Stalin

Death and disease wracked the entire Soviet wheat belt—Ukraine (including the Moldavian autonomous republic), the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, Stavropol, and Don provinces), the Middle and Lower Volga valley (from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan, including the Volga German autonomous republic), and the Central Black Earth region—but also Vologda and Arkhangelsk in the north, the Urals, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.⁴²⁸ Party officials begged for emergency aid to “save the lives of many people from starvation death,” as the ethnic Kazakh official Turar Ryskulov wrote to Stalin (March 9, 1933).⁴²⁹ An OGPU operative assembled a summary of starvation in the cities

in the Urals, Volga valley, and North Caucasus, underscoring the negative effects on workers’ political mood.⁴³⁰ Reports of cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it.⁴³¹ The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: “This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.”⁴³²

Reports and letters to Stalin’s office were graphic.⁴³³ The documents show that he became livid not when he learned that people were driven to eating human flesh but when he learned that an American correspondent was given permission to travel to famine-stricken regions (“We already have enough spies in the USSR”).⁴³⁴ When even the unsqueamish Kaganovich confirmed the catastrophe, it evidently got through to the dictator.⁴³⁵

On March 20, 1933, the politburo, with Stalin signing the protocol, resolved to supply more tractors (though fewer than requested), send more food aid to Ukraine, allow free trade in foodstuffs in Kharkov and Kiev, and mobilize all internal resources for the sowing campaign.⁴³⁶ (That same day, the politburo directed the OGPU to remove guns from the population.) ⁴³⁷

Voroshilov, on holiday again, had written to Stalin complaining of insomnia and stomach problems. Stalin answered, “I still feel poorly, sleep little, and am not getting better, but this is not manifested in work.” Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (April 9) that he was sick and exhausted and complained about how his first deputy, Pyatakov, worked hard but did not believe in the party’s strategy, and how Orjonikidze needed a trusted deputy who could relieve him as commissar, because “I am rather ill and cannot make it much longer.”⁴³⁸

How did the regime not come apart altogether? How did higher-ups writing and receiving the reports not concede that the situation called for repudiation of regime policies? How did local officials persist in implementing orders?

Lev Kopelev (b. 1912) was a Communist Youth League militant, the editor in chief of an agitation paper, and a 25,000er requisitioning grain in his native Ukraine from late 1932 into spring 1933. He had been arrested, for ten days in 1929, for putting out leaflets defending the “Bolshevik-Leninists” (as Trotskyites called themselves).⁴³⁹ Young and naïve, he had admitted his error. His life rippled with meaning. “The grain front!” he recalled of the procurement campaigns. “Stalin said the struggle for grain was the struggle for socialism. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the Five-Year Plan.” Kopelev noted how a local OGPU operative was the son of a miner and had worked in a mine himself (“We believed him without reservation”), while meetings with villagers took place under religious icons. “Every time I began to speak, I wanted to prove to these people that they were making a serious mistake by hiding the grain”—after all, workers in the cities were putting in two and three shifts yet did not have enough food; Japanese militarists and now German fascists surrounded the country. Villagers were eating grass and gnawing on twigs, denying that they had grain to give, before being hauled off—“and I persuaded myself, explained to myself: I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity,” Kopelev said. He convinced himself that “the famine was caused by the opposition of suicidally unconscientious peasants, enemy intriguers, and the inexperience and weakness of the lower ranks of [party and soviet] workers.”⁴⁴⁰