For decades, Robert Conquest, before his death was considered the premier expert on the rise of the Soviet Union. His research was often criticized by those on the left but with the opening of the Soviet archives, his excellence was proven beyond a doubt. In this book, he lays out what may be the greatest genocide in the world’s history, that of the Ukrainians especially during the years of 1929-1933. During that time, as many fourteen million people were executed or starved to death in a deliberate policy designed to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and the will of the peasants to resist Soviet power.
Starting with a purge of the “kulaks” (normally the more productive peasants), the policy under Stalin also aimed at the various churches in the Ukraine as well as the academic community at every level. The imposition of the Russian language was designed to erase the history of the Ukraine and make it subservient to the will of Stalin. During this time, millions of “kulaks” were thrown out of their houses and shipped via rail to the wilderness of the north or far reaches of Siberia and often simply dumped into marches without food or tools and told to learn their lesson. The winters were terrible as families attempted to survive by digging into the earth for shelter as around them their children died from lack of food and various diseases. In some areas where there were camps, the winters were so brutal that everyone died including the guards and their dogs.
A valuable lesson had been learned by those who had watched the “kulaks” being taken away, the so called “middle peasants”. The lesson was that hard work and success could earn one the label of “kulak” and lead to one’s own deportation. But there was little incentive to work as individual farms were collectivized into huge farming communities. The Marxist theory of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” simply meant that the laziest peasants were suddenly made managers and the average peasant saw no reason to labor as wages and material goods were not available as a reward for their work. In the meanwhile, the new “managers” abused their positions but were still given better goods and privileges than the actual workers.
Fleeing from the collectives was difficult if not impossible, especially after the issuance of “internal passports”. One’s name, birth, religion and place of work were all in these passports and it was illegal for anyone to leave their place of work without authorization. When the final intentional famine began, troops were posted at all major cities to keep fleeing peasants from entering the cities to beg for food. For two years, impossibly high quotas for grain delivery were demanded from Moscow and in the effort to achieve those goals, special groups of students and Communist activists were delivered to the farms where they searched for every pound of grain. When the quotas could not be fulfilled, it was blamed on more “kulaks” and anti-Soviet spies and saboteurs paid by the British, Japanese, Poles or just pain Trotskyites and of course, they had to be executed. Even the grain for the next seasons plantings were seized so another year of famine could be forecast. When agricultural experts did not forecast the correct number of crops to be harvested (versus the “official goal”), they were executed.
The world was not blind to the famine, (the exact numbers were not known), but most newspapers around the world either ignored the story or intentionally sought to minimize the numbers of deaths. Walter Duranty of the New York Times was wined and dined by the Soviet leadership and even though he travelled through the Ukraine and saw the bodies of people who had died of starvation, even though he saw the mass graves containing the dead and soon to be dead, he wrote to cover up the horror and was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize (which the New York Times still mentions among their honors). Beatrice and Sidney Webb, famous sociologists of the time (I can remember them being held up as experts in my undergraduate days) said of the Soviet activists and secret police, “… strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men, who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a decision.” I wonder if they said the same of the killers in the Nazi death squads. George Bernard Shaw said that he never even saw anyone hungry during his visit at that time.
There were more people killed in the Ukraine during those few years than were killed during World War I in all theaters. Conquest created a book that is factual and damning and should be read by anyone believing that the millions dead under Communism were merely due to a system run by bad individuals. Any system that can allow such individuals to gain power must in and of itself be bad.
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