[This article
appeared in the Conservative
Review, December 1992, pp. 38-44.]
From the Academy. . .
Lest We Forget (or Never Really
Know):
The 60th Anniversary of Soviet
Communism's
Deliberate Murder of Millions
by Starvation
Dwight D. Murphey
World War I was a bloodletting of almost unthinkable
proportions -a war that set the stage for much that followed in the twentieth century.
What many of us don't realize is that, by comparison, according to Robert
Conquest, "the number dying in Stalin's war against the peasants was
higher than the total deaths for all countries in World War I." The focal
point of this slaughter was the winter of 1932-33,
exactly sixty years ago. Millions died in a man-made famine, cut off from
all food by deliberate totalitarian policy. Each of these millions was a
person, every bit as real as the emaciated figures photographed recently in
If the history of the
twentieth century is written appropriately, it will be a source of undying
shame for the mainstream of Western intellectual culture, and for the millions
who clung to the illusions spawned by that culture out of a desire always to be
comfortably in tune with intellectual fashion, that it turned its eyes away
from the murderous nature of Communism.
After the momentous
events of the recent past in which the
Sixtieth
Anniversary of One of The World’s Most Despicable Episodes
This winter and spring will
mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet horror of 1932-33. To beat a recalcitrant peasantry into
collectivization and to crush all vestiges of national aspiration among the
Ukrainians and others, the Soviet regime under Stalin sealed off a vast area,
sent squads of men from house to house to seize quite literally all the food,
smashed millstones so that peasants couldn’t even grind such little grain as
they had managed to hide, and watched while millions died, sometimes eating
each other in a desperate effort to stay alive.
This is something that
Americans understandably have a hard time grasping. To do so, imagine that the government sealed
off Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, removed the food from all grocery
stores and other sources of supply, went house-to-house to confiscate any food
anyone had, imprisoned or executed people for taking anything to eat even from
the fields where it was growing, wouldn’t let anyone out of those states
(except those who could manage to smuggle themselves out), and wouldn’t provide
any help or allow anyone else to bring in food.
Imagine further that while several million died the government
officially preached, even to them, that there was no famine. And imagine that the world intellectual
community overwhelmingly ignored what was going on, and even continued to sing
the praises of the “people’s democracy.”
No, such an enormity
hasn’t been committed here. But it was
committed in the
But there is a problem
with all such figures because of the inability of our imaginations to
comprehend them. How can anybody possibly have an imagination powerful enough
to give a face and form to each of those countless people? And yet they were people, each with dreams, a
family and friends – and each susceptible to unspeakable suffering. They were mostly faceless to us sixty years
ago, as the world’s intellectual culture chose not to see them; and they were
mostly faceless to us today.
Fortunately, the
survivors have begun the long process of giving us what will hopefully be a
complete history. The first
international scholarly conference on the Ukrainian famine was held in
In 1991 a memorial book 33-Famine, compiled by the
husband-and-wife team of V. Maniak and L. Kovalenko, was published in the
Ukrainian language.
On
An exposition displaying
letters written to Stalin, eyewitness accounts, and artifacts from the famine
has recently been held at the
A Congressional
commission headed by Representative Daniel A. Mica (D-FL) submitted its report
to Congress on
Draconian
Decrees
According to Robert Conquest,
the Ukrainian harvest in 1932 produced, due to “the conditions of collectivization,”
only two-thirds of the 14.7 million tons that it had in 1930. Nevertheless, Stalin ordered the delivery of
7.7 tons as
A series of draconian
decrees was put into place starting in the late summer of 1932. On August 7, the law “On Safeguarding
Socialist Property,” known among the people as “The Law of the Ear of Wheat,”
was promulgated. It provided for
execution or a ten-year prison sentence whenever even so little as an ear of
wheat or a sugar beet was “stolen” from the crop. Conquest tells us that there were 1500 death
sentences in one month simply from the Kharkiv court alone.” A woman was sentenced to ten years for
cutting a hundred ears of ripening corn, from her own plot, two weeks after her
husband had died of starvation . . . Another woman was sentenced to ten years
for picking ten onions from collective land.”
One of the Congressional Commissions’ witnesses testified about how her
aunt died in prison, to which she had been sentence for finding two ears of
corn on a path.
The Report tells how a
November 17 resolution denounced “recalcitrant local organizations” as being agents
of wealthy peasants and of Ukrainian exiles.
Then on November 20 a decree cancelled “the food advances to collective
farmers where the sate procurement quotas had not been fulfilled.” On December 6, yet another decree placed an
“economic blockade on villages which had ‘criminally sabotaged’ the
procurements.”
On December 27, a system
of internal passports was imposed.
Passports were issued to city dwellers and not to villages. “Starving villages,” the Reports says,
“inundated train stations in the hope of traveling to areas with more food, but
the trains were reserved for those with internal passports or to those who had
documents” showing a work-related trip for a collective farm.
By now, starvation was
in full swing, caused not merely by these decrees but by house-to-house
seizures that I will describe in the next section. The decrees continued on
On March 17, a law took
effect “that a peasant,” according to Conquest, “could not leave a collective
farm without a contract from his future employers, ratified by the collective
farm authorities.”
A document to local
subordinates of the OGPU (secret police) on May 22 dealt revealingly with
cannibalism.
And finally, Stalin
signed an order on
House-to-House
Confiscation: Cutting Off
the Food Supply
While these decrees were
being handed down, “agricultural procurement brigades” consisting of urban
activists, known to the people as “the red broom” and as “the twenty-five
thousanders,” were brought in from outside.
Searching the collective farms and individual plots, they seized
everything. The activists were helped by
local members of the komnezam (the
Committee of Non-Wealthy Peasants).
One witness testified
that “every day a brigade consisting of several sturdy men headed by a Chekist
(member of the Soviet political police) came to our house. He ordered his men to pierce all the walls,
ceilings and floors with long ramrods.
He threatened the men by saying that they would be arrested if they did
not find any grain.” Another witness said
“they searched in the rafters. They
searched with pikes to see if there was something hidden somewhere . . . They
poked the ground noisily in search of a soft spot where something might be
hidden.”
Yet another witness told
how “whatever they found – a handful of wheat – they took it; some melons –
they took them. And the cellars – where
the cabbage, and pickled beets, and potatoes were kept – they were also totally
cleaned out . . . Nowhere in this directive were there instructions to leave
some minimal amount of food behind for families . . . And it was still seven
months to the new harvest.”
Conquest relates that
“it aroused suspicion not to be in a starving state . . . One activist, after
searching the house of a peasant who had failed to swell up, finally found a
bag of flour mixed with ground bark and leaves, which he poured into the
village pond.”
Those who were employed
on the collective farms were given something to eat at first, eating from a common kitchen. “But eventually this was discontinued as
well,” we are told by the witness whose aunt died in prison. “A second aunt, my
mother’s sister, also died; she, her husband, and four children died; . . . all
of them died from starvation . . . Two older girls survived. When the older girls saw hat happened, they
joined the state farm. And there in the
state farm, they survived somehow.”
One witness’s mother
worked at a collective farm, where she received “something like 200 or 300
grams of bread a day. She would eat some
of this bread, perhaps half. Each time she
got the bread, she would save some of it, which she would then pass on to us
whenever she could get back home . . . But the big problem always was in eating
this food before it was taken away from us.”
The Italian consul in
Kharkiv reported to his government that in a town sixty kilometers from Kharkiv
“everyone [is] dead from typhus and famine.
One Doctor Gey, who was sent there, was taken aback upon entering the
village by the horrible stench of corpses in full stage of decay in the
houses.”
Stopping
People From Getting Out, and From Bringing Back Food
The Commission’s Report
says “famine victims were not allowed to travel to
The Report further says
that “villages turned to eating roots, flowers, leaves, and tree bark . . .
Soups and cakes were often made out of such ingredients. People ate dogs, cats, rats, birds, insects,
and grubs for meat. Because of the
slaughtering of pets and the passivity of the starving, the villages fell
silent. One account describes a case
where two starving boys ripped apart a live rat and ate it raw on the spot.”
A Mrs. Harmash testified
that she watched some peasants along a road:
“They walked very slowly, and I noticed that they were squatting
frequently. At first, I could not
understand why they were squatting down, but then I understood that they were
bleeding with diarrhea.”
“Hardly a single witness finished testifying,”
the Report says, “without vividly recalling cannibalism, resulting from famine
induced insanity.” One witness recounted
what her mother saw: “One day my mother
came to visit a sick person in the neighborhood . . . She thought that the
people were ill because they did not answer the door. When she entered the house she saw the family
was sitting around the table and a baby was separated. They cooked the baby for food. It was 1932.”
Another witness was told
by a child that “my mother gave me something to eat that looked like jellied
meat. And I asked her, ‘Mama, what is
it?’ Mother replied, ‘Eat what I give
you’ . . . I said, ‘Oh, this is Nadya we’re eating’ . . . [I thought] ‘Mama and
I ate Nadya, and then my Mama will eat me.”
A witness who was in his
early twenties at the time recalls how “hunger turns a human being into an
animal. There were instances in which
human bones would be found in mounds of earth where someone had cut away all
the flesh cleanly from the bone, cooked and eaten it. I saw bones like this at one planting
site. At the marketplace in
Even among the starving,
there was resistance to cannibalism. The
Italian consul in Kharkiv reported in July, 1933, that in a certain village
only 40 of an original 800 people were still alive. “Many were killed by the peasants themselves
‘because they had eaten the children of others.”
Suffering
of Those Who Made It to the Cities
Desperate, some people managed
to make it to the cities, hoping that there would be something to eat
there. Others planned to abandon their
children in the cities, hoping they could survive there. They had to dodge police who guarded “all the
railway terminals and stations, all the main roads” seeking to prevent people
from getting out of the starving villages.
Villagers were reported
to have dug up graves to find valuables that they could take with them to the
cities to barter for food. But the
Italian consul reported that “even if their strength enables them to reach the
city, death by starvation awaits them there as well, for they have no money and
there is no on e to help them.”
Horrible sights became
common in the cities. In
In Kharkiv, a woman was
one of many mothers begging with their children along
In another 1933 report
by the Italian consul in Kharkiv, “swollen people are taken by freight train
into the countryside, about fifty to sixty kilometers from the city so that no
one will see them die. The cars are
filled up and then barred shut . . . A few days ago a worker assigned to the
train was passing by one of the cars when he heard someone call out. As he came closer he heard a wretched man
inside begging to be let out because the stench of the corpses had become
unbearable. Opening the car, the worker
found this man alone still alive. He was
then taken to another car to die, one in which those locked in were still
alive.”
When the trains arrived
at their destination, “large pits were dug and the dead were removed from the
cars. I was told that no one was
terribly fussy and that often one of those thrown into the pit reawakens and moves in a final flash of life.”
Turning
Children Against Their Parents
Fear gripped the
population. “They were so afraid that
even a son didn’t tell his father anything, and a father didn’t tell his son
anything . . . People were afraid of those who might report on them, especially
of youngsters, “ said a witness who had been fifteen
years old at the time.
There was a government
policy of turning children against their parents. “As Mrs. Pawlichka noted, ‘They would come to school, trying to seduce the children
with candies and sweetmeats, in order to get them to betray their parents, to
get them to tell the authorities where they had hidden food.”
Robert Conquest tells of
the infamous Pavlik Morozov case in the
Riots
to Get at Full Granaries; Exporting of Grain
I have already told how
Robert Conquest estimated the number of deaths as from five to seven million in
Necessarily, the exact
numbers are impossible to come by.
Estimates are often made by comparing the 1939 census with earlier
counts. But the Congressional Commission
points out that this is precarious: a
census was taken in 1937, but when the population was shown as having shrunk
drastically, those who took the census were shot. Needless to say, the people who later took
the 1939 census were motivated to report a more optimistic figure. The range of scholars’ estimates as to the
Why Was
It Done?
Essentially, the famine
was the Communist government’s weapon in a war between the people and the
totalitarian state.
The years of Lenin’s
“New Economic Program” had spurred the economy by reintroducing some vestiges
of capitalism, but in the late 1920s a drastic switch occurred. Even though all peasants were severely
limited in what they could own, a campaign was begun against the “kulaks,” the
so-called wealthy peasants, who were declared a class enemy. “In 1929 all of the so-called kulaks, that
is, the landed peasants, were deported to
There was some
collectivization of agriculture as early as 1924, but collectivization was put
into full swing with a declaration at the XVth Conference of the Communist
Party in Moscow in December 12927. “The
whole atmosphere in the country from 1928 on,” Conquest says, “was one of
increasing terror and hysteria.” The
process of so-called “de-kulakization” went on simultaneously with the creation
of collective farms. A witness tells how
in early 1929 members of the Committee of Non-Wealthy Peasants went from house
to house seizing “all the plows, all the harrows and all the horses,
and they took all of it to the collective farm.” Conquest reports that the twenty million
family farms that had existed in 11929 were converted into 240 thousand
collective farms by the end of 1934.
Misstating
the Case
All of this met strong
resistance from the peasants, who didn’t take it lying down. This is why I say that the famine was
eventually used as a weapon in a war that was going on between the Communist
state and the people. Those who abhor
Stalin’s genocide shouldn’t base their revulsion on the notion that “Stalin did
it without provocation.” It misstates
the case to say that the Communists’ crime was that they waged a campaign of
extermination against an unresisting people.
Rather, their crime was of a different sort: that of being willing to wage war against the
people at all; and of declaring, in the service of ideology, vast portions of a
country’s population undeserving to live.
There had long been a
tension between the peasants and socialist ideology. Conquest speaks of “the Marxist-Leninist
thesis that the individual peasantry was a class which a ‘proletarian’ regime
intent on ‘socialism’ must defeat and subdue.”
This had a long history in Marxist thought: “As regards the ‘backward’ national passion
became manifest years later with the formation of the Ukrainian nation as soon
as the
Other
Soviet Atrocities
In this article, I have
focused on the famine of 1932-3, but it isn’t my intention to minimize any
other of the countless horrors committed by the Soviet regime. One of these would be the Great Terror of
1936-8, in which in the cities of the Ukrainian intelligentsia
were executed by the thousands, with entire university departments being
emptied out. Professors were shot for
giving lectures in the Ukrainian language.
Readers who have not
already done so should read the volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago with its accounts of the vast empire of
Soviet slave labor camps.
And on the day this is
written, my local newspaper carries a report that “Wednesday, a Russian
official sent to Warsaw made public for the first time copies of documents
signed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordering the mass murder of 14,700
Polish officers in the Russian forest [of Katyn] near Smolensk 52 years ago.”
Even to mention these,
however, runs the risk of suggesting that there weren’t many other mass
atrocities.
The
Shame of the Western Fellow-Travelers Who Concealed the Facts
Some stories of the famine got
out, with several Western newspapers running accounts. But overwhelmingly, the West’s media and
intellectual culture for many years suppressed any consciousness of it.
Walter Duranty, whose
many articles in the New Republic I
remember reading from those years as part of my preparation for my book Liberalism in Contemporary America, was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his accounts from
The Congressional Report
tells us that “at the height of the Famine, he attacked an account by British
journalist Gareth Jones in an article with the self-explanatory title,
‘Russians Hungry but not Starving.”
Conquest points out that on
He said that “there is
not actual starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to
malnutrition.” It was in this connection
that he made his famous statement that “to put it brutally, you can’t make an
omelet without breaking eggs.”
A few months later
Duranty told British diplomats confidentially that he thought it quite possible
that as many ‘as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly
because of lack of food in the
Louis Fischer was
another prominent figure in American “liberalism” during the Thirties, writing
frequently for the
On
George Bernard Shaw in
Robert Conquest tells
how the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited the Soviet Union in
i1932 and 1933, did seemingly prodigious research, and then praised the drive
against the “kulaks”: “Strong must have
been the faith and resolute the will,” they said, “of the men who, in the
interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a
decision.”
In the midst of it all, the administration of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the
But it would be a mistake to note the moral
insouciance only of intellectuals and politicians. During the entire Communist era, there were
millions of other people in the
“I Rest
My Case!”
A philosophy professor
with whom I have kept in touch for forty years has, in recent correspondence,
taken issue with the thesis I expressed in my book Understanding the Modern Predicament1 – that mankind has
only part-way risen out of barbarism and into civilization-, although I know
that he agrees with my thesis that modern consciousness has been warped far out
of shape by the ideology of the world Left.
Perhaps it is with the
story I have just recounted that I should rest my case.
1
Dwight D. Murphey, Understanding the Modern Predicament (Washington,
D.C.: University Press of America, 1982).