Red Famine by Anne Appelbaum

Among other things, I collect stamps from Eastern Europe and that obviously includes several countries from the former USSR. I'm also a fan of Anne Applebaum's column. She resides in Poland, speaks fluent Polish, and is a scholar of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That she attended a Friends school (as did I) doesn't hurt either. So I was intrigued to read a review of her latest book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on the Ukraine, in the NYRB, August 16, 2018, which I have been reading.

Famous as the grain basket of the east and prized by both invading Germans and Soviet's, the poor Ukraine farmers have been treated as badly as the Irish by the British. The Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine even has its own label: Holodomor (killing by hunger.) In 1932, Stalin issued his "On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucusus, and the Western Region." The commands contained in the document were collect as much (all) the grain produced in these areas to help pay for Soviet industrialization, not to mention quiet the slowly building resentment in Russia of shortages created by the failures of collectivization. The result was the deaths of more than four million Ukrainians, more than half of all those who died during in the USSR during that period. 

The demise of the USSR and the opening of Soviet archives has revealed the depths of the efforts to use grain to also subvert and destroy any vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Complaints to local implementers of Stalin's genocidal order resulted in letters like the following:

#2 Letter to Stalin from Komsomol member Pastushenko, Polonyste village, Baban raion, Vinnitsa oblast, on the requisition of grain and starving collective farmers (excerpt)
February 10, 1932*
Good day honorable secretary of the AUCP(b), Comrade Stalin!
I am writing you this letter from a remote, out-of-the-way village in Ukraine. On a military map you will find the village called Polonyste on the river Yatran in the Uman region of Baban raion. Listen to this, Comrade Stalin! The village of 317 homesteads is collectivized a full one hundred percent. Do you think we have Soviet rule here?
No, it’s not Soviet, but completely bourgeois. Remember serfdom, six days of work for the master, and the seventh was а Sunday, when you didn’t work because it was a holiday? In the village cooperative, we work every day. There is nothing around the homes but empty buildings, yet we still have to pay taxes from our households for work done on the collective farm, and turn over our own savings; if you sign for a loan of 40 karbovantsi at the collective farm then [you must] pay it back from your homestead. It has been three years since everything has been collectivized by the kolhosp, yet we have to turn in grain procurements for land that we contributed to the kolhosp. Don’t go to the kolhosp for bread, but yourself provide 45 poods from three-tenths of a field, pay 28 karbovantsi for a share in the cooperative and pay a construction advance of 15 karbovantsi from your home; all that is left from three years of food are only kopeks of money — such is life.
Our village has fulfilled the [grain procurement] plan by 65 percent. The kolhosp shipped out the last funt of every sort of grain. There is nothing for the horses, only chopped wheat sprinkled with molasses; 56 horses have died already. Everyday three, four, six horses die of starvation; there is not a kernel left. There were 500 pigs, 184 of which have already died, [the remainder] eat sugar beet residue. There are only 60 cows, of which 46 will go for meat, leaving 14 for the entire village for all of 1932. That’s livestock breeding for you. Ours is a beet-growing and cattle-farming region and there are predictions that all the livestock will die in two months. People are beginning to die of famine, to swell and children ask for “bread, bread.” Do no think, Dear Leader, that people have refused to work… or [that there was] a bad harvest that nobody is considering. Last year’s harvest was average and the population barely survived because the plan was 38,000 poods. This year it’s 57,000 poods… 
A brigade of 86 persons has spent three months doing nothing [but] check under every house, day after day. Since the campaign began, every house has been searched 60 times. They took the last funt of vegetables from the kolhosp, [leaving] collective farmers with two poods of potatoes per person; the remaining funts went for procurement. There is no provision for spring sowing, not a funt of seed, not a grain crop left: no potatoes, no beans, no legumes, no lentils, no peas, no buckwheat, no cattle grass, no barley, no oats, no soybeans — everything to the last funt. They have taken our beets and pickled cabbage and are taking away our chickens. Villagers say the secret slaughter of rabbits is taking place because there is nothing to eat. Such is the state of affairs, Comrade Stalin. […]
Komsomolets, Branch secretary, 
member of RKM bureau 
Pastushenko 

Rape of the Ukrainian breadbasket in 1932 was not the first time. Ukraine didn't exist as a nation during WWI but was fought over by the Russians and Austro-Hungarians. Following WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, grain became essential to the success of the revolution. Lenin wrote to his commanders in Ukraine: "For God's sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain, and more grain. Otherwise Petrograd may starve to death." Lenin's troops were fighting the Ukrainian nationalists who had gone underground after WW I and had formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, a socialist regime but not allied enough with Moscow. But it was all about grain. Ukraine suffered as Communist colonialism took place.

Stalin was after more than just grain, however. Part of his rationale was to eliminate the peasant class and create a working class, needed for the industrialization of the USSR, and to eliminate ethnic and national differences. "The national question is purely a peasant question...the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers..., which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat. ." (Mikhail Kalinin) The world-wide revolution had not materialized and Russian insecurity required a more rapid transformation of the economy into a military and industrial one to resist a hostile capitalist world. 

The Ukraine suffered as collectivization of the farms, arrest of peasants (anyone who resisted, really) who were labeled as wealthy exploiters (kurkuls) and deported north. The goal was to completely control grain supplies. Ukraine political leaders were purged if they showed an signs of resistance to Stalin's policies. As all the grain was confiscated and sent north, nothing was left to plant for following years and starvation and genocide was the result.