I hope Russia’s Ambassador, Vladimir Malygin, will bear with me for returning to the subject of Ukraine’s recent history.
I have been reading a shocking book, Red Famine, by Ann Appelbaum – the West’s leading historian of Soviet crimes – which takes as its subject events in Ukraine between 1931 and 1934 when four million people perished of hunger. The famine has come to be known as the Holodomor,a term derived from two Ukrainian words: holod meaning “hunger” and mor meaning “extermination”.
What was so appalling about the Holodomor was that, as it progressed, witnesses to its horrors informed Moscow of what was happening. The novelist, Mikhail Sholokov, wrote a series of letters to Stalin personally describing the famine. He felt the Soviet leader should know that a catastrophe was unfolding.
The Holodomor was largely man-made. Decisions by the Soviet government, and ultimately by Stalin himself, led to it. State collectivisation of the land and the eviction from their homes of tens of thousands of so-called “kulaks”, the wealthier peasants who were identified as enemies of the 1917 Russian Revolution, drove large swathes of Ukraine towards starvation. Collectivisation had been Stalin’s idea. He could not admit that it had failed.
Putin has reinstated an archaic model of the former Soviet State
The policy was a combination of stupidity and evil, both in almost unbelievable quantities. Moscow needed the grain that Ukraine could produce. It needed it to feed the workers in the cities and wanted to export it for industrial goods.
Adding to the toxic mix of motives behind Stalinist policies was a paranoid distrust of Ukraine that dated back at least as far as the days of the Russian civil war years earlier. Suppression of Ukrainian nationalism and attacks on Ukrainian intellectuals marched in parallel with the diktats that created the famine.
In 1933, the rural population of Ukraine began to die. They fell down dead while sitting at school desks, while queuing outside bakeries, while begging in the street and scavenging in the fields. Bodies littered roads and villages.
They ate their horses and every cat and dog they could find. They made “potato-cakes” out of grass. They ate bark and manure. They grazed on grass and pigweed, like cattle. To survive, people ate anything, from crows and sparrows to moss and acorns. They consumed the dead bodies of their family members. Sometimes they killed their children and ate them, too.
Far from alleviating the suffering, Stalin and the Politburo exacerbated it. Even as much of its population starved, the exporting of food continued. At the height of the famine, thousands of tonnes of butter and bacon were shipped out of Ukraine. Even worse, loyal communists were sent into the Ukrainian countryside to requisition for the Soviet State what little food many peasants possessed. Then they shut the borders of Ukraine and of every city, and sat there while people died. Four million of them.
In his reply to Sholokhov, written at the worst moment of the famine, Stalin denied that those starving to death were innocent. They were traitors and saboteurs who had been conspiring to undermine the Revolution. They were waging “a war against Soviet power”. For this reason, they deserved to die.
The Soviets feared Ukrainian nationalism. The famine destroyed the peasant class they saw as dangerous. And just to be sure they imprisoned every nationalist leader, repressed the Ukrainian language, deported thousands who might pose a threat and replaced them with Russian workers.
If this wasn’t formal genocide as legally defined, this is only because the Soviets insisted that after World War II the United Nations would adopt the narrowest possible definition of the term so as to include the Nazi murders, but exclude their political repression of an entire culture and leadership in Ukraine.
The Holodomor was unmentionable in the Soviet Union for decades. As Applebaum says: “Between 1933 and 1991, the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place”. Only since 1991 has the truth begun to be accepted.
Red Famine does much to place the current crises and confrontations in Ukraine into a longer historical context. More than that, however, it also casts a shining light on the mind-set that drives President Vladimir Putin’s policy today.
This is not to say that Russia is committing genocide. But the mass murder of civilians by chemical attack by a Russian surrogate in Syria, the Skripal poisoning by nerve gas in England and the sheer scale of subversive activities in the West suggest that a turning point has been reached by Stalin’s distant cousins in the Kremlin today.
It is to assert that Putin, a career KGB officer whose outlook and approach to international and domestic affairs were shaped by his time as a spy, has revived and strengthened the remains of the former Soviet Union (Putin has recently rehabilitated Stalin), its institutions, economic structures and social practices.
Today, the three main pillars of the Soviet State – disinformation, propaganda and the threat of repression – have been restored. The KGB (now the FSB), which was humiliated and broken up in the aftermath of the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, has been rebuilt as the main vehicle for political and economic power.
Reactionary policies at home have led to aggression abroad. Russia has invaded Georgia and destabilised Ukraine, two of the most democratic of the former Soviet republics. It has intervened bloodily in Syria and annexed the Crimea. It has attempted to undermine Euro-Atlantic institutions, backed right-wing parties in Europe and tried to meddle in the American and French presidential elections.
After the defeat of the 1991 coup, Russia was widely expected to become a westernised, democratic, free-market country. When he came to power in 2000, Putin was expected to consolidate the country. But his rule has become increasingly autocratic. The FSB has emerged as the main mechanism for exercising power, often at the expense of all other security services, including the police.
Putin has reinstated an archaic model of the former Soviet state. It was naïve to expect that after several decades of Soviet rule – which included the horrors of the Holodomor and Siberian Gulags – Russia would emerge as a functioning Western-style democracy. Political relations with the West are at a nadir.