraine, where nationalists were menacing, at no time did Stalin issue orders for people to be starved to death. He was equally heartless and would not yield to requests from elsewhere to lower the quotas. When officials in Kazakhstan begged for a reduction in grain collection because of the great suffering caused by two years of crop failure, Stalin retorted that he had better information and demanded “unconditional fulfillment.”49 If the Middle Volga complained, it was threatened with “harsh measures.”50
At the early 1933 plenum, Stalin touted the successes on the industrial front, and using statistics “creatively,” he boasted that after only four years the Soviet Union had caught up to and surpassed Russia’s pre-1914 industrial output by 334 percent. The second five-year plan could afford to be more modest, aiming at a minimum of “only” 13 to 14 percent annual growth.51 So much did he want industry that he did not shrink from inviting in American capitalists, who built whole new factory towns.52 When there were setbacks or accidents there or anywhere else, they were blamed on spies and “wreckers.” The incompetent or unlucky were already subject to show trials in May–June 1928.53