In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Diego Rivera’s Red Square. A multitude of faceless men marched with red banners and encircled a locomotive with a hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization that the Soviets wanted to convey during Stalin’s first five-year plan: the achievement was impersonal, technical, undeniable. The Soviet Union transformed itself from an agricultural hinterland into an industrial power through a mere disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Rivera’s painting suggested, while shaping them into a new breed of people.
But by March 1932 hundreds of thousands were starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the country’s breadbasket. Rapid industrialization was financed by the destruction of traditional agricultural life. The five-year plan had brought about “deculakization”, the deportation of peasants who were considered more affluent than others, and “collectivization”, the appropriation of agricultural land by the state. The result was a mass hunger attack: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and above all in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviet leaders were aware of this in 1932, but still insisted on requisitions in Ukraine. Grain that humans needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. Writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda depicting the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies puff out rather than accept Soviet gains.
After Russia, Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic, and Stalin saw it as headstrong and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine did not produce the yields Stalin expected, he blamed local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. Since food was mined during the famine, Ukrainians in particular suffered and died – around 3.9 million people in the republic, according to best estimates, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communicating with trusted comrades, Stalin did not hide the fact that he was pursuing a specific policy against Ukraine. Residents of the republic were forbidden to leave it; Farmers were prevented from going into the cities to beg; Communities that failed to meet grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; Families were robbed of their cattle. In particular, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly confiscated, far beyond common sense. Even the seeds were confiscated.
The Soviet Union took drastic measures to ensure that these events went unnoticed. Foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine. The only person reporting the famine in English under his own byline, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, was later murdered. Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, declared famine to be the price of progress away. Tens of thousands of hunger refugees made it across the border to Poland, but the Polish authorities refrained from making their plight public: a treaty with the USSR is being negotiated. In Moscow, the disaster was portrayed at the 1934 party congress as a triumphant second revolution. The deaths have been rearranged from “hunger” to “exhaustion”. When the next census counted millions fewer people than expected, the statisticians were executed. Residents of other republics, mostly Russians, moved into the abandoned houses of the Ukrainians. As beneficiaries of the calamity, they were not interested in its sources.
