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The Ninth Circle
by Olexa Woropay
Editor's Introduction By James E. Mace
Ukrainian Studies Fund, Inc. 1983
READERS IN THE English-speaking world will find much of what Olexa Woropay
says hard to believe. The world he describes with such eloquent simplicity
is completely alien to anything they have ever experienced: it is cut from
the same cloth as Hitler's death camps, a world gone mad on the blood of
human beings sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
When Americans think of the Soviet Union, they tend to think of Russia and
assume that all those who live there are Russians. In fact, about half the
inhabitants of the USSR are not Russian at all: they belong to nations as
diverse as Armenians in the South, Lithuanians in the North, Muslim Kazakhs
and Tatars, and an array of Siberian peoples not unlike our own American
Indians. There are over one hundred languages spoken in the Soviet Union,
and Russian is only one of them.
According to the 1979 census, over forty million of the Soviet Union's
inhabitants were Ukrainians, a Slavic nation like the Russians and Poles as
different from them as they are from each other. The Ukrainians have a
historical record that extends back to the tenth century when their ruler,
Prince (St.) Volodymyr accepted Christianity and brought what was then
called Rus' into the ranks of the Christian nations of Europe. They have a
rich culture of which they are rightly proud, and the central figure of
their literary tradition is the poet Taras Shevchenko, a nineteenth-century
bard who was born a serf and rose to the highest levels of cultured society
in the Russian Empire. The reader will learn from Woropay what happened in
Shevchenko's native village in 1933.
In 1933 Ukraine and certain neighboring areas were victims of what those who
survived remember as the Velyky Holod, the Great Famine or, more precisely,
the Great Hunger. It is also often referred to asShtuchny Holod, the
Artificial or Man-Made Hunger, for it was not, like most famines, due to
some natural calamity or crop failure. Figures on the Ukrainian harvest were
published in the press at the time, and they show that the grain crop was
only a little below the pre-collectivization average; there was certainly no
crop failure capable of causing a famine. A few years earlier the Soviet
government had collectivized agriculture, forced the farmers to give up
their individual farms, pool whatever resources could be taken from them,
work the land in common on estates not unlike that on which Shevchenko
worked as a serf, and give a far greater share of what they produced to the
state. [1] The farmers fought against this, and they also fought for their
national culture, which was under attack by the Soviet regime. It was in
order to break this resistance that government agents were sent into the
countryside and ordered to take away all food stuffs. As a result, the
people starved.
We have far more than Woropay's word for this. For one thing, we have census
figures published by the Soviet government, and we have various other
official Soviet population studies, which allow us to put the census figures
in perspective. According to Soviet Ukrainian figures from the late twenties
and early thirties, the number of Ukrainians in the USSR was increasing at
well over one percent a year. [2] Yet,the 1939 census -- itself somewhat
suspect -- [3] shows that the number of Ukrainians declined by almost ten
percent, over three million people, from what it had been in 1926 when the
last published census was taken. [4]
A Polish Communist historian calculated from these figures that there were
9. 3 million fewer Ukrainians in 1939 than would have been expected from the
population trends of the 1920s. [5] Some of this was due to a lowered birth
rate during the famine and some to assimilation at a time when Soviet
government was actually attempting to destroy Ukrainian culture, but this
still leaves several millions who could only have perished from starvation
and famine-related diseases.
There are also thousands of eye-witness accounts like those Woropay
presents. The Harvard University Refuge Interview Project conducted
interviews with thousands of displaced persons who left the Soviet Union
during and shortly after World War II, and the project files contain
hundreds of accounts virtually identical with those in this book. Many more
survivors published accounts of their experiences in books of testimonies
published by Ukrainian groups in the West. They have highly emotional titles
like The Black Deeds of the Kremlin and Moscow' s Biggest Crime . After one
reads Woropay' s book, one might begin to understand how these people became
so emotionally and vehemently anti-Communist. For Ukrainians, Communism has
come to be just another name for Russian imperialism, one even more
oppressive than the tsarist imperialism under which their grandparents
lived. There are also quite a number of Western accounts by non-Ukrainians.
[6]
Lastly, we have one truly unimpeachable source. Nikita Khrushchev, who ruled
the Soviet Union from the mid-fifties until 1964, related the following in
his unofficial memoirs, published in the West from tape recordings smuggled
out of the USSR after his death:
- Mikoyan told me that Comrade Demchenko, who was then First Secretary of the
Kiev Regional Committee, once came to see him in Moscow. Here's what
Demchenko said: "Anastas Ivanovich, does Comrade Stalin for that matter,
does anyone in the Politbureau know what's happening in the Ukraine? Well,
if not, I'll give you some idea. A train recently pulled into Kiev loaded
with corpses of people who had starved to death. It had picked up corpses
all the way from Poltava to Kiev . . . " [7]
- the fact that Khrushchev was not in Ukraine at the time and can only give
the story second-hand does little to undermine its credibility. Khrushchev
might have lied about many things, but he had no reason to lie about this.
In order to understand why the famine of 1933 occurred, one must go back at
least to 1917, perhaps even to 1900 when the first Ukrainian political
parties were formed in the Russian Empire. The Ukrainians were at that time
almost entirely a nation of peasants, just as the Czechs had been not long
before. If one visited Prague in, say, 1800, the language one would hear in
the streets and shops would have been German, not Czech. Only later was
Prague "Czechized." By the same token, the cities of Ukraine were
predominantly Russian-speaking in 1917. Although they were largely
Ukrainized in the late 1920s, they were later re-Russified to the point
where today Ukrainian is seldom heard in the streets of Kiev. In order to
prevent the development of a Ukrainian national movement, the tsarist
Russian government made it illegal to write or publish in the Ukrainian
language up to 1905. The concessions made in that year were gradually
withdrawn to the point that very little could be published legally in
Ukrainian by the time the First World War broke out. Ukrainian writers had
two choices: either publish legally in Russian and hope to slip something
past the censor through the use of Aesopian language, or publish in
Ukrainian in Austrian-ruled Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia) and try to
have their work smuggled over the border illegally. Despite these obstacles,
the Ukrainians produced an educated stratum, the intelligentsia, and this
group organized political parties, which sought national liberation, social
justice for the peasants, and some sort of home rule for Ukraine.
In 1917 the Russian Empire disintegated. The tsar abdicated, the police were
slaughtered or went into hiding, and the imperial army began to fall apart.
The Russian Provisional Government had little real power, particularly in
outlying areas. A Ukrainian national council, the Central Rada, was
organized in Kiev. Led by the two largest Ukrainian socialist parties, the
Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, it gradually evolved into an
autonomous national government. After the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd
and began an invasion of Ukraine the Rada declared Ukraine independent in
January 1918. For years Ukraine was fought over by Ukrainian governments,
the Bolsheviks Denikin's Russian Volunteer Army (which sought to turn the
clock back to before the revolution), the Poles, and a number of rural
warlords known as otamans. Although by 1921 the Bolsheviks were able to
defeat their various rivals in the field of battle, large-scale guerrilla
warfare continued in the Ukrainian countryside. Ukrainian governments were
driven from the country, but the Ukrainian peasantry remained unconquered.
The Bolsheviks decided to concede the peasants the minimum of what they
demanded. In 1921 the New Economic Policy was adopted, ending forced
requisitions of foodstuffs and allowing farmers to sell their products in a
limited free market. In 1923, a series of policies known as indigenization
were adopted in non-Russian areas. These policies provided for the
recruitment of non-Russians into the Party and state, teaching Russians the
local language, and actively supporting the cultural life of the non-Russian
peoples. Belorussianization, Tatarization, Yiddishization, and so forth,
proceeded through the rest of the decade.
Since the Ukrainians of all the non-Russian nations were the most numerous
and constituted the greatest political threat to Moscow, Ukrainization went
much farther than any of its counterparts. Many prominent Ukrainian
intellectual and political leaders returned from exile to take advantage of
the cultural opportunities afforded by this relatively benevolent policy. A
national cultural revival of unprecedented creativity took place in
literature, scholarship and the arts. Even within the Communist Party
(Bolshevik) of Ukraine, a strong Ukrainian wing demanded that Ukrainization
lead to the end of Russian domination. This group, led by Oleksander
Shumsky, Mykola Khvyl'ovy, and Mykhailo Volobuev, was condemned as
"nationalistic deviationist," and the Party repudiated their views.
By the end of 1927 Mykola Skrypnyk emerged as Ukraine's political strongman.
His official post, Commissar of Education, placed him in charge of the
Ukrainization policy and of supervising cultural life in general. By
eschewing any hint of anti-Russian sentiment, he was briefly able to achieve
much of what Shumsky, Khvyl'ovy, and Volobuev had called for. Under
Skrypnyk, Soviet Ukraine evolved more and more in the direction of a
national government, defending its prerogatives from Moscow and even
demanding it be allowed to defend the national interests of Ukrainians
residing in Russia itself.
The regime used the respite provided by the New Economic Policy and
Ukrainization to penetrate the Ukrainian countryside in a variety of ways.
Committees of Non-Rich Peasants (komnezams, KNS), which had earlier seized
peasants crops and held absolute power in the villages, were retained. There
was no counterpart to these organizations in Russia. After 1925 they were
stripped of political power and turned into voluntary organizations, and
during collectivization and the early stages of the famine they played an
important role in expropriating those the regime wanted to get rid of,
forcing the peasants into collective farms (kolhosps), and searching for
hidden grain to seize. In this later period, however, they often performed
these functions under the leadership of someone sent from the outside to
supervise dekulakization, collectivization, and the deliveries of grain to
the state. Village soviets were also organized, and the countryside was
covered by a dense network of secret police collaborators known as the
seksoty. Because of this penetration of the countryside, the regime was in a
far stronger position relative to the peasants than it had been in 1921.
Whereas the Bolsheviks had hitherto come to the villages as complete
strangers, they now had organized supporters ready to do their bidding and
provide information on potential opponents who could be singled out for
elimination.
Stalin saw the nationalities question and peasant question as indissolubly
linked. In his view, the peasants constituted the social basis of national
movements, the reservoir from which such movements drew strength. As he once
put it, "The nationality problem is by its essence a peasant problem. " [8]
Thus, concessions to the peasants meant concessions to the non-Russian
nations and vice versa. By the same token, repression in the countryside and
repression against those nations were bound to go together. They were two
sides of the same coin.
In 1929 Stalin decided to eliminate the kulaks (well-to-do peasants, kurkuls
in Ukrainian) as a class, begin forcing peasants into collective farms, and
use what could be taken from the peasants to finance rapid
industrialization. This was possible because, although collectivization did
nothing to increase crop yields (the current problems of Soviet agriculture
are largely attributable to forced collectivization), harvesting was done in
common, and the state could supervise the harvest directly and take as much
as it wished directly from the threshing room floor. This is precisely what
happened, and the idea that the state should take all it required from
"first proceeds," that is, the threshing room, became known as the First
Commandment of Soviet agriculture.
At the same time as peasants were being forced into collective farms the
first steps were taken to end the indigenization policies. Since Ukraine was
the largest stumbling block, these steps took the form of indirect attacks
on Skrypnyk and his clients. In 1929 one of his most important subordinates,
the ideological watchdog of historians, Matvyi Yavorsky, was attacked for
"treating the history of Ukraine as a distinctive process. " [9] The
political implication of such a charge was quite obvious: if Ukraine did not
have its own history, it was not a distinctive country and ought not to be
considered as such. This was the beginning of the end of Skrypnyk. At the
same time, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was banned and its
priests were executed on a mass scale. In 1930 a show trial was held of an
imaginary conspiracy called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. At this
trial some of Ukraine's most distinguished intellectual and spiritual
leaders were convicted of a host of crimes known in the jargon of the day as
"wrecking." Among these charges was a most interesting one: linguistic
sabotage, which consisted of spelling words in such a way as to make the
Ukrainian language closer to Polish than to Russian. Despite the absurdity
of this charge, it held particularly ominous political implications for
Skrypnyk, who had participated directly in various linguistic discussions of
the 1920s. When Skrypnyk was denounced and removed from his post in 1933,
one of the major charges levelled against him was that he had advocated the
use of the letter G in Ukrainian." [10]
The famine of 1933 succeeded in breaking the Ukrainian peasantry as a
political force, completed the destruction of the entire social structure of
the Ukrainian nation, and made possible far-reaching political changes. In
addition to the fall of Skrypnyk, the Ukrainization policy was ended and a
policy of Russification was instituted. The Ukrainian wing of the Communist
Party ceased to be an independent policy force and over the next several
years what was left of its old cadres was "liquidated" (a singularly
inappropriate euphemism since such people did not melt; they were executed),
and the Ukrainian intelligentsia was to all intents and purposes destroyed.
Ukrainian culture was thus decapitated by the loss of its intellectual and
political leaders, pushed out of the cities and back on the farms by a
return to Russification, and Soviet spokesmen began to glorify everything
Russian, including the tsarist past. At roughly the same time, internal
passports were issued to urban dwellers but not to collective farmers. Since
farmers could not live in the cities and towns without such documents, this
meant legally attaching the agricultural population to the land. The word
customarily used to describe such a state of affairs is serfdom.
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