Abolished census, code of silence and censorship: when Stalin concealed the famine that killed eight million Ukrainians

Vladimir Putin copies Joseph Stalin. And he does it step by step. It will be unpredictable in many things, but the Stalinist yarn shines so brightly that it becomes inconcealable, even if it is a fine strand.

Last Friday, Putin took a mass bath in Moscow's Luzhinsky Stadium. He was cheered by more than a hundred thousand people when he explained the false reasons for his “special operation” in Ukraine which he calls neither invasion nor war. BBC journalist Will Vernon, who has no doubt about the support of many of those attending the event, discovered that thousands of others were officials, teachers, state employees who had been forced to go to the stadium and that they were unaware of the real reason for the call. The students had been promised “a day off” of classes, if they agreed to go to “a concert”: Putin's concert.

There's more. The Spanish daily El País revealed yesterday that Putin's government issued a series of “draconian, Kremlin-approved” laws, which punish anyone who questions the official version of the war with up to fifteen years in prison and punishes those who “disseminate unofficial information” with penalties similar to those who “disseminate unofficial information”.

Stalin did the same, and worse, with the famine that killed nearly eight million Ukrainians between 1931 and 1933. If Putin has not yet complied with the demands of his mentor, it is due to lack of time and not of will. Like Putin with the war, Stalin forbade talking about famine in Ukraine, dictated by himself to comply with the “collectivization” of agriculture. The famine did not exist either in the speeches, nor in official documents, nor in the newspapers of the time. Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army stopped receiving letters from their relatives. Years later, when those confiscated letters were found and made public, they learned about the drama their families had experienced: many had died.

The code of silence was immediately understood because it was founded and sustained by terror. “At work there was no talk of the famine or the corpses that were in the streets, as if we were all part of a conspiracy of silence. We talked about the terrible news only with the most faithful and trusted friends,” revealed one of the witnesses before the US Congress and the Ukrainian Famine Commission that functioned in the 1980s. Stalin also ordered that doctors and nurses “invent something” to issue death certificates for the victims of famine and that, in cases of death by starvation, they certify that the death had occurred due to an infectious disease or cardiac arrest.

In Odessa, today bombed by Putin's forces, all the death record books that were kept in municipal councils disappeared in 1934. The same thing happened in Kharkiv, also today under Putin's bombs, where Soviet officials claimed the record books of the deaths that occurred between November 1932 and the end of 1933, with the excuse that these books were “in the hands of elements hostile to the working class”.

In Stalin's rule, eliminating any evidence or reference to famine was a matter of party discipline and personal loyalty to Stalin and his regime. When the Japanese consul in Odessa wanted official information about the poor living conditions of the population, they replied that, in fact, “there is a shortage of food, but not a famine”.

What was difficult was hiding the dead. Not the bodies, which were buried in mass graves without pointing out. The drama was the numbers and the effective and disciplined statistics service of the Soviet Union. In 1937 there was a census. And a drama. In 1934, Soviet propaganda had enthusiastically calculated that the population of the USSR was one hundred and sixty-eight million people. And they projected for 1937 a total population of one hundred seventy million or one hundred seventy two: a symbol of progress and the welfare of the regime.

But when the actual census data became available, they showed that the population was still anchored in one hundred and sixty-two million inhabitants: eight million people were missing, including not only those killed by famine, but the unborn because of the death of their parents and that the optimistic screening of 1934 was considered born. A preliminary report of that census indicated, with great caution and fearful caution, that population levels “are perhaps below expectations in Ukraine, in the North Caucasus and in the Volga region,” areas where peasant resistance to handing over crops to the State had been most tenacious.

The Soviet leaders began to get nervous. They prevented the employees of the statistical offices from giving any kind of information. The order was: “Not a single census figure can be published.” But what to do with propaganda? The partisan newspapers had announced a rapid increase in population, “evidence of the rise in the standard of living of workers after ten years of our heroic struggle for socialism.” And of all that, there was nothing. Soviet statisticians should not be ordered anything: they were willing not to open their mouths for fear of being considered “transmitters of a negative message”, and therefore, true enemies of the people.

When Stalin heard about the results of the census, he abolished it. The publication of the numbers stopped in the printing press and the results never saw the light of day. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decreed that the census had been organized “incorrectly and unprofessionally”, and that it was “a serious violation of the basic foundations of statistical science”. One magazine, Bolshevik, claimed that the census had been “altered by despicable enemies of the people, Trotskyist spies and traitors to the homeland, all infiltrated the headquarters of the Central Directory of People's Economic Accounting”. Ivan Krával, director of the Soviet Institute of Statistics, was arrested and shot in September 1937, a fate followed by his closest colleagues. Hundreds of officials from the Russian territories were dismissed, many executed, especially in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Mikhailo Avdienko, editor of the Soviet Statistics magazine, was arrested in August and executed in September of that year. And Olexándr Askatin, head of the Department of Economics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, was also shot.

Hiding the famine abroad was a more difficult task. The complaints crossed the border of the USSR in desperate letters sent by the victims and somehow circumvented censorship, sometimes carried outside the USSR by travelers. As early as 1933, a Ukrainian newspaper published in Poland denounced the famine as “an attack on the Ukrainian national movement”. Ukrainians scattered around the world revealed the great tragedy that had struck their land. Some came to the White House of newcomer President Franklin D. Roosevelt, such as the one sent by the Ukrainian National Council in 1933. In that year, the Vatican received in writing two anonymous complaints about the famine that Pope Pius XI had published in L'Osservatore Romano. The world of diplomacy, that of the Christian churches and the United States had direct information about the famine. They did little and nothing. They faced a greater dilemma: the rise of Adolf Hitler and the warmongering impetus of the new German chancellor. Perhaps Roosevelt's advisors thought of the USSR as an eventual future ally if the United States should, again, go to war in Europe. It is likely that the Vatican of Pius XI - Pius XII would reach the throne of Peter in 1939, months before the Second World War - had feared that a harsh pronouncement against the Soviet Union over the Ukrainian famine would give the world the impression that the pope supported Nazi Germany.

The foreign press accredited in Moscow began to suffer the brunt of censorship and the undisguised pressure of the Kremlin. Correspondents in Moscow needed a state permit to live in the capital and to send their articles to their newspapers: without an official signature and stamp from the press department, the Soviet telegraph would not send a single report abroad.

Censorship began to work. Just as Putin today punishes anyone talking about war against Ukraine or Russian invasion of that country with prison, Stalin forbade talking about Ukrainian famine, starvation deaths and hunger in general. Something could be said, authorized by the regime: “food deficit, severe food shortages, lack of food, diseases caused by malnutrition”, but nothing more.

Journalists were negotiating their precarious life in the USSR with the Soviet head of the foreign press, Konstantin Umansky. In her revealing Red Famine, historian Anne Applebaum quotes William Henry Chamberlin, then correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and to his dilemmas: “We work with a sword of Damocles on our heads, under the threat of expulsion from the country or the denial of permission to re-enter, which amounts to to the same thing.”

There was a system of awards and punishments for foreign correspondents. Walter Duranty, who was sent from The New York Times to Moscow between 1922 and 1936, took advantage of the benefits of obedience and became famous, and rich, with his adherence to Stalin, a servility that was not even tied to ideological sympathy. Duranty said in a report on the collectivization of Ukrainian farms and the menu to which Ukrainians were condemned: “It can be objected that the vivisection of live animals is a sad and frightening thing, and it is true that the large number of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not happy. But in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done for a noble purpose.”

Duranty, Applebaum says, “he had a big flat, he had a car and a mistress, he had the best access than any correspondent, and he received twice coveted interviews with Stalin. (...) His notes from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time.”

The opinion of Duranty, a British by birth, was very useful to Stalin, which did not prevent Soviet officials from visiting him in his flat at the end of 1932, which caused some concern in the correspondent. Durant looked and saw what he wanted. For his colleague Chamberlin, “officially there was no famine, but for anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and kept his eyes and ears open, famine is not in doubt.” For William Strang, a British diplomat, Duranty's notes had “awakened to the truth for some time, although they had not allowed the general American public to know the secret”. And the secret was about eight million dead.

The counterpart of Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for being silent, was another Briton, Gareth Jones, a 27-year-old Welshman who traveled to Ukraine in 1933. He spoke Russian, French and German and was private secretary to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Jones met Umansky, the powerful chief, and censor, of foreign correspondents in Moscow, and got a permit to visit Ukraine.

He climbed a train in Moscow on March 10, 1933, but got off 80 kilometers from the now bombed Kharkiv: he was carrying a backpack loaded with bread, butter, cheese, chocolate, bought everything in Moscow with pounds sterling. He followed the railway tracks and walked through no less than twenty villages and collective farms, at the most serious time of the famine. He wrote everything down in notebooks that were later passed into the hands of his sister. In them he reveals his dialogues with the Ukrainian peasants who told him that they had no bread, that they hadn't eaten bread for months, that their beet stocks were running out, that cattle were starving because there was nothing to feed it. They couldn't sow because they didn't have horses. A peasant confessed to him that he had not eaten meat for a year. This continued until he was arrested by communist militiamen and, despite official stamps and permits, they put him on a train and took him to Kharkiv. He was released thanks to the services of the German consulate and witnessed hunger in that city. Prudente, escaped from the USSR and on March 30 he appeared in Berlin and denounced everything at a press conference.

Everything Jones said was taken by the American newspapers The New York Evening Post and the Chicago Daily News, which titled “Famine takes over Russia, millions die, inactivity is increasing, says the British” and “Russian famine is now greater than that of 1921, says Lloyd George's secretary.”

In the USSR they were furious with Jones, who had been given everything and in return had received what they judged a betrayal. Immediately, the Kremlin forbade journalists from traveling outside Moscow, furious at Jones because he had said what they were silent about. They smashed Jones to pieces. United Press correspondent in Moscow, Eugene Lyons, who had been a devout Marxist, admitted: “Taking down Jones was as unpleasant a task as any of us had in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes, but we did it, unanimously. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly obtained from our mouths were covered by our denials.”

The first to denounce it was Duranty, who sent an article to The New York Times titled: “Russians are hungry, but they don't die of hunger.” That's how it was published.

Furious, Jones sent a letter to the director of The New York Times, listing his interviews and sources, more than twenty consuls and diplomats, and attacked his colleagues accredited in Moscow: “Censorship has made them masters of euphemism and underestimation. Therefore, they give “famine” the polite name of “food shortage” and “starving” is softened to read as “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.

In 1935 Jones was kidnapped and killed by Chinese criminals during a trip to Mongolia. “Russians are hungry but don't die of hunger” became an accepted, and acceptable, truth in a world that was beginning to worry about Hitler and agreed to forget Ukraine. Applebaum argues that, with that, the cover-up of the Ukrainian famine was complete. Stalin had gotten away with it.

The process of concealment and destruction of Ukrainian identity continued with the elimination in the years of the Soviet Terror of Ukraine's intellectual, political and scientific elite: academics, writers, political leaders, thinkers, anything that could help to root Ukrainian culture and language and identity was razed “to make the people's revolution possible”.

Ukraine was not destroyed, its language did not disappear, its traditions, its legends, its wishes for independence. Putin tries again today what Stalin left unfinished and attacks civilians, bombs maternity hospitals and that is why his war has already been killed by more than 150 Ukrainian boys.

It can do even worse. It's only a matter of time.

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