Holodomor

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Before we start today's episode, today's topic is a serious one, but today is also our last chance to let everybody know that we have a live streaming event coming up on March So if you're listening to this episode on the day that we released it, that's tomorrow. It's happening very soon. That's going to be at eight p m Eastern, five pm Pacific. Several folks, when we have posted about this on social media have said things like that's one am my time, so I can't come. Well, I have good news, which is that the stream is available for seventy two hours after the show, So if you are in sometimes zone, that is very inconvenient for the times that we've just said, it's okay. Uh. Normally, when we have a live show, that live show becomes an episode of the podcast. That's not going to be the case this time. Uh. This is a little bit different in terms of the way our live shows normally go. Rather than it just being us doing something that we could also have done in the studio. It's a little more interactive thing, so not as conducive to going into our feed with everything else. Yeah. So if you want to hear us talk about some feuds and have some votes with audience interaction, this is the thing. But like we said, if you miss out on a ticket, you won't get to hear this one. Yeah. Yeah, So looped live dot com that's where you can go to buy tickets. We also have the link to the ticket page pinned up at the top of our Facebook and our Twitter. We are very excited about it again. That's on Thursday, March two, eight pm Eastern, five pm Pacific, and now onto the act will episode. One topic that we have gotten many, many, many requests for over the years is the whole Amore. Some folks have even been persistent enough to write in and request this topic more than one time. The whole of Moore is the name that was coined in the nineteen eighties to describe a famine that struck Ukraine in the early nineteen thirties. The name comes from Ukrainian words that roughly translate to death by hunger, and while there were famines and food shortages that were taking place in other parts of the Soviet Union. At the same time, Soviet policies toward Ukraine specifically made the situation there a whole lot worse, and they were part of an intentional effort that was spearheaded by Joseph Stalin to destroy Ukrainian culture and identity. This is also obviously part of the historical context for Russia's invasion of Ukraine that started on February of this year. It is also really truly horrifying, so listening to it in light of those events which are ongoing that may make it seem even more horrifying. So take care of yourself while you're listening. So to give a little bit of background, Russia and Ukraine share a lot of overlapping history, going all the way back to the establishment of Kievan russ in the late ninth century. Keevan Ross was the first Eastern Slavic state, and today Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia all trace their origins and cultural identity back to it. But over the centuries, the nations, peoples, and ethnic groups that would form these countries as we know them today they went through very different trajectories. What's now Ukraine was repeatedly divided up and assigned to other nations and empires, including Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro Hungarian Empire. Aside from its westernmost regions, most of Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire in seventee. Regardless of which nation or empire they were considered to be living in, Ukrainians had their own ethnic and cultural identity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of what's now Ukraine had come under Russian control, but by that point Ukrainian had also evolved as its own standardized language. Literature written in Ukrainian reflected ukrainians own cultural and ethnic identities. Imperial Russia eventually started to see this developing sense of language and cultural consciousness as a threat, and in the late nineteenth century, Russian officials started banning the teaching of Ukrainian and removing Ukrainian books from schools. The Russian Imperial government was overthrown in a series of revolutions in nineteen seventeen. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin took control, changing their name to the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks in nineteen eighteen. As all of this was happening, Ukraine established a provisional government and declared its independence, and for about the next four years fought to keep that independence. This involved political, diplomatic, and military efforts against other nations and against counter revolutionary forces within its own borders. This lasted until nineteen two, when Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That same year, parts of the Soviet Union faced a famine. This famine was brought on by the political instability and warfare of the previous few years, and it was made worse by a drought. At first, Soviet leaders refused international aid, but eventually a campaign for famine relief was underway in Soviet Russia. This included suspending food taxes, but Ukraine was really facing the same conditions, especially in its southern regions. Not only was Ukraine left out of aid programs and other relief until late nineteen twenty two, but it was also expected to contribute food to Russia, including contributing food from the southern regions that had been most stricken by the same famine. The Communist Party had also instituted a system of war communism, which involved nationalizing industries and forcibly requisitioning surplus grain and other food. This affected the Soviet Union as a whole, but it was particularly disruptive in Ukraine, where about eight percent of the population were farmers. Growing grain was a central part of the Ukrainian economy and identity. Ukraine is nicknamed the bread basket of Europe and its flag represents a blue sky over a yellow field of wheat. Under war communism, Ukraine was no longer able to sell its surplus grain, and as a consequence, it's economy collapsed. Unrest was widespread, and agricultural productivity roped since people didn't want to spend their time growing surplus grain that would just be requisitioned with no compensation. Lenin introduced a new economic policy in nineteen twenty one that addressed some of this, but there was still a lot of anti Soviet and anti communist sentiment. One step that was taken to try to reverse that sentiment was a policy of indigenization. Russia was by far the largest of the Soviet republics, and Russians were by far the largest ethnic group, but the Soviet Union was not at all monolithic, nor were the Soviet republics that comprised it. This indigenization policy encouraged people of different national identities and ethnic groups to really pursue and develop their own cultures while still being part of the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, this led to a huge cultural flourishing involving literature, art, music, and language age. Newly open schools taught courses in Ukrainian, with Russian treated more like an elective class. The Ukrainian Autocephalis Orthodox Church became independent from the Russian Orthodox Church, and its membership and clergy both grew rapidly. The idea had been that encouraging this kind of diversity and national identity would appease various ethnic groups and it would increase their support for the Soviet regime. But Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, found Ukraine's cultural rebirth and it shift away from Russian culture and ideals to be threatening. In ninety nine, he started arresting thousands of Ukrainian scientists, poets, intellectuals and artists, claiming that they were part of a secret organization that was plotting against Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church had been opposed to the Ukrainian churches independence from the start. It formally denounced the Ukrainian Autocephalis or Docks Church as well, and Soviet authorities started cracking down on it in nineteen twenty six. This involved destroying churches and their icons, smashing church bells, arresting religious leaders, and murdyring bishops. In the face of all of this, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church abolished itself in nineteen thirty although a smaller group of churches held on until nineteen thirty six. The Ukrainian Autocephalus Orthodox Church didn't start re establishing itself in Ukraine until the nineteen eighties. Another big factor leading into the Holadamore was Stalin's First five Year Plan, which was announced in ninety eight. This was a plan to modernize and industrialize all of the Soviet Union. In terms of agriculture, this would involve collectivizing the farms. Small farms would become part of bigger collectives that were under state control, and they would sell their crops at prices that were set by the state. The idea was that this would make farms more efficient, and that efficiency would allow the Soviet Union to feed a larger population as it industrialized, and to export more crops to bring in more revenue to then buy the equipment and material that was needed for that industrialization. Of course, farmers resisted this idea, and there were thousands of uprisings against collectivization all across the agricultural areas of the Soviet Union. Many of the poorest farmers had received the land they were working in a redistribution after the Russian Revolution, and now they were being told to give it up. In general, people did not want to go from controlling their own livelihoods to essentially being employees of state run farms. The prices set by the state were often lower than what people had been able to sell their surplus for before, so overall the farms were very slow to collectivize, leading the Communist Party to start a huge push between January and March of nineteen thirty and this included taxing independent farms so heavily that the farmers wound up in debt and that forced them to join the collective or go bankrupt. Soviet leadership also targeted one particular class of farmers. That was a group known as kulaks, which was a term that had taken on some derisive connotations. Sometimes these people are described as wealthy farmers, but to be clear, they were not what most people would think of as wealthy today. The Soviet government defined kulak farms as ones that brought in an annual income of three hundred roubles per person or fifteen hundred roubles per family, and hired farm workers are owned farm machines. Being able to rent out some of the farm property or having another income besides farming also would fit the definition of kulak, but for comparison, the average industrial worker only made about three hundred roubles per year. Authorities didn't really stick strictly to this definition, and a lot of people that were treated as kulaks had even less than that. The Soviet government believed that if there was going to be an organized uprising against collectivization, it was probably going to start with these slightly more affluent peasants, so it branded them as class enemies, claiming that they were exploiting hired workers and taking advantage of their communities. Authorities pursued a policy of liquidating the kulak class, or decoulak azation. They arrested about fifty thou people, some of whom were deported or executed. Authorities also confiscated their property and their farm equipment. This was catastrophic in addition to the loss of labor and production from these farms. Many of these people described as kulaks were the most skilled and experienced farmers in the areas they lived and a lot of towns and villages. They were also community leaders. They were the people who really helps to hold the community together. So this community resource for knowledge and support just disappeared. Between the forced collectivization and the de cool acquization campaign. More than two hundred and eighty thousand peasant households simply vanished from Ukraine between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one. And all of this set the stage for a famine, and we're going to get into that after we pause for a sponsor break. After all of the factors that we talked about before the break, harvest was poor across a lot of the Soviet Union. The collectivization and de cool acquization process had been really disruptive, and then bad weather made it worse. The collective farms also had not been run particularly efficiently, even though the whole point was to be more efficient. This was in part because that liquidation of the koolat class had involved a lot of loss of knowledge and leadership. Soviet leadership also set quotas for how much grain each community was expected to contribute to the collective, and in many cases those quotas were just unattainably high. To even come close to meeting them, farming families had to turnover grain that they would normally keep for their own food supply. Although these quotas existed in all of the Soviet Union's agricultural regions, their effects were particularly dramatic in Ukraine, which was expected to contribute about as much grain and other produce as all the rest of the Soviet Union combined. In December of one, Joseph Stalin's government started placing more and more pressure onto these communities to meet their quotas. A lot of the enforcement of these regulations was overseen by the State Political Directorate, which is abbreviated from Russian as GPU. This was kind of a combined intelligence and secret police force. In internal memos about this there is an insistence that the poor harvest and the failure to meet the quotas was the result of a coordinated program of intentional sabotage and theft that was meant to undermine the collectivization process and ruin the harvest and undermine the Soviet Union as a whole. So mass uprisings against collectivization, which involved everything from work stoppages to destructions of machinery to violent revolts, that was interpreted as a conspiracy against Soviet leadership rather than as a response to all of this increasing hardship and instability. This is a really destructive cycle in which people were arrested, deported to Siberia or sent to a gulag, and then that would spark further uprisings among the who had known those folks. Uprisings and unrest continued through the nineteen thirty two planting and growing season, with farmers struggling to both meet their quotas and just retain enough food to live on. In most cases it was flatly impossible to do both, or in some cases to do either. By June of ninety two, Ukrainian leaders were writing to Stalin and other Soviet leaders for aid. In August, Stalin wrote to his adviser Lazar Kaganovitch, saying that if they did not improve the situation in Ukraine, they might lose it. Grain quotas were lowered three times in nineteen thirty two, but really not enough to address this situation, and the quota reductions were also more about trying to keep the system of agriculture running, not about a humanitarian impulse. Were the people who were doing that. Even with those reductions, Ukraine was still expected to contribute about of its grain to the state. Punishments for failing to meet the reduced quotas also became a lot harsher, and the other policies that were contributing to the famine, like this continuing push for collectivization and the ongoing liquidation of the Kulak class, none of that changed. A new decree called the five Stocks of Grain Decree went into effect in August of ninety two. Under this law, theft of state property was punishable by ten years in prison or death, and this meant that people who stole food because they were starving could be executed for it, no matter how little food they stole. This applied to everyone, even children. It also applied to people who went through fields that had already been harvested to glean anything that was left to save themselves from starvation. More than fifty thousand people were charged with violating this decree, and more than two thousand of them were executed. Although the five stocks grain decree applied all across the Soviet Union, the vast majority of people who were arrested were from Ukraine. Because of the truly dire situation there. In the fall of two, Soviet leadership started blacklisting towns and villages that failed to meet their grain Quotas. Blacklisted towns were banned from receiving food and from buying basic necessities like salt or kerosene. More than a third of the towns in Ukraine were blacklisted. So to some all this up Joseph Stalin's policies had created the conditions that sparked the famine, then made the famine worse, and punished its victims for being the victims of famine. At this point, many farmers started trying to leave Ukraine, either to buy food from one of its neighbors or just to relocate entirely in the hope of finding a better life, and of course Soviet leadership did not want this to happen because Ukraine was the Soviet Union's largeist food producer, But instead of taking steps to address the escalating famine in Ukraine, which again was being worsened by unreachable food quotas. Soviet leadership worked to stop Ukrainian farmers from leaving. In October, about a hundred thousand Communist Party representatives and military personnel were dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to the Northern Caucasus and the Volga Basin to conduct house to house searches to make up for the shortfall in the quotas. During these searches, they confiscated any grain or flower or their food that they found. People started selling whatever they had wedding rings, household goods, furniture, their tools, just to try to buy back some of their own produce to eat. Calls for aid to Ukraine became increasingly desperate, but in ninety two, more than four million tons of grain were taken from Ukraine, enough to feed more than twelve million people for a year. Moscow exported more than a million tons of green to other countries and held enough green in reserves to feed at least ten million people. Yet all over the Soviet Union people were starving, especially in Ukraine. In December of ninety two, still tied to the idea that a huge conspiracy was intentionally undermining agriculture in Ukraine, Soviet authorities started a series of mass arrests of people who were accused of being involved in secret paramilitary organizations. These organizations did exist. They included the Ukrainian Military Organization or u v O and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or oh u N, but this alleged involvement was really being used as a justification for mass arrests without actually offering any proof that the arrested person had any ties whatsoever to these organizations. In January of nine thirty three, Pavel post Yachev arrived in Ukraine as Stalin's personal representative and implemented a series of massive purges, removing Ukrainians from positions of leadership and replacing them with Russians. On New Year's Day of nineteen thirty three, an amnesty was announced for anyone who turned in stolen or hidden grain. The implication was that anyone who didn't turn in any grain was clearly hiding something. The house to house searches that had started in October intensified, with anything that could be eaten being confiscated, including seed crops meant to be planted the next season, and people's pets. In late January of three, Joseph Stalin and Lazarre Molotov ordered the Ukrainian borders to be sealed. Efforts had already been underway to keep Ukrainian farmers from leaving, but this measure also kept people from entering Ukraine, so people couldn't leave to buy food. That's also kept word of the famine from spreading, and it kept any kind of relief from being brought into Ukraine. An internal passport system was implemented for travel within Ukraine as well, but farmers were not allowed to have them, so in addition to being unable to leave Ukraine to find work or food, they also couldn't try to move to a city or a different rural area where things might not be so dire. Even though other parts of the Soviet Union were also experiencing a famine, Ukraine was the only Soviet republic where these measures were in place. In late January of nineteen thirty three, the Pullit Bureau, which was the Communist Party's supreme policy making body, resolved that the Ukrainian Communist Party had failed to carry out its duties. Pavl Postazev was named the new head of the party, he implemented another wave of purges of Ukrainian intellectuals, cultural figures, and party leaders, again replacing the people who were removed from their positions with Russians. Many of those who had been arrested and imprisoned in earlier years were executed. Ukrainian Communist leader Michoelas Krupnik took his own life in July three rather than go through a show trial connected to all these purges. A month earlier, Ukrainian poet and writer Michael Kulvi took his own life in protest, feeling that that was the only action left open to him. The deadliest months of the dam Or were in early nineteen thirty three. During this time, it is estimated that a thousand people were starving to death in Ukraine every single hour. People died of starvation while waiting in line for bread, with those lines often being thousands of people long. As crops grew in the early spring of nineteen thirty three, people died while trying to eat unripe grain uncooked in the fields. Parents abandoned their children close to cities, hoping that city dwellers with more access to food might take them in. Survivors accounts are full of just absolutely desperate steps that people took to try to stay alive. Eventually, so many people were dying that wagons were sent house to house to collect the dead. The wagons were drawn by horses, which had to be fed at night and in secret, otherwise starving people would understandably mob the stables trying to get the horses food. Many many farm animals died of starvation during this period as well, because there was no grain to feed them with, and there was also a wave of just appalling and brutal crimes, including cannibalism, committed by people who had reached a point of having to do just anything possible to find something to eat. Throughout the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, the focus of the mass arrests and purges had mainly been men that men that often them, and where the people trying to hold their families and their communities together as the wolodamor peaked. Survivors of the famine have described women trying to find and store whatever food they could, and trying to turn things that would be considered to be inedible, like leather and horse hides and dried leaves and twigs into food. Women also formed mutual aid organizations and banded together to try to guard communities food stores, or to fight back against food confiscations and arrests. The Soviet government took steps to try to cover up the famine. Russian propaganda films depicted Ukraine as a happy and bountiful place, as professional journalists and ordinary citizens risk their lives trying to document what was happening. Foreign journalists and dignitaries were allowed into the Soviet Union, but they were given very tightly controlled tours that made it look like everything was under control. A small number of journalists did manage to publish articles on what was really going on. One was Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who published multiple articles on the famine in ninety two and nineteen thirty three. The Soviet Union published extensive rebuttals to this reporting, insisting that everything was fine and that reports of a famine were simply anti Soviet propaganda. Even journalists outside the Soviet Union questioned or dismissed Jones's reports. Walter Duranti of The New York Times, for example, stated that he quote thought Mr. Jones's judgment was somewhat hasty. Jones was ultimately forbidden from being allowed to re enter the Soviet Union, and he was murdered in Japanese occupied Mongolia in ninety five. Yeah, there were there were some other journalists as well who were able to publish accurate accounts, some of it later, like later in the nineteen thirties. We'll get more into the aftermath of all of this. After another quick sponsor break, the Holidamora came to an end as crops were harvested in three and more people were allowed to keep enough of that harvest to feed themselves. Accurate death records were not kept during the famine, though, so there are multiple estimates of how many people died. The most commonly cited figures today are about five million deaths across the Soviet Union, with about four million of those happening in Ukraine, but some estimates are a lot higher, as many as ten million total deaths, with seven million of those deaths in Ukraine. It's estimated that more than ten percent of the population of Ukraine died in the Holidamor, with a much higher death toll in some communities. This, combined with the intentional arrests and purges of Ukrainian leaders, intellectuals, artists, and cultural figure to just have a devastating effect on the nation and its identity. In February of nineteen thirty four, Ukrainian writer Boris and Tanenko Davidovich wrote quote, at the present time, there is no Ukrainian culture, and if there is, it is the corpse of Ukrainian culture, because the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia and its culture are in exile. Although the Soviet Union had tried relentlessly to cover up the famine, it was really impossible to keep it completely secret. But in spite of that, there was not really an international response to what was going on at the time. Discussions of the famine in the international community generally framed it as an internal matter for the Soviet Union and not something that called for some sort of international consequences. The United States recognized the Soviet government on November sixteenth, nineteen thirty three, more than a decade after the Soviet Union was first established. The Soviet Union also became a member of the League of Natans in nineteen thirty four. Purges and arrests also continued into nineteen thirty four, including replacing Ukrainian leaders with Russians. Russians were also recruited to repopulate parts of Ukraine that had been most affected by the famine. Some of these people were volunteers who returned to Russia after about a year, but this was part of an ongoing effort to transfer more people who were ethnically Russian into Ukraine. The Soviet cover up of the famine also continued for years. In nineteen thirty seven, there was a census that made it obvious that something terrible had happened in Ukraine. Joseph Stalin suppressed the census and then had the committee that had carried it out executed. Soviet efforts to cover up the famine and to break apart Ukrainian culture and society ended only after Nazi Germany invaded in nineteen forty one. At first, many people in Ukraine saw this as a liberation, both because of the horrors they had endured at the hands of the predominantly Russian Soviet leadership during the famine and the ongoing oppression and dismantling of Ukrainian culture. Some people also thought that because Germany and the USSR were enemies, Germany would be on the side of Ukrainian independence. Germany used these perceptions to its own ends, including using inspections of mass graves from the famine to deflect from its own crimes, But of course the Nazi invasion brought its own horrific incidents to Ukraine. Nazi policies were the same in Ukraine as they were in any other territory that the Nazis occupied. This included the massacre at bobby Ar that began on September. More than thirty three thousand Jews were killed in this massacre, and the ravine where it happened was the site of additional massacres and mass burials over the remainder of the war. Somewhere between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand Jews, prisoners of war and Ukrainian nationalists were killed and buried in mass graves there before the war ended. After World War Two, the Soviet Union continued to refuse to acknowledge or discuss the famine of nineteen thirty two and nineteen thirty three. Survivors in Ukraine, of course knew about it, as did Ukrainians living elsewhere, but the Kremlin denied that it had happened for more than fifty years. Soviet research into the famine, starting in the nineteen fifties and sixties, was meant to try to disprove that it had ever happened, and to provide evidence that it had really all been propaganda cooked up by Ukrainian nationalists and bourgeois expatriots. The famine wasn't totally unknown outside the USSR and Ukrainian immigrant communities, though. For example, in nineteen fifty three, past podcast subject Raphael Lampkin, who coined the term genocide, gave a speech at a New York commemoration of the famine. He also published this speech as an article titled Soviet Genocide in Ukraine. In this he walked through why he believed Russia's destruction of Ukraine was genocide, incorporating a four pronged plan that included the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the starvation of Ukrainian farmers, and the replacement of Ukrainian population with non Ukrainians from Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. More accurate, scholarly and popular articles about the Holodomor began to be published in the early nineteen eighties, right around the fiftieth anniversary of the famine. Public statements on the subject increased after the nineteen eighties six Chernobyl disaster, including people pointing out earlier Soviet efforts to cover up a disaster. The Soviet Union's first official acknowledgement of the famine came in nineteen eighties seven. The Ukrainian Communist Party also formally acknowledged it on December twenty five, Night seven, which was the anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. More information became available about the whole damore after the collapse of the Soviet Union in nine, at which point Ukraine again became an independent nation. Much of the ongoing historical analysis of the Holodamar has taken place in Ukrainian immigrant communities in North America. Harvard University is home to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, which was founded in nineteen seventy three with support from Ukrainian Americans. Alberta, Canada, is home to the lad More Research and Education Consortium, which was established in On November two thousand and six, the Ukrainian Parliament passed an Act defining the Holadamor as an act of genocide, and since then at least fifteen other nations have also formally done the same. Lad More Remembrance Day is observed in Ukraine and around the world on the fourth Saturday of November. Uh, and that is the whole of moral Uh. In lieu of listener mail today, we're going to take one last chance to say, live streaming of it coming up just a couple of days from this podcast coming out. That's March ten. Everything you need to know about it is that looped live dot com. Uh. It feels a little weird to end this podcast with that announcement in this particular episode, but uh, we have no other no other episodes coming out before the live stream is happening. Yes, sometimes that is just how the calendar works out. Yeah. Yeah, So we hope to see folks there if you would like to write to us about this or any other pod asked Where it History podcasts that I Heart radio dot com. We are all over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterests, and Instagram. We have our live stream link pinned up at the top of our Facebook and our Twitter, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.