Perversely, a blessing can become a curse. Ukraine is endowed with some of the best soil on Earth. That has not led to peace and prosperity. Rather, it has made it a target of opportunity for some of the nastiest people the world has ever produced: Hitler, Stalin, and Putin. Timothy Snider provides some background for the current warfare between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine in his historical masterpiece Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Many soldiers would be killed in the wartime battles in the regions separating /Russia and Germany, but even more innocent civilians would die because of the policies imposed by Stalin and Hitler.
“In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. During the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism (1933-1938), the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland (1939-1941), and then the German-Soviet war (1941-1945), mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region. The victims were chiefly Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Balts, the peoples native to these lands. The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power. Though their homelands became battlefields midway through this period, these people were all victims of murderous policy rather than casualties of war.”
“The lands of today’s Ukraine were at the center of both Stalinist and Nazi killing policies throughout the era of mass killing. Some 3.5 million people fell victim to Stalinist killing policies between 1933 and 1938, and then another 3.5 million to German killing policies between 1941 and 1944. Perhaps three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in combat or as an indirect consequence of the war.”
In the early 1930s both Hitler and Stalin were formulating their long-term plans and Ukraine was a central focus for both. Hitler, ever mindful of the near starvation suffered by the Germans during The Great War, saw Ukraine and its fertile land as the reason for waging war. His plan included capturing all the productive farmland east of Germany, starving to death or transporting to Siberia the resident populations, save for necessary agricultural workers who would be used as slaves. German farmers would move in and take control. Meanwhile, Stalin needed export products to gain the money needed to buy the machinery and tools necessary to make his nation a modern power. Due to the depression, Europe was a hungry continent, and the agricultural produce of Ukraine was critical to his plan.
“For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil, and its millions of agricultural workers. In 1933, Ukrainians would die in the millions in the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.”
It is important to recognize what Stalin did to Ukraine because it is eerily similar to what Putin is now doing to Ukraine: be willing to destroy a nation and its peoples in order to create a new cultural entity..
After the first world war sections of western Ukraine became a part of Poland. Stalin considered Poland to be a western enemy and the former Ukrainians a potential threat to the Soviet nations. Nevertheless, Ukrainian farmers thrived initially through the 1920s as they were left alone as they worked their lands. But given the dedication to communism, this could not go on indefinitely. Stalin’s five-year plan of 1928 called for massive amounts of Soviet agricultural produce to be exported and for that production to take place on collectivized farms.
“Collectivization had to mean a great confrontation between the largest group within Soviet society, the peasantry, and the Soviet state and its police, then known as the OGPU. Anticipating this struggle, Stalin had ordered in 1929 the most massive deployment of state power in Soviet history. The labor of building socialism, said Stalin, would be like ‘raising the ocean.’ That December he announced that ‘kulaks’ would be ‘liquidated as a class’.”
The term “kulak” could be defined as needed in a given location. It was intended to remove anyone who might impede the collectivization process. Large farm owners and community leaders were particular targets. Teams would be established in each location to determine who might be considered a kulak and what the punishment might be (either death or exile). The large number of the exiled provided the opportunity to create the slave labor camps of the Gulag.
“The Gulag, which the Soviets themselves called a ‘system of concentration camps,’ began alongside the collectivization of agriculture and depended upon it. It would eventually include 476 camp complexes, to which some eighteen million people would be sentenced, of whom between a million and a half and three million would die during their periods of incarceration. The free peasant became the slave laborer, engaged in the construction of the giant canals, mines, and factories that Stalin believed would modernize the Soviet Union.”
The last crop before collectivization was implemented, the last crop sowed by free men and women, would set a standard that could never be met again in the future. The peasant population would pay for this failure. Nowhere was the disappointment greater than in Ukraine, and nowhere was the punishment so severe.
“The weather was unusually fine that summer. The crop of 1930 in Ukraine set a standard that could not be met in 1931, even if collectivized agriculture were as efficient as individual farming, which it was not. The bumper crop of 1930 provided the baseline number that the party used to plan requisitions for 1931. Moscow expected far more from Ukraine than Ukraine could possibly give.”
“By autumn 1931 the failure of the first collectivized harvest was obvious. The reasons were many: the weather was poor; pests were a problem; animal power was limited because peasants had sold or slaughtered livestock; the production of tractors was far less than anticipated; the best farmers had been deported; sowing and reaping were disrupted by collectivization; and peasants who had lost their land saw no reason to work very hard.”
Laying the fault on the collectivization process could not happen. It had to be the fault of the Ukrainian peasants. Either they were hiding food crop from the government, or they were in a counterrevolutionary revolt, or they were actively supporting espionage in concert with their countrymen residing in enemy Poland. Crackdowns on the freedom of the Ukrainian peasant would follow even though government officials were aware of starvations occurring.
“Stalin…offered his closest collaborators the theory that collectivization was missing only the correct legal basis. Socialism, he claimed, just like capitalism, needed laws to protect property. The state would be strengthened if all agricultural production was declared to be state property, and unauthorized collection of food deemed theft, and such theft made punishable by immediate execution. Thus a starving peasant could be shot if he picked up a potato peel from a furrow in land that until recently had been his own. Perhaps Stalin really did think that this could work; the result, of course, was the removal of any legal protection that peasants may have had from the full violence of the triumphant state. The simple possession of food was presumptive evidence of a crime. The law came into force on 7 August 1932.”
Laws must be enforced. Bands of state representatives would descend on the lands where the peasants lived like an occupying army with the mission of finding the food that was being hidden and the permission to punish the offenders.
“The communist party in Soviet Ukraine, though disproportionately Russian and Jewish in its membership, now included many young Ukrainians who believed that the countryside was reactionary and were eager to join in campaigns against peasants.”
“Watchtowers went up in the fields to keep peasants from taking anything for themselves. In the Odessa region alone, more than seven hundred watchtowers were constructed. Brigades went from hut to hut, five thousand youth organization members among their member, seizing everything they could find…The brigades took everything that resembled food, including supper from the stove, which they ate themselves.”
The behavior of these brigades resembles the reported behavior of today’s Russian occupying army in Ukraine. It is as if Stalin has returned to power.
“Like an invading army the party activists lived off the land, taking what they could and eating their fill. With little to show for their work and enthusiasm but misery and death. Perhaps from feelings of guilt, perhaps from feelings of triumph, they humiliated the peasants wherever they went. They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport, or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray. Women caught stealing on one collective farm were stripped, beaten, and carried naked through the village. In one village the brigade got drunk in one peasant’s hut and gang-raped his daughter. Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations—and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated. This was the triumph of Stalin’s law and Stalin’s state.”
Stalin was unhappy and distrustful of the Ukrainian peasants. They, though starving, continued to provide him with food—enough to feed themselves and contribute to export markets, but Stalin was determined to make them suffer even more because they threatened his view of a docile Soviet nation, one that still harbored nationalist aspirations.
“In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. He shifted to a position of pure malice, where the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he, Stalin, the victim…It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.”
In the fall of 1932, Stalin would institute regulations that would ensure that Ukrainian peasants would die of starvation. The following were the main measures.
“On 18 November 1932, peasants in Ukraine were required to return grain advances that they had previously earned by meeting grain requisition targets. This meant that the few localities where peasants had had good yields were deprived of what little surplus they had earned.”
“Two days later, on 20 November 1932, a meat penalty was introduced. Peasants who were unable to meet grain quotas were now required to pay a special tax in meat. Peasants who still had livestock were now forced to surrender it to the state. Cattle and swine had been a last reserve against starvation.”
Stalin would distribute just enough food to the cities to keep people there alive. He distributed none to the peasants and then forbade them from going to the cities to beg for food.
“As starvation raged throughout Ukraine in the first weeks of 1933, Stalin sealed the borders of the republic so that peasants could not flee, and closed the cities so that peasants could not beg…Stalin’s justification was that the peasant refugees were not in fact begging bread but, rather, ‘engaging in a counterrevolutionary plot,’ by serving as living propaganda for Poland and other capitalist states that wished to discredit the collective farm.”
Snyder provides this final comment on this Stalin-induced tragedy in Ukraine.
“In fall 1933, in villages across Soviet Ukraine the harvest was brought in by Red Army soldiers, communist party activists, workers and students. Forced to work even as they died, starving peasants had put down crops in spring 1933 that they would not live to harvest. Resettlers came from Soviet Russia to take over houses and villages, and saw that first they would have to remove the bodies of the previous inhabitants. Often the rotten corpses fell apart in their hands. Sometimes the newcomers would then return home, finding that no amount of scrubbing and painting could quite remove the stench. Yet sometimes they stayed. Ukraine’s ‘ethnographic material,’ as one Soviet official told an Italian diplomat, had been altered…the demographic balance in Soviet Ukraine shifted in favor of Russians.”
Was it ever Stalin’s intention to eliminate from Soviet Ukraine those people who might wish they rather owned their property in a capitalist democracy to the west? If so, it makes Putin’s motives, actions, and methods in 2022 nearly identical to those of Stalin in 1932. Captured Ukrainian nationalists, according to reports, are being treated like the kulaks of Stalin’s era—either killed, imprisoned, or exiled to the Russian hinterlands. Ukraine’s agricultural production is again being stolen from its farmers by Russians. Putin is destroying Ukrainian infrastructure wherever he can reach it, and “Russifying” the occupied regions.
Both Stalin and Putin had the motive of converting Ukraine from what it was into something it didn’t wish to be. In Putin’s case, a healthy democracy with western ties and eventually a better living standard than Russia can provide is an intolerable affront. All countries must have lower living standards than Russia or there is no justification for his rule and his methods. In his view, the current Ukraine must die and go away forever.
That sure sounds like cultural genocide to me. Ukraine has suffered enough at the hands of
the Russians. It is time for the
Russians to suffer at the hands of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy
war for the US and western Europe. Putin
must be defeated. The US and Europe must
not be cowardly.
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