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by Marco Carynnyk
The Ukrainian Weekly
PART I, May 29, 1983
"The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that
it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any
consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering," Malcolm
Muggeridge said. He was talking about the genocidal famine that swept
Ukraine and the adjacent North Caucasus, two of the most abundant lands in
all of Europe, in the winter of 1932 and the spring and summer of 1933.
The harvest of 1932 had been a fair one, no worse than the average during
the previous decade, when life had seemed a bit easier again after three
years of world war and five years of revolution and famine. But then, as the
Ukrainian peasants were bringing in their wheat and rye, an army of men
advanced like locusts into every barn and shed, and swept away all the
grain. The few stores that the peasants managed to put away were soon gone,
and they began eating leaves, bark, corn husks, dogs, cats and rodents.
When that food was gone and the people had puffed up with watery edema, they
shuffled off to the cities, begging for bits of bread and dying like flies
in the streets. In the spring of 1933, when the previous year's supplies
were gone and before the new vegetation brought some relief, the peasants
were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, or 17 a minute.
(In World War II, by comparison, about 6,000 people were killed every day.)
Corpses could be seen in every country lane and city street, and mass graves
were hastily dug in remote areas. By the time the famine tapered off in the
autumn of 1933, some 6 million men, women and children had starved to death.
Malcolm Muggeridge was there that terrible winter and spring. As a
correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow, he was one of the few
Western journalists who circumvented Soviet restrictions and visited the
famine regions - and then honestly reported what he had seen.
Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge's articles appeared in the Guardian, the
Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about
concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers
and journalists - among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George
Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times - were enlisted in the
campaign of misinformation.
The conspiracy of silence was largely successful. For years to come
Stalinists and anti-Stalinists argued whether a famine had occurred and, if
so, whether it was not the fault of the Ukrainian peasants themselves.
Today, as Ukrainians throughout the world (except in the Soviet Union, of
course, where the subject cannot even be mentioned) commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the famine, the events of 1933 are still largely unknown.
Mr. Muggeridge and I talked at his cottage in Sussex, England. I was
particularly anxious to know why he, unlike other foreign correspondents in
Moscow in 1933, took the trouble to investigate the famine.
* * *
Q: Why did you decide to write about the famine?
A: It was the big story in all our talks in Moscow, everybody knew about it.
There was no question about that. Anyone you were talking to knew that there
was a terrible famine going on. Even in the Soviets' own pieces there were
somewhat disguised acknowledgements of great difficulties there: the attacks
on the kulaks, the admission that the people were eating the seed grain and
cattle.
You didn't have to be very bright to ask why they were eating them. Because
they were very hungry, otherwise they wouldn't. So there was no possible
doubt. I realized that that was the big story. I could also see that all the
correspondents in Moscow were distorting it.
Without making any kind of plans or asking for permission I just went and
got a ticket for Kiev and then went on to Rostov. The Soviet security is not
as good as people think it is. If you once duck it, you can go quite a long
way. At least you could in those days. Having all those rubles, I could
afford to travel in the Pullman train. They had these old-fashioned
international trains - very comfortable, with endless glasses of hot tea and
so on. It was quite pleasant.
But even going through the countryside by train one could sense the state of
affairs. Ukraine was starving, and you only had to venture out to smaller
places to see derelict fields and abandoned villages.
On one occasion, I was changing trains, and I went wandering around, and in
one of the trains in the station, the kulaks were being loaded onto the
train, and there were military men all along the platform. They soon pushed
me off. Fortunately, they didn't do more. They could have easily hauled me
in and asked, "What the hell are you doing here?" But they didn't. I just
cleared off. But I got the sense of what it was like.
I'll tell you another thing that's more difficult to convey, but it
impressed me enormously. It was on a Sunday in Kiev, and I went into the
church there for the Orthodox mass. I could understand very little of it,
but there was some spirit in it that I have never come across before or
after. Human beings at the end of their tether were saying to God: "We come
to You, we're in trouble, nobody but You can help us."
Their faces were quite radiant because of this tremendous sense they had. As
no man would help them, no government, there was nowhere that they could
turn. And they turned to their Creator. Wherever I went it was the same
thing.
Then when I got to Rostov I went on to the North Caucasus. The person who
had advised me to go there was the Norwegian minister in Moscow, a very nice
man, very well-informed, who said, "You'll find that this German
agricultural concession is still working there. Go and see them, because
they know more about it than anybody, and it'll be an interesting
experience." So I went there. It was called the Drusag concession.
Q: What difference did you see between Drusag and the collective farms in
Ukraine and the North Caucasus?
A: The difference was simply that the agriculture in the concession was
enormously flourishing, extremely efficient. You didn't have to be an
agronome, which God knows I'm not, to see that there the crops, the cattle,
everything, was completely different from the surrounding countryside.
Moreover, there were hordes of people, literally hordes of people trying to
get in, because there was food there, which gave a more poignant sense to
the thing than anything except that service in the church. The German
agronomes themselves were telling me about it. They'd been absolutely
bombarded with people trying to come there to work, do anything if they
could get in, because there was food there.
Q: I have read in a British Foreign Office dispatch that Drusag employed
five people simply to pick up bodies of peasants who had come in and died of
hunger.
A: Yes, that's what I'd heard too, if not more. The peasants staggered in
and dropped dead.
Q: Were the Germans able to do anything for the peasants?
A: They could help them with a little food - they were quite charitable in
their attitude - but of course they couldn't do more than that flea-bit.
Q: What were you thinking and, more importantly perhaps, what were you
feeling when you saw those scenes of starvation and privation in Ukraine?
How does one respond in such a situation?
A: First of all, one feels a deep, deep, deep sympathy with and pity for the
sufferers. Human beings look very tragic when they are starving. And
remember that I wasn't unaware of what things were like because in India,
for instance, I've been in a village during a cholera epidemic and seen
people similarly placed. So it wasn't a complete novelty.
The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that
it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It
was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the
collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical
proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human
suffering.
That was what I found so terrifying. Think of a man in an office who has
been ordered to collectivize agriculture and get rid of the kulaks without
any clear notion or definition of what a kulak is, and who has in what was
then the GPU and is now the KGB the instrument for doing this, and who then
announces it in the slavish press as one of the great triumphs of the
regime.
And even when the horrors of it have become fully apparent, modifying it
only on the ground that they're dizzy with success, that this has been such
a wonderful success, these starving people, that they must hold themselves
in a bit because otherwise they'd go mad with excitement over their
stupendous success. That's a macabre story.
Q: There were kulaks throughout the Soviet Union, and they were "liquidated"
as an entire class. Collectivization also took place throughout the Soviet
Union. And yet the famine occurred at the point when collectivization had
been completed, and it occurred not throughout the Soviet Union, but largely
in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. How do you explain that?
A: Those were the worst places. They were also the richest agricultural
areas, so that the dropping of productivity would show more dramatically
there. But they were also places, as you as a Ukrainian know better than I,
of maximum dissent. The Ukrainians hated the Russians. And they do now.
Therefore, insofar as people could have any heart in working in a collective
farm, that would be least likely to occur in Ukraine and the North Caucasus.
Q: Given the deliberate nature of the famine in Ukraine, the decision on
Stalin's part to proceed with collectivization and to eliminate resistance
at any cost and to get rid of the kulak, vaguely defined as that category
was, and given the fact that food continued to be stockpiled and exported
even as people dropped dead on the streets, is it accurate to talk about
this as a famine? Is it perhaps something else? How does one describe an
event of such magnitude?
A: Perhaps you do need another word. I don't know what it would be. The word
"famine" means people have nothing whatsoever to eat and consume things that
are not normally consumed. Of course there were stories of cannibalism
there. I don't know whether they were true, but they were very widely
believed.
Certainly the eating of cattle and the consequent complete destruction of
whatever economy the farms still had was true.
I remember someone telling me how all manners and finesse disappeared. When
you're in the grip of a thing like this and you know that someone's got
food, you go and steal it. You'll even murder to get it. That's all part of
the horror.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/228321.shtml
The Ukrainian Weekly, May 29, 1983, No. 22, Vol. LI
For personal and academic use only
"DELIBERATE," "DIABOLICAL" STARVATION
Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin's famine (Conclusion)
by Marco Carynnyk
The Ukrainian Weekly
June 5, 1983
CONCLUSION
Q: How does one rank the famine of 1933 with other great catastrophes?
A: I think it's very difficult to make a table of comparison. What I would
say with complete truth and sincerity is that as a journalist over the last
half century I have seen some pretty awful things, including Berlin when it
was completely flat and the people were living in little huts they'd made of
the rubble and the exchange was cigarettes and Spam.
But the famine is the most terrible thing I have ever seen, precisely
because of the deliberation with which it was done and the total absence of
any sympathy with the people. To mention it or to sympathize with the people
would mean to go to the gulag, because then you were criticizing the great
Stalin's project and indicating that you thought it a failure, when
allegedly it was a stupendous success and enormously strengthened the Soviet
Union.
Q: What sort of response did you encounter when you came back from the
Soviet Union and published your findings, particularly from people close to
you, like the Webbs?
A: The Webbs were furious about it. Mrs. Webb in her diary puts in a
sentence which gives the whole show away. She says, "Malcolm has come back
with stories about a terrible famine in the USSR. I have been to see Mr.
Maisky [the Soviet ambassador in Britain] about it, and I realize that he's
got it absolutely wrong. "Who would suppose that Mr. Maisky would say, "No,
no, of course he's right"?
Q: This is precisely the attitude that the British government was taking at
that time. L.B. Golden, the secretary of the Save the Children Fund, which
had been very active during the famine of 1921-22 in Russia and Ukraine,
approached the Foreign Office in August 1933. He'd received disturbing
information about famine in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, but the first
secretary of the Soviet embassy had assured him that the harvest was a
bumper one, and so Golden asked the Foreign Office whether a public appeal
should be put out. The Foreign Office told him not to do anything, and he
did not. The Soviet authorities were not admitting to a famine, and
therefore it was agreed that nothing should be said.
A: Absolutely true. The other day I had occasion to meet Lord March, the
representative of the laity on the World Council of Churches. "Why is it
that you're always putting out your World Council complaints about South
Africa or Chile?" I asked. "I never hear a word about anything to do with
what's going on in the gulag or with the invasion of Afghanistan. Why is
that?"
He said, "Whenever we frame any resolution of that sort, it's always made
clear to us that if we bring in that resolution, then the Russian Orthodox
Church and all the satellite countries will withdraw from the World Council
of Churches."
"Then do you not pursue the matter?" I asked. And he said, "Oh yes, we don't
pursue it because of that." I was amazed that the man could say that. But
there it was, and it's exactly true of the Foreign Office.
Q: You published "Winter in Moscow" when you got back from the Soviet Union,
and you were attacked in the press for your views.
A: Very strongly. And I couldn't get a job.
Q: Why was that? Because people found your reports hard to believe?
A: No, the press was not overtly pro-Soviet, but it was, as it is now,
essentially sympathetic with that side and distrustful of any serious attack
on it.
Q: How do you explain this sympathy?
A: It's something I've written and thought about a great deal, and I think
that the liberal mind is attracted by this sort of regime. My wife's aunt
was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote the classic pro-Soviet
book. "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization." And so, one saw close at hand
the degree to which they all knew about the regime, knew all about the Cheka
[the secret police] and everything, but they liked it.
I think that those people believe in power. It was put to me very succinctly
when we were taken down to Kharkiv for the opening of the Dnieper dam. There
was an American colonel who was running it, building the dam in effect. "How
do you like it here?" I asked him, thinking that I'd get a wonderful blast
of him saying how he absolutely hated it. "I think it's wonderful," he said.
"You never get any labor trouble."
This will be one of the great puzzles of posterity in looking back on this
age, to understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester Guardian mind, the
New Republic mind, should feel such enormous sympathy with this
authoritarian regime.
Q: You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia did not simply overlook
the regime's brutality, but actually admired and liked it.
A: Yes, I'm saying that, although they wouldn't have admitted it, perhaps
not even to themselves. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very
cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian
Society and so on, saying to me, "Yes, it's true, people disappear in
Russia." She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn't help
thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she
would have liked to organize.
No, it's an everlasting mystery to me how one after the other, the
intelligentsia of the Western world, the Americans, the Germans, even the
French, fell for this thing to such an extraordinary degree.
Q: One man who didn't fall for it was George Orwell. Did you discuss your
experiences in the Soviet Union with him? I ask because Orwell mentioned the
famine in his essay "Notes on Nationalism." "Huge events like the Ukraine
famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people," he wrote, "have
actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles."
A: We discussed the whole question. George had gone to the Spanish Civil War
as an ardent champion of the Republican side. In Catalonia he could not but
realize what a disgraceful double-faced game the Communists were playing
there. He was in a thing called POUM [Partido Obrero de Unification
Marxista, the United Marxist Workers' Party], which was allegedly
Trotskyist. Those people were not being knocked off by the Franco armies,
they were being knocked off by the Communists. And he was deeply
disillusioned. He then wrote what I think is one of his best books, "Homage
to Catalonia."
And so what brought us together was that we were in the same dilemma. People
assumed that because he had attacked the Communists, he must be on the
Franco side. Just as people thought that because I'd attacked the Communist
side, I must be an ardent member of the right wing of the Conservatives. And
so we had that in common, and we became friends. He had a feeling that I
also had strongly, that the Western world is sleepwalking into becoming a
collectivist, authoritarian society. And that's really what "1984" is about.
Q: Where do you think that Orwell got the idea for "Animal Farm"? His fable
of the revolution betrayed is so accurate that it even portrays the famine.
Food falls short, and the animals have only chaff and mangels to eat.
Napoleon (Stalin) conceals the facts and orders the hens to surrender their
eggs so that he can procure grain to keep the farm going. The hens rebel and
Napoleon orders their rations to be stopped, decreeing that "any animal
giving so much as a grain of corn to a hen shall he punished by death."
A: It's his masterpiece. It is one of the few books written in the 20th
century that I would say will always be read. It's a beautiful piece of
writing. If you show it to children, they love it and don't understand the
other part of it. I think that he had a deep hatred of intellectuals as
people. He felt that they were fortunate, and in "Animal Farm" he was
illustrating how a revolution can be twisted into its opposite. It is a
superb allegory of the whole thing.
But it's difficult to explain. He wasn't a man who discussed political
theories. He had an instinct that these intellectuals were somehow
double-faced, and he never tired of railing against them. If you had asked
him about the Soviet Union, he would have just said, "It's a dictatorship,
and they behaved disgracefully in Spain." So he'd write the whole thing off
in that way. He still called himself a socialist.
Q: To the very end.
A: To the very end of his life. He actually went canvassing for Anuerin
Bevin, and I've always wondered what particular line of talk he would have
fallen into. He wasn't a person with whom you could exchange ideas as such.
He was kind of impressionistic in his mind.
Q: Absorbed things without actually analyzing them.
A: That's right. And in "1984," all that business about Newspeak and
doublethink is beautifully done. And it is the kernel of the whole thing.
And the terrorism and the fact that you drift into a situation in which
people are in power with no program except to remain in power, which is very
much the state of affairs that's come to pass. The people in the Kremlin at
this moment are not in power because they've got plans to do this or the
other thing. All they want is a policy which will enable them to stay in
power.
Q: All that you've said about the image of the world that liberals have and
about reporting, in this case from the Soviet Union, leads to a rather large
and difficult question about the reliability of the image of the world that
we are given.
A: Yes, indeed. I believe that this is how posterity will see it. We are a
generation of men who have become completely captivated and caught up in
false images.
Television and all these things are splendid instruments for keeping them
going. Splendid. And I would say that the collapse of Western civilization
will be much more due to that than to anything else.
Q: False images?
A: False images. And it's enormously difficult to correct them. Children who
grow up now have been looking at television and hearing the voice of the
consensus, and they know nothing else. So I can't myself believe that
there's any escape from this, except that the whole show will blow up
sometime or other. But I think that Orwell's position was rather different.
He looked back on the past with nostalgia, which is peculiar in a man of his
attitude of mind and temperament.
Q: He was very conservative and very English in many ways.
A: Deeply conservative. The most conservative mind I've ever encountered.
But let's take this much more sinister thing we were talking about now, this
complete imprisonment of people at all levels into images which are fantasy,
bringing about in them a kind of unanimity, a consensus, which is very
dangerous and which is really the party line. For instance, I know a great
many people in the BBC. I would have the greatest difficulty in finding any
people there, more than a handful, who would have other than the consensus
views on things like abortion, euthanasia or overpopulation. There's a
consensus, and the consensus seems to be true, and the images over which
people spend a high proportion of their lives shape, color and dominate all
their thoughts.
Q: What is your way to overcome these images?
A: As a Christian, I believe that you can, if you want to, find reality,
which is what people call God. You can relate yourself to that reality, and
as a person belonging to what's called Western civilization you can find in
the drama of the Incarnation everything that's come therefrom, you can
recover contact with reality.
That is in fact the only way. The ordinary man gets up and spends four, five
or six hours of his day looking into these pictures and being subjected to
his fantasy view. I often think that like Caliban's island, full of sounds
and sweet airs, when we wake, we cry to sleep again. But if people ever do
wake, and I don't believe they wake much anymore, they cry to sleep again.
And crying to sleep again is turning on the apparatus.
Marco Carynnyk has published poetry and criticism as well as edited and
translated nine books, of which two recent ones are Leonid Plyushch's
"History's Carnival" (1979) and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's "Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors" (1981).
He is a visiting fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington and is writing
two books and filming a documentary about the famine of 1933. Clips from
this interview with Mr. Muggeridge have been shown on programs about the
famine prepared by CKCF in Montreal, Radio Quebec and the CBC.
The Ukrainian Weekly, June 5, 1983, No. 23, Vol. LI
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/238322.shtml
For personal and academic use only
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