Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence, 1928–1929
Author(s): Olga Bertelsen
Source: Genocide Studies International , Spring 2017, Vol. 11, No. 1, Starvation and
Genocide (Spring 2017), pp. 38-67
Published by: University of Toronto Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26986059
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of
Silence, 1928–1929*
Olga Bertelsen
Harvard University
This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin’s collectivization campaign in the
context of peasant resistance, state violence, and the famine in 1928–1929, and illuminates the
primary function of strategic silence—an information blockade which creates a space for violence
and human suffering. Only in silence does the landscape of violence emerge and its spiral dynamics
consume everyone, assailants and victims, proceeding swiftly to the eventual destruction of this
landscape. In Ukraine, strategic silence and the relatively hermetic information blockade highlights
the intentional nature of state violence: it produced a ghetto of exclusion that helped crush peasant
resistance to collectivization and prevented Ukraine’s potential secession from the Union. More
profoundly, the politics of silence is analyzed as ‘‘cultural’’ violence and one of the most important
building blocks in the foundation of genocide that routinely provokes and escalates direct violence, a
phenomenon which culminates in massacres, repressions, and famines, as happened in the Ukrainian
case.
Key words: violence, Soviet politics of silence, secrecy, starvation, resistance
The discovery of an important archival document about the Soviet past has always been
an event celebrated by historians. New findings help us construct a more nuanced
picture of the past, contextualize the existing knowledge about historical events, and
add conceptual clarity to this knowledge. In the case of the Holodomor,1
it is even
more so because the Soviet politics of silence systematically attempted to erase the
narrative about mass killings by hunger from Soviet history books, textbooks, and thus
from the national memory of several generations of people in Ukraine and the USSR.2
In the past 30 years, new archival studies allowed historians to speak of the cluster
of Soviet famines in Ukraine during the collectivization campaign of 1928–1933 and
analyze their man-made nature. Starvation was used as a political tool to tame the
Ukrainian peasantry, and to prevent the crystallization of the Ukrainian nation and
the consolidation of a competing power center in Ukraine.3
For example, the declassification
of documents in 2006 located in the former KGB archive in Kyiv (HDA SBU)—
chekist directives, reports about the situation in the Ukrainian countryside, statistics,
diaries, and memoirs—served as the evidential base for a variety of analyses about the
dynamics, the scale, and the instrumentality of the famine in suppressing the Ukrainian
peasantry who rebelled against state violence in the late 1920s.4
Importantly, these documents, as many others, confirmed the relevance and accuracy
of James Mace’s observations and research that he conducted before the Soviet archives
opened their doors to researchers.5
Mace’s provisions and conclusions that appeared
in the US Commission’s Report to Congress in April 1988 and spelled out the genocidal
Olga Bertelsen, ‘‘Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence, 1928–1929,’’ Genocide Studies
International 11, 1 (Spring 2017): 38–67. 8 2017 Genocide Studies International. doi: 10.3138/gsi.11.1.02
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thesis of the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 offered conceptual clarity to the matter
concealed by the Soviet regime for decades and identified a research agenda for subsequent
generations of scholars. His definitions of intent and the methods through
which Moscow eliminated the nationally-oriented and most conscious Ukrainian segment
of society are still valid, and current studies on the Holodomor add incremental, yet
enormously important, nuances to his original interpretation.
Although a breakthrough and radical change in the way we think about historical
events are critically important, the power of incremental change and additions to the
master narrative occurring through systematic research and discovery of new archival
documents should not be underestimated. The general story of the Holodomor, the
preceding famines, and those that followed the Holodomor have been told. Yet a general
scholarly consensus about the intentionality and the uniqueness of the Ukrainian
famine of 1932–1933 did not emerge until a great many studies offered sufficient
archival evidence. Due to the efforts of many historians, incremental change and adjustment
of the historical record of Ukrainian famines led to a ‘‘tipping point’’ (Malcolm
Gladwell’s term) or to a ‘‘paradigm shift’’ (Thomas Kuhn’s term) when it became extremely
difficult to move forward with the thesis of commonality between the Holodomor
and other Soviet famines.6
Conceptually, three major intrinsically interconnected factors
contribute to the uniqueness of the Holodomor: time, space and place, and an unprecedented
number of deaths caused by starvation that occurred within a brief period
of time in Ukrainian territories.7
Starvation was clearly a political tool for Stalin, but
what makes this argument even more convincing is the politics of silence which was
advanced in late 1928 and which created the possibilities for escalating violence and
crushing peasant resistance to collectivization.
The discovery of the 1928 archival document, Circular no. 984, which was issued
by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow (Narkomindel) and explicitly
ordered the Ukrainian authorities to deny any information or assistance to foreign
guests and journalists in traveling to the countryside, helps illustrate this point.8
In conjunction
with another important document received by Ukrainian leaders, the 1928
Statute about Secrecy which was issued by the secret police administration in Moscow
and helped to narrow the circle of individuals who could potentially have access to such
top secret documents, the Circular reveals the ultimate rationale for and meaning of
concealment of ‘‘extraordinary measures,’’ a euphemism for violence through which
grain procurements were conducted by the state.
Most importantly, beyond concealing coercion and hiding its consequences, starvation,
impoverishment, and the Ukrainian peasants’ resistance and hostility toward Soviet
power, this document illuminates the essence of strategic silence (polityka zamovchuvannia
in Ukrainian) which served as a tool for demarcation and isolation of the
Ukrainian peasantry and prepared the ground for escalating violence in 1932–1933.
Strategic silence is one of the most important building blocks in the foundation of
genocide, no matter how it is achieved, through starvation or massacre. In isolation
resistance is always difficult and slavery is always easy, as one intellectual has stated.9
The evidence and literature that have been discussed in this text support exactly this
conclusion. Only in silence does the landscape of violence emerge, and its spiral
dynamics consume everyone, assailants and victims, proceeding swiftly to the eventual
destruction of this landscape. We have seen what was left of it in 1932–1933, a Kafkian
blank, lifeless, and frozen space.
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 39
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In order to contextualize this archival document, its analysis will be preceded by
three sections that will briefly analyze the notion of silence as ‘‘cultural’’ violence, clarify
the mode of secrecy which helped promote violence, and offer a brief historical background
illuminating the Soviets’ efforts to collectivize the Ukrainian peasantry in 1928–
1929.
Silence as Cultural Violence
To begin, what meanings did the Soviet politics of silence convey? Cheryl Glenn has
persuasively shown that there are numerous meanings and definitions of silence and
silencing.10
Silence means both a state of nature (the absence of sound or noise) and a
social phenomenon that exists when humans do not communicate. The reasons for
people’s silence may vary: they want to be silent, they need to be silent, or they are
forced to be silent.11
Importantly, John Gerring and Alexander J. Motyl remind us
that all definitions are imprecise and imperfect.12
The definitions of silence are no
exception. For the sake of conceptual clarity, silence is used here as ‘‘political strategic
silence’’ employed by the state as an intentional tool for the concealment of realities.13
The politics of silence and withholding information are critical elements of authoritarian
regimes. Beyond other functions, they help conceal the truth about violence and atrocities
committed by the state. Political strategic silence and the pandemic secrecy associated
with it shape the history and the aesthetics of state political practices,14
and through
their analysis we can better understand the modes of thinking and motivations of state
leaders, and the roots of state violence.
The strategic goal of silence in a place like the Soviet Union was the distortion
of realities by concealing or withdrawing information about people’s experiences and
state practices at a given time and in a specific location. The alteration of people’s consciousness
and perceptions (whether they were insiders or outsiders) about the socialist
paradise was a constant hope of Soviet leaders throughout the history of the USSR. To
legitimize the existence of this paradise, they engaged in sanitizing realities so that they
seemed better than they were. Marginalization, demarcation, and isolation were used
to cope with those who resisted the deception and actions associated with abuse and
violence.
Accordingly, silence in the Soviet case is meant to be understood as ‘‘violent silence
imposed on the experiences of others’’15
and as a tool of violence, practices that Johan
Galtung has identified as ‘‘cultural or symbolic violence.’’ Typically, cultural violence is
employed to rationalize and defend the other two types of violence, defined by Galtung
as ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘structural’’ violence.16
Galtung’s cultural violence seems to be consistent
with the notion of ‘‘systemic violence,’’ introduced by Slavoj Zizek, a phenomenon
that is less perceptible than direct violence. Pierre Bourdieu referred to this type of
violence as ‘‘symbolic’’ violence.17
Cultural violence, however, is a more fundamental,
pervasive, and long-lasting form of violence than ‘‘direct’’ violence, because it is inscribed
into our language and everyday practices, thus smoothing the functioning of political
systems, a notion that perfectly describes and explicates the Ukrainian case in question.
The creation of conditions for manipulation through language and hate speech aimed at
‘‘enemies,’’ for instance, serve as examples of cultural violence, whose ultimate goal is to
exert control and to manage a situation. Glenn has noted that
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Bertelsen40
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silence originates with the dominant party, stimulating the subordinate party to explore
options for breaking the silence, for rousing speech from the other . . . To maintain
control of the situation, the dominant party must wield silence as a means to press the
subordinate into taking on the burden of silence . . .18
Consequently, Soviet strategic silence is discussed here as a political tool that perpetuated
state violence and its consequences (people’s starvation and physical and psychological
suffering) by demarcating and isolating them as a group who remained unspoken and
unheard by a broader international community. The British scholar Ken Booth has maintained
that all silences are ‘‘against some body or against some thing. . . . Such silences are
not natural, they are political.’’19
By not letting foreign and independent observers visit
the Ukrainian countryside, which in 1928 was rampant with starvation and at war with
the regime, the Soviet government considerably limited the peasants’ chance to be heard
and helped. In other words, they were prevented from becoming citizens worthy of consideration,
empathy, assistance, or protection—they were politically silenced and thus
excluded. The politics of silence in Soviet Ukraine gains an especially sinister meaning
when considered in the context of oral histories that illuminate state brutality and people’s
suffering as a result of starvation and psychological abuse.
To promote the state’s interests, the politics of silence was allotted a special place
in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks did not invent this tool of control, but as the Soviet
regime and its key agency, the secret police, matured, the politics of silence was refined
and advanced.20
Its essence was rather simple: in the hands of empowered party leaders,
silence prevented the witnessing of state violence and non-democratic methods of
governing, thereafter eliminating possibilities of critical observation and distribution
of information. Significantly, silence often prevented ordinary people from detecting
deception and state violence. Charles de Gaulle once stated that silence served as the
ultimate weapon of power and control. Similarly, Ievgenii Ievtushenko has observed
that when truth was replaced by silence in the Soviet Union, the silence became a lie.
As mentioned earlier, cultural violence prepares the ground for direct violence and
facilitates its daily escalation. Ultimately, as practice has shown, cultural violence produces
hidden or forgotten genocides,21
such as the Holodomor. Scholars often identify
the Ukrainian famine as ‘‘the hidden famine of 1932–1933.’’22
A famine that cannot be
discussed simply does not exist, as Robert Kindler has stated.23
Yet many commentators
have noted that it was not silence, but ‘‘actual denial by the Soviet authorities’’ and the
subsequent cover up that elevated the famine to a dominant position in Ukrainian national
history and cultural identity.24
The Soviet government considered any mention of
famine as anti-Soviet propaganda,25
and even after the threat of direct violence was
removed, the principle of cultural violence was at work, hijacking popular memory
and ‘‘depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping.’’26
For some, the continuity of Soviet politics in Ukraine and a direct connection
between the politics of silence advanced in 1928 and the genocide of 1932–1933 might
seem illusory. Sceptics might also suggest that the notion of continuity applied to the
Soviet regime is also illusory. Indeed, continuity can be more accurately measured and
perceived in electronics by using the continuity test to check an electric circuit and
to see whether current flows. Nevertheless, in social science and historical dialectics,
continuity can be identified by analyzing its alternative—discontinuity.27
Was discontinuity
an intrinsic feature of the Soviet regime? Slavoj Zizek has suggested that it was
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 41
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extremely consistent in its inconsistencies and its radical self-contradiction. The regime
constantly murdered itself through terror and repression. The escalation of violence
and constant purges not only were necessary ‘‘to erase the traces of the authentic revolutionary
past’’ of the regime but they were also a reminder of the betrayal of the
Revolution.28
The continuity and logic of the regime’s history, Zizek has argued, are in
its violent policies and purges—the ‘‘very form in which the betrayed revolutionary
heritage survives and haunts the regime.’’29
In this logic, the politics of silence served
multiple purposes. Among others, it helped mask the regime’s impotence, suicide, and
murder altogether.
Masking and silence were animated by secrecy, the hallmark of the Soviet state.
Secrecy
Secrecy commonly emerges and develops during the establishment of new states when
international skepticism about their legitimacy is most pronounced. Secrecy accompanied
state violence in the Soviet Union from its inception. The Red Terror institutionalized
by the Bolsheviks in 1918 seemed to them the only solution for suppressing
competing parties, kurkul revolts, and dissenters.30
A legal and institutional basis for
terror was needed to justify the almost unrestricted power of the secret police.31
However,
despite the terror’s legal status, executions and violent grain requisitions from
‘‘saboteurs’’ were conducted as secret operations and were treated as such in the
Cheka32
and party documentation. In 1918–1919 the center (the Kremlin) introduced
full-scale state terror to fight the peasants who were labeled as internal enemies, and
subsequently Moscow continued to utilize secrecy to prevent international exposure.
Spy hysteria and the threat of war motivated the government to design a set
of norms that all governmental agencies had to follow in order to prevent leaks of
any information that might be used by internal and external enemies. As Niels Erik
Rosenfeldt has pointed out, ‘‘external and internal enemies and their mutual scheming
constituted one of the most prominent themes in the Bolsheviks’ political philosophy,’’
and secretiveness was ‘‘gradually developed into pure obsession,’’ which incited the
agencies to classify any information, even the most innocent.33
The code of conspiratorial behavior was prescribed in detail in various instructions
issued by the party and reproduced in tens of thousands of copies that were distributed
among various governmental offices and organizations. These brochures were routinely
edited and issued almost every two years beginning in 1922. Materials considered top
secret were ‘‘reduced to a minimum,’’34
while the circulation of secret instructions
about the eligibility of those who might read these materials reached thousands of
copies. The thorough and detailed pattern of regulations was characteristic of the Soviet
bureaucratic system, and each rule was elaborated, clarified, and often altered in subsequent
editions exhibiting the strict secret procedure that Soviet bureaucrats had to
follow in the localities.35
Ironically, various instructions and regulations about matters
of secrecy were of course secret, and a special secret procedure was to be followed
to review them to keep up with the injunctions that emanated from the Kremlin. The
rotation of those who had access to secret documents was constant, and often individuals
who finally passed a routine secret background check for eligibility to read
secret materials were dismissed from their positions before they had an opportunity to
study the conglomeration of secret instructions. Instead of their status as ‘‘authorized
persons’’ determined through training and exhaustive GPU checks, they immediately
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Bertelsen42
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acquired the status of ‘‘unauthorized persons’’ that was fraught with repression. Because
of Soviet personnel policies, it was extraordinarily difficult for state bureaucrats to
become experts in conspiratorial practices, to be deemed senior members of the secret
apparatus, or to pass their experience to newcomers. In a sense, everyone was a newcomer,
and the state preferred to keep it this way.
The GPU was intimately involved in the process of screening ‘‘specialists’’ in secret
departments, and clandestinely gathered information about their personalities, habits,
social, and political behavior. The agency valued any information, no matter how it
was obtained, especially that which negatively characterized an individual. The verification
procedure of this information was generally poor. Positive evaluations were frequently
ignored and were considered not worth mentioning. For the GPU, information
became a commodity that could be used for the benefit of or against rivals or friends,
supervisors or subordinates, strangers or relatives, political opponents or associates,
women or men, children or adults. Information could be bought, sold, obtained in
return for future favors, stolen and fabricated, but it could not be given away. The
motto of the agency was: ‘‘We are not an agency for inquiries. We receive information,
we do not give it away.’’36
In an atmosphere of paranoiac secrecy, in 1927 the center ordered the return of all
top secret documentation to Moscow after their careful scrutiny by the local authorities,
and no copies were allowed to be kept in regional agencies or archives. Subsequently,
the purges of national archives became a routine practice, resulting in displaced official
records and the disrupted integrity of archival collections ( fondy) in Ukraine.37
In light
of these realities, the discovery of the 11 December 1928 top secret Circular no. 984
in the State Archive of Kharkiv Oblast, a document that emanated from the People’s
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, came as a surprise.
There might be several reasons for its survival. Three waves of purges of Ukrainian
archives destroyed thousands of documents. The first massive destruction of archival
documents associated with Soviet collectivization policies occurred in 1929–1930.
Apparently, documents dated earlier than 1 January 1929 may not have been allocated
for destruction.38
Or, for some unknown reason these documents were never returned
to Moscow, as was prescribed. It seems rather unusual that the recipient kept the
Circular issued by the Narkomindel despite the center’s 1927 resolution about the
mandatory return of conspiratorial documents, especially those issued by agencies
such as the Narkomindel and the secret police.39
The explanation might be found
in growing manifestations of sloppiness that became increasingly common among the
members of secret departments and authorized personnel, a phenomenon that was
contingent upon the amount of work which the agents were assigned and on the
general growth in secrecy and secret instructions that overwhelmed bureaucrats in the
localities. An alternative explanation might be informed by a document of the Secret
Bureau of the Kharkiv Okruha Executive Committee (Okrvykonkom) discovered in the
State Archive of Kharkiv Oblast.40
In the late 1920s there was a deficit of sealing wax
typically used for secret correspondence. Therefore, there might have been delays in
mailing correspondence or negligence in following through with responses.41
The substantial
rotation of the cadres in 1928–1929 might have contributed to the confusion
and chaos in paper work. Regardless of how this document slipped through archival
cleansing operations, its existence sheds light on the politics of silence which helped
obscure the dynamics of collectivization and the 1928–1929 famine for foreign observers.
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 43
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A brief historical background will clarify this point and explicate the Soviets’ pressing
need for the obfuscation of the situation in Ukraine.
Peasant Resistance and State Violence in Ukrainian Villages
As many scholars have demonstrated, ‘‘leader-centered regimes are . . . brittle,’’42
and
hyper-centralization is fraught with political crises, such as insurrections, rebellions,
and revolutions. The consolidation of Stalin’s power in 1928–1929 and state violence
led to exactly this result. Unbearable taxation and grain procurement plans, impoverishment,
disenfranchisement, cultural disruption, starvation, and social uncertainties
placed the majority of the Ukrainian peasantry in opposition to the Soviet regime in
1928–1930.
According to the GPU, leaflets that had been distributed in the countryside by an
unknown group of conspirators from Kyiv became a widespread phenomenon in all
Ukrainian okruhy in 1926. The leaflets called for the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet
Peasant Republic that would unite the Ukrainian peasantry against the draconian economic
measures employed by the state.43
This propaganda, the GPU claimed, was very
effective, and peasants discussed the creation of unions to resist Soviet power that had
deceived them. The secret police registered 23 cases of active resistance and anti-Soviet
propaganda in the countryside in 1926: ‘‘Soviet power is the power of a gang of criminals,’’
stated a peasant.44
The disrespect seems to have been mutual. For Stalin, the peasants were backward,
reactionary, and ‘‘not socialistic by their position.’’45
In his 1926 work Problems of
Leninism, dedicated to the Leningrad Organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union which was purged during the Great Terror, Stalin explained his perception of
what the peasantry should generally want:
Peasant economy is not capitalist economy. As far as the overwhelming majority of the
peasant farms is concerned, peasant economy is petty commodity economy. And what
is petty commodity peasant economy? It is an economy standing at the cross roads
between capitalism and socialism. It may develop in the direction of capitalism, as is
now happening in capitalist countries; or it may develop in the direction of socialism
as should happen here in our country under the dictatorship of the proletariat . . .
Because our Party was able to discover to what extent the specific interests of the peasantry
(the overthrow of the landlords, peace) could be joined with and subordinated to the
general interests of the country (the dictatorship of the proletariat) which proved
acceptable and advantageous to the peasants. And so the peasants, at that time, in spite
of their being non-socialistic, followed the lead of the socialist proletariat.46
Stalin continued:
The same must be said about socialist construction in our country, about drawing the
peasantry into the stream of this construction. The peasantry are not socialistic by their
position. But the peasants must, and certainly will, take the path of socialist development,
for there is no other way nor can there be any other way of saving them from
poverty and ruin than the bond with the proletariat, by the bond with socialist industry,
than by including peasant economy in the general stream of socialist development, by
the widespread organization of the peasant masses in cooperative societies.47
On these two pages Stalin repeated the word ‘‘advantageous’’ three times, yet beyond
the point that the peasants would be enlisted in ‘‘the work of socialist construction’’ and
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Bertelsen44
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would be drawn into ‘‘co-operative organization,’’ Stalin provided no explanation about
how this plan would be implemented and what concrete advantages the peasants could
expect as a result of this plan. Instead, the emphasis focused on the shortsightedness of
opposition within the party. In Stalin’s view, it did not ‘‘understand the inevitability of
this path [for the peasantry] under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’’48
The decision to launch a new collectivization campaign was initially publicly denied
by Stalin. In 1926 he created a commission within the Politburo of the Central Committee
VKP(b), which on 30 December 1926 prepared a resolution ‘‘About the Results
of Collective (radhosp and kolhosp) Construction.’’ In 1927, however, at meetings with
foreign workers’ delegations that arrived in Moscow on the eve of the 10-year anniversary
of the October revolution, Stalin refuted the ‘‘rumor’’ of the state’s intention to
collectivize the peasantry. Following Lenin’s thesis of ‘‘cooperative socialism,’’ Stalin
emphasized the voluntary nature of the cooperative movement and the engagement
of broad strata of individual peasant households in it. He rejected all-embracing collectivization
as an ineffective method that contradicted the interests of the peasants.
A few weeks after Stalin’s speeches before the foreign workers, the implementation of
‘‘all-embracing collectivization’’ began.49
In late 1927, the artificially created imbalance between the prices of manufactured
goods and agricultural products discouraged peasants from selling bread to the state.
State granaries were immediately emptied. Forcing the peasants to sell their grain, or
giving it to the state on the state’s conditions, seemed like a reasonable solution to
Stalin.50
The mechanisms of pressure differed. Among others, disenfranchisement of the
peasants (pozbavlennia vyborchykh prav) and fiscal mechanisms of control were rather
effective. In 1928, the slightest expressions of displeasure with Soviet policies or practicing
entrepreneurial activities (selling a surplus of grain for cash) were identified as antiSoviet
propaganda and speculation, and were severely punished.51
For example, during
the election campaign of 1928–1929, there were 869,111 people in the UkrSSR who
were deprived of voting rights, which constituted approximately 6% of all voters.52
To pursue industrialization and militarization projects and to preserve state power,
state ownership, and party control, a system of coercion and exaction in the form of
unbearable taxes was installed.53
Whatever the key objectives were at a given time, the
1919–1920 assault on the peasantry served as the experiential foundation for further
enforcement of draconian taxation policies. The zigzag-like maneuvers of the state
during the 1920s, concessions to the peasants and again full state control over them,
ceased in 1926 when the state consolidated its power and taxed peasants heavily for
failing to be active members of the new Communist reality, swiftly approaching the
Great Turn of 1929.54
The Bolsheviks taxed peasants’ income, and all they needed was information about
the peasants’ households, land, animals, potential income, and the like, which allowed
the authorities to evaluate peasant capacities.55
These assessments were inaccurate and
often driven by personal and ideological biases. There was a ‘‘growing concern that the
peasants were poorly integrated and contributing too little to the new regime.’’56
The
agricultural tax was ‘‘flat and apportioned,’’ and could be increased for the needs of
industrialization arbitrarily, as happened in 1928 in Ukraine on the eve of the new
Five-Year Plan (1928–1932).57
The tax was so high that peasants flooded the district tax
offices with petitions asking to reduce their tax because they could not pay it.58
Private
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 45
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households paid twice as much tax as collectivized households, those that were coerced
into joining collective farms.59
Most petitions were written by poor peasants who
claimed that they had no property, and rented apartments in residential buildings that
belonged to the Soviets. Many petitioners were denied assistance, unless they were
servicemen, soldiers in the Red Army or relatives of servicemen.60
The new course of collectivization in 1928,61
unbearable agricultural taxation,
religious persecution, bad weather conditions, starvation, diseases, and an increasing
scale of terror against peasants exacerbated their suffering and provoked fierce passive
and active resistance to coercion and Soviet collectivization policies: ‘‘violence fed on
violence, state terror provoked and reacted to anti-violence,’’ complicating Stalin’s task
to mobilize funds for the Five-Year Plan.62
Growing anti-collectivization protests in
Ukraine presented an existential threat to the Soviet regime and its survival. To remove
the obstacle, Stalin had to bastardize the behavior of the wealthiest part of the peasantry
and dehumanize the enemies of Soviet power, justifications for a cascade of cleansing
operations that followed.
Almost a decade after Soviet power was established in Ukraine, the threat of
Ukraine’s secession seemed to be serious and real. Moreover, the state perceived that
this threat was of a magnitude that required extraordinary measures, when normal
everyday rules and codes of behavior had to be suspended. A sharp turn toward repression
in the middle of 1928 is not surprising, because in June 1928, Vsevolod Balyts’kyi,
head of the GPU in Ukraine, sent a report to Lazar Kaganovich, General Secretary of
the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, about the escalating activities of Ukrainian
counterrevolutionaries and kurkuli of all kinds, who, according to Balyts’kyi, hoped
that the days of the USSR were numbered, a war with the West was inevitable, and
Ukraine could gain independence.63
In light of the preceding 1926 report ‘‘On Ukrainian
separatism,’’ Kaganovich and Stalin understood this document as a signal to
centralize power, to eliminate the threat emanating from the Ukrainian countryside,
and to intensify propaganda for collectivization.64
The peasant and the Ukrainian questions
overlapped, and they needed more fundamental hands-on control, preferably by
one person, to answer the questions.
After the failure to collect sufficient grain supplies in 1927, Stalin persistently returned
to discussions about a necessary shift in Soviet agricultural policies and advocated the
introduction of extraordinary measures to combat the kurkuli and to conduct effective
grain procurements. Yet he was extremely cautious in asserting himself as the leader of
the Central Committee. His opponents were other prominent party members Aleksei
Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, Mikhail Kalinin, and Nikolai Uglanov who
supported the principles of collective leadership in the Central Committee, and opposed
the rise of Stalin and the extreme measures and violence he advocated.65
Stalin’s trip to Siberia in mid-January 1928 solidified his position. According to
several scholars, it was strategic for personal and political reasons.66
According to Oleg
Khlevniuk, Stalin was eager to demonstrate that he was capable of solving grain and
other crises in the country on his own. Extreme measures, effective in that they could
kill two birds with one stone, always remained an option for Stalin: he could defeat
his impotent opposition who failed to deliver sufficient grain to the state in 1927, and
legitimize his exclusive and leading position in the Politburo, if the terror in Siberia
succeeded.67
And it did.
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Stalin’s superb skills at manipulation, blackmail, and scheming, and his ties to the
GPU that was under his control helped him discredit his opponents, and he moved forward
with the plan of extraordinary measures in Ukraine.68
Even before his departure
to Siberia (he left on 15 January 1928), on 5 January 1928, the Ukrainian party organs
received a new document from the Central Committee of the VKP(b) signed by Stalin,
the directive ‘‘To Party Organizations about Bread Procurement’’ which encouraged the
local authorities to employ the severest measures of punishment and repressive methods
to those who sabotaged the collection of grain and taxes.69
Rightfully calculating
and anticipating glorious success in Siberia, Stalin signed and sent another document
to the party leadership in Ukraine, the 14 January 1928 directive, ‘‘About the Intensification
of the Measures to Procure Bread.’’ The extreme measures spelled out in the
directive and to be applied to the ‘‘recalcitrant’’ in the countryside further dramatized
the events of 1928–1929.70
The War Communist rhetoric, intimidating and militant, once again became
popular among party chiefs and village officials who got to work immediately. In May
1928 at a closed meeting of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, Balyts’kyi alerted the
party about the increasing danger emanating from the periphery, and the Ukrainian
party leadership was ordered to intensify surveillance in the countryside and to broadly
employ repression against the rebels.71
They were defined in class and national terms,
‘‘kurkuli’’ and ‘‘petliurovtsi’’ (‘‘Petliurites’’), and were criminalized using a broader definition,
‘‘spekulianty.’’72
The crushing of the ‘‘left opposition’’ in late 1928 meant not only a personal victory
for Stalin that boosted his popularity in the party but was also a vital necessity for the
regime to continue. Precisely during this time, the hands of the secret police were untied:
special operations and the arrest of members of Ukrainian nationalist organizations and
groups followed one after another.73
The extraordinary measures and their direct result,
starvation, guaranteed the peasants’ long-term hostility toward the authorities.
By late 1928, the peasants began to organize: passive peasant resistance was transformed
into open protests, terrorist attacks, mass disturbances, and armed riots. The
majority craved self-governance and called for action to get rid of the Bolsheviks. Stalin
kept insisting that only an insignificant section of the Ukrainian peasantry, kurkuli,
caused trouble in the villages, a line for domestic and foreign consumption.74
He,
however, was informed by the GPU that the opposite was true. The entire Ukrainian
countryside was in turmoil. According to Liudmyla Hrynevych’s calculations, Stalin
could rely only on 5% of Ukrainian society who could be characterized (and only conditionally)
as a consciously pro-Soviet group of people.75
Therefore, the extraordinary
measures were essentially the only solution to the crisis, a solution he kept promoting
vigorously.
Their implementation became possible because of the formation of a new Politburo
under Stalin’s management. By early-mid 1929 the ‘‘right’’ opposition was conquered,
and Stalin’s command-repressive system was installed. By late 1929 to early 1930, as one
scholar has stated, the ‘‘entire Politburo became a sort of Stalin faction.’’76
This shaped
the second wave of terror in the countryside during the first months of 1929, which
was even more severe.77
In April 1929, Stalin advised the local party cells to press the kurkul. His thesis
about the mobilization of the poorest Ukrainian peasantry against kurkuli was reflected
in his speech delivered at the April 1929 Joint Plenum of the TsK and TsKK VKP(b).
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Shortly thereafter, the Ukrainian party leader Stanislav Kosior reported that in 22
okruhy (out of 40) 18,000 kurkul households were auctioned off or confiscated as
punishment for hoarding grain. The kurkuli were found guilty of sabotage, and were
sentenced to one year in prison. Their personal property was also confiscated. Violence
and the prohibition of the free grain market produced hunger and mass exodus from
the villages.78
In autumn of 1929, 15,000 more peasant households were destroyed
(de-kurkulized).79
Although the GPU systematically confiscated firearms left over from the Civil War
from the peasantry, political activism among the peasants was growing. In Kirovohrad
oblast, for instance, Serhii Bilenko and Davyd Baden, residents of the village of
Pishchanyi Brid (Novoukrains’kyi raion or district), organized meetings to sabotage
grain procurements, arguing that Soviet power choked them by unbearable taxes and
took all their bread.80
They were arrested by the GPU on 3 April 1929 for anti-Soviet
propaganda, and exiled to the North for three years. Ivan Hruznyts’kyi, Mykhailo
Todorenko, and the Vovchenko family (Pavlo, Semen, and Taras) of the village of
Novomykolaiivka (Novoukrains’kyi district) called for disobedience to free Ukraine.
Taras organized a protest against the representatives of sil’rada, demanding they cease
populating his land with migrants, and Ivan called for regime change. All were arrested
on 20 September 1929. Pavlo and Semen were sentenced to three years, Taras and
Mykhailo to five years, and Ivan to 10 years in concentration camps.81
The protests in
the village Haiivka (Zinov’ivs’kyi district) resulted in the arrest of several individuals.
Among them were Hurii Hraliuk who openly identified Soviet leaders as a group of
criminals who should not lead the country, Fedot Smykodub who systematically conducted
anti-Soviet propaganda and refused to pay taxes, and Andrii Katerynych who
argued that the Communists intended to use starvation as a weapon against the
peasants.82
They were arrested on 15 January 1929 and sentenced to three years in exile
in the North.
Moreover, environmental factors, such as a bad crop in 1928–1929 (nedorid) in
Southern Ukraine, and Soviet plans to procure as much bread, meat, eggs, butter, and
other foodstuffs as possible to supply non-Ukrainian regions exhausted the Ukrainian
peasants’ households:83
from mid-1928, they began to starve, exhibiting symptoms of
serious malnourishment, such as swelling. By early 1929, the famine affected thousands
of people in Ukraine. For instance, according to the February 1929 reports of the secret
organs, in the village of Derezovatsi (Dnipropetrovs’ka okruha) alone, 50 households were
systematically starving, and in eight villages of Kutsevolivs’kyi district (Kirovohrads’ka
okruha) 1,963 children and 3,793 adults out of 35,640 residents suffered from hunger.84
April and May of 1929 were especially difficult months for the peasants, when their
winter reserves were gone. The GPU informed the center about mass starvation in
the villages, and the discrepancy between state aid and people’s needs.85
According to
Hrynevych, during the famine of 1928–1929 the direct demographic losses of Ukraine’s
population constituted approximately 23,000 people, and indirect losses of approximately
80,000 people.86
Whether the Soviet leadership used the famine of 1928–1929
as an effective weapon against peasant protests is a matter for conjecture. However,
the idea clearly has some currency, since the Bolsheviks had a ‘‘formative experience’’
in crushing the resistance of kurkuli in the Ukrainian countryside in 1919–1920. The
violence of collectivization in 1919–1920 and people’s starvation in 1921 remained
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part of their horrible memories about the regime.87
One scholar has noted that the
famine of 1921–1922 had certainly ‘‘opened up new possibilities for the Bolsheviks.’’88
Importantly, because of the famine, the hostility toward Soviet power became
pandemic. Neither the rotation of the party leadership in Ukrainian villages, nor the
March 1928 GPU operation which resulted in the arrest of 400 party functionaries,
alleviated the political crisis in the republic.89
The exponential growth of anti-Soviet
peasant revolts during the second part of 1929 provoked the government to consider
more severe punishments for the most active and recalcitrant individuals who openly
called for resistance. The death penalty became a more common sentence.90
The December
1929 directive of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) was very clear about this group
of people and identified them as counterrevolutionary activists (kontrrevoliutsiinyi
aktyv).91
Their cases were ‘‘investigated’’ by OGPU troikas, and the luckiest were
sentenced to 10 years in exile. In the late 1920s, 850,000 Ukrainian peasants were exiled
to the uninhabited regions of the Kola Peninsula and Siberia. Although Moscow relied
on Ukrainian GPU resources in implementing this operation (the liquidation of
kontrrevoliutsiinyi aktyv), the deputy head of the counterintelligence department of the
OGPU of the USSR S. V. Puzyts’kyi thoroughly supervised the logistics of the opera-
tion.92
By late 1930, at the Union level, 20,201 people were executed by the GPU for
participating in mass disturbances.93
The ‘‘nationalist’’ profile of the kontrrevoliutsiinyi aktyv in Ukraine, shaped by the
rhetoric of the campaign against kurkuli and Ukrainian nationalists which was launched
by the center and masterminded by the secret police, exacerbated their guilt before the
state. Through official and non-official channels, the rhetoric of verdicts and newspaper
articles overlapped and enriched one another, and kontrrevoliutsiinyi aktyv and
instigators of political unrest in the countryside were identified in nationalist terms—
Petliurites. For instance, Moisei Ivanets’ of the village of Skaleva (Novoarkhanhels’kyi
district), who inspired his neighbors to rebel against the authorities, was one of them.
He was arrested on 19 November 1929 and after a brief investigation he was accused of
close connections to Petlurites, identified as a nationalist and a Petlurite, and shot on 27
February 1930.94
In GPU individual and group criminal files, three terms are blended—
kurkuli, political gangs, and nationalists. Interrogators employed them together, separately,
and interchangeably. For instance, in villages like Skaleva, ‘‘political gangs of
nationalists’’ under the leadership of locals Zalizniak and Lysovenko recruited new
members, agitated against Soviet power, and distributed anti-Soviet propaganda leaflets.
Petro Riabuha and Davyd Sidun, residents of Skaleva, were arrested on 21 November
1929 and were shot on the same day with Ivanets’ in February 1930.95
The village of
Tsybuleve (Ielysavethradkivs’kyi district) had its own share of nationalists and kurkuli
who were sentenced to death.96
In 1929, the peasants resisted the Soviet regime’s violence and coercion individually
and in groups, using various tactics. Among others were clandestine activities, such
as arson of the Soviet activists’ properties and distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda
leaflets that called for resistance to collectivization;97
open verbal attacks against the
village authorities; and mass disturbances and violent beatings and murders of Soviet
activists. For instance, in the village Velyki Babtsi under the leadership of Starikov,
the villagers armed themselves with stones, sticks, and pitchforks, and chased the Soviet
village administration and militia out of the village. The fight lasted 10 hours, and 1,500
people participated in the riot. Soviet power in the village ceased to exist for a day but
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was restored when an armed militia detachment was sent to the village.98
Local militia
men were vulnerable and complained to Kharkiv authorities that they could not control
the situation, and they demanded to be provided with a sufficient amount of guns,
ammunition, and incentives, similar to that of the Red Army soldiers.99
From Lynne Viola’s studies of peasant resistance, we learned that women were an
inseparable part of peasant riots.100
Children’s participation in riots and attacks against
village authorities was also prominent, and may be welcomed as a new avenue of
research on violence in the Ukrainian countryside during Stalin’s collectivization
campaign. For instance, in the village Pavlivka (Kharkivs’ka okruha), children systematically
participated in clashes with the local authorities. Women attacked the wives of
the village administration and encouraged their children to beat them severely.101
In
April 1929 the GPU arrested a group of individuals from the Karl Marx commune
(Pervomais’ka okruha) for anti-Soviet propaganda as their influence had spread far
beyond their commune.102
Among those who actively participated in the group’s
activities were children. Moreover, children’s bravery and political activism extended
beyond their participation in riots and mass disturbances. For example, they also wrote
letters to Stalin about their hardships in despair and doom.103
In the midst of cleansing GPU operations that eliminated kurkuli and nationalists
in the Ukrainian countryside, Moscow never gave up on propaganda methods.104
The
propagandists dug out Lenin’s article ‘‘How should one organize a competition?’’ that
he wrote in 1918 in which he explicated his idea about socialist competition and
the creativity of the masses in helping the state build a strong and resilient economy.
The time was right to remind the peasants about their duty to be part of socialist construction
and to prove self-conscious and long-standing commitment to the revolution.
The article was published on 20 January 1929 in Pravda, detailing an array of party
directives about who should compete with whom and why. The urban regions adopted
the innovation first. Now it was time for the countryside to be included in the allUnion
movement of socialist competition.
In July 1929, when Ukrainian rural regions were in turmoil, Moscow ordered the
Ukrainian authorities to sign an agreement about ‘‘agricultural’’ socialist competition
(sotszmahannia) among Moscow, Kharkiv, and the Don region to distract and to pacify
the peasantry. The authorities enthusiastically supported the idea and such an agreement
was signed. However, the center’s plans were not working very well. Most peasants
were skeptical about Moscow’s promises about sotszmahannia that would allegedly
facilitate the fulfillment of the Five-Year Plan and ultimately deliver prosperity to each
household. Those who saw through the center’s propaganda maneuver were rather
vocal: ‘‘Ukraine sold itself out to Moscow; the agreement about sotszmahannia is a new
type of slavery.’’105
In August 1929, Russian propagandists, Moscow plenipotentiaries in
Kharkiv, and local party bosses came up with a directive which denounced this kurkul
interpretation of sotszmahannia and ordered the rural party organs to popularize the
agreement in villages by allocating several hours per week for studying its text and
educating the peasants in the socialist spirit. Each village council was supposed to display
the text of the agreement about sotszmahannia at the council’s headquarters near
another important document, the Constitution of the UkrSSR.106
People’s participation
in the competition was mandatory, and a lack of enthusiasm, let alone their refusal to
compete, was punishable by exile. The gap between Lenin’s suggestion about people’s
self-conscious and voluntary participation in competition, its premises and objectives,
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and state practices of coercion and violence further aggravated the starving men and
women. These realities made Stalin realize that the Ukrainian peasants were a politically
dangerous phenomenon, more dangerous than their counterparts in the Russian
Federation.107
According to the official data, over the course of 1927–1928, 538 terrorist acts were
registered in Ukrainian villages. In 1928–1929 this number more than doubled to 1266,
and from 1927 to 1929, 318 representatives of Soviet power in villages were attacked
and murdered.108
In late 1929 to early 1930, the Ukrainian GPU managed to establish
control over eight okruhy, Poltavs’ka, Iziums’ka, Kharkivs’ka, Sums’ka, Proskurivs’ka,
Kam’ianets’ka, Odes’ka, and AMRSR, although mass bab’i bunty still erupted in
Shepetivka, Starobils’k, and Kup’ians’k.109
By October 1929, the GPU had arrested
3,705 individuals in Ukraine.110
However, the riots continued to grow in 1929 and
reached their peak in 1930.111
They absorbed four large okruha, Kyiv’ska, Bilotserkivs’ka,
Mohyliov-Podils’ka, and Vinnyts’ka. Karl Karlson reported that from 1 March to 15
March 1930, the GPU arrested 25,000 people, liquidated 36 counterrevolutionary organizations
and 256 counterrevolutionary groups, shot 655 individuals, sent 3,673 men to
concentration camps, and exiled 5,580 people. In total, the operation resulted in the
displacement of 88,656 peasants and the next goal, according to Karlson, was to cleanse
Ukraine’s near-border territories by exiling 15,000 people.112
This discussion of the events of 1928–1929 in Ukraine provides us with the foundation
for a more careful understanding of the reasons behind advancing the politics of
silence in Ukraine. A close analysis of Circular no. 984, issued by the Narkomindel in
Moscow at the dawn of the collectivization campaign, will help establish the connection
between Soviet politics of silence, state violence, and its intentionality.
1928: Institutionalizing the Politics of Silence
Cultural or symbolic violence creates a situation when domination is ‘‘soft’’ and ‘‘invisible,’’
and is a constant, effective and, perhaps, more brutal means of oppression
than direct violence, as Pierre Bourdieu has posited.113
It isolates people and makes
them a part of the ‘‘secret’’ space of a lie, subversion, and cynicism, masked as a space
of freedom and justice. Subversion and cynicism can achieve both the invigoration of
political resistance and the destruction of beliefs and hopes. In Ukraine in 1928–1929,
besides direct violence, the demarcation of rebellious villages was achieved through
information blockades and deception. To a potential foreign observer, the brutality of
Soviet collectivization would present a drastic departure from the noble goals and
credos of socialism proclaimed by the Bolsheviks. Therefore, routine cover-ups of the
discrepancy between the words and the deeds of the regime became an essential and
inseparable part of power politics, and secrecy was an operative mode prescribed by
the party and controlled by the Soviet secret police.114
Foreign journalists were carefully managed on Soviet soil.115
They were obliged to
inform the authorities about their travel plans in advance, so that they were thoroughly
monitored by the secret police in the territory of the USSR. Secret agents followed
foreigners like shadows, as a worker of the VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural
Ties Abroad) suggested.116
Moscow’s fundamental task was to show foreigners ‘‘model
institutions,’’ which would create a favorable view about the Soviet experiment.117
This
selectiveness provided an opportunity to strengthen existing sympathies toward the
Soviet state among Sovietophiles, and to convert the critics of the socialist system into
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supporters.118
For foreign travelers, a necessary precondition for their pleasant trip and
safe return home was public praising of Soviet approaches and policies.119
From late 1928, despite massive anti-kurkul propaganda, it became increasingly
difficult to find model collective farms and to conceal social unrest in villages because
there was a true war in the Ukrainian countryside.120
The party leadership urgently decided
to take precautions to make the conflict and its consequences invisible for foreigners,
obstructing their desire to travel to the Ukrainian countryside.
In December 1928 the head of the Kharkiv Okruha Executive Committee, Panas
Butsenko, received Circular no. 984 from the Narkomindel instructing the local authorities
in Kharkiv to prevent foreigners’ trips to the countryside.121
The Circular was
directed exclusively to Ukraine and was defined as ‘‘strictly secret’’ (tsilkom taiemno),
reinforcing the sense of the seriousness of conspiratorial matters in local party
bureaucracy, especially regarding collectivization in Ukraine that went far from
smoothly.122
Importantly, only eight copies of the Circular were issued. Identifying the
other seven recipients of the Circular appears problematic. Likely, they were heads of
okruhy executive committees in other large industrial and cultural centers in Ukraine,
such as Kyiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Donets’k, Odesa or others, where visits of foreign
journalists would have been most probable. What is certain is that, as a key player in
monitoring foreigners in Ukraine, the Kharkiv GPU should also have received a copy of
this document.
It appears Narkomindel officials created the text of the Circular. However, it is
possible that this was a collective effort of diplomats and top-ranking party members.
In the late 1920s, the Narkomindel had little autonomy and was fully subordinate
to high party organs’ decisions. Rikke Haute has argued that ‘‘the political leadership
formulated foreign policy strategy independently of the Narkomindel and could at
any point, where they found it appropriate, interfere in the concrete decision-making
process within the Narkomindel.’’123
Moreover, the Narkomindel received special secret instructions about the secrecy
of all information that originated within the Politburo and went through the Narkomindel.
Its first Commissar, Georgy Chicherin, was advised that the content of any foreign policy
discussions held by any high party organs, such as the Central Committee, the Politburo,
or the Organizational Bureau, should not be revealed even to the Narkomindel’s own
board, the Collegium. The procedure of voting and stenographic reports about the
meetings held in the Narkomindel and party organs (separate and joint), reports from
which it was clear ‘‘who said what,’’ had to be classified, and access to these materials was
to be extremely limited.124
Chicherin and his deputy Maxim Litvinov were personally responsible
for potential information leaks to unauthorized individuals or agencies, and
they knew perfectly well what sort of sanctions would be applied to them for any failure
to protect sensitive information from ‘‘foreign’’ eyes.125
Not surprisingly, the document
in question contains no references to the corresponding directives of the leading party
organs.
The stenographic minutes of the meetings of the Politburo and the Central Committee
typically revealed ‘‘the truth about who really took the initiative and pulled
the strings.’’126
This information was top secret, especially when a new party directive
contradicted official legislation. As early as 1921, the Politburo advised all People’s
Commissariats and the secret police to avoid mentioning previous secret party resolutions
in their documents. The avoidance of such references in Circular no. 984 created
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an illusion that the Politburo had little to do with it, and that the document was the
product of the Narkomindel.
Keep in mind that by late 1928, Stalin manipulated most major decisions, although
the pretense of the collective decision-making process was intact. As some scholars
have argued, the term ‘‘discussions’’ that occurred at the high party level would be an
over-exaggeration. Archival evidence indicates that even individuals who constituted
Stalin’s inner circle within the Politburo, which originally consisted of the ‘‘group of
six’’ (Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan, Malenkov, and Zhdanov), did not equally contribute
to discussions of foreign policies. Rather, most were listeners who ‘‘were simply
kept informed.’’127
Nor were Ukrainian party leaders active participants in discussions about foreign
policies that directly concerned Ukraine.128
Khrystyian Rakovs’kyi who simultaneously
headed the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the Council of People’s Commissars
in Ukraine was extremely busy and largely disengaged from foreign affairs. Moreover,
Moscow took measures to limit Ukrainian diplomatic representation abroad, and by
1922, Ukraine was diplomatically represented only in Germany and Poland. The chief
leadership in foreign affairs was implemented in the center, Moscow. Soviet diplomat
Grigory Bessedovsky noted that ‘‘the Ukrainian Commissariat [could] undertake nothing
without previous assent from Moscow.’’129
On 6 July 1923, Moscow officially created
the Narkomindel, and its Ukrainian satellite was abolished. The Narkomindel became one
of the most important Soviet propaganda agencies, functioning also as an intelligencegathering
agency.130
Subsequently, the structural and interpersonal specificity associated with the
Narkomindel and the Politburo permits a reasonably secure conclusion that the Politburo
‘‘supervised’’ the creation of the Circular for Ukraine. The Narkomindel, however,
managed the surveillance logistics and procedures of preventing foreigners from traveling
to Ukraine who might witness the conflict and realize that the integrity of the USSR
was threatened.131
The text of the Circular seems to have been shaped by the Narkomindel’s and the
GPU’s understanding that there were two possible scenarios for dealing with this
matter: first, to deny an entrance visa to as many visitors as possible; and second, if
a visa to the USSR was granted, and a foreigner wanted to visit Ukrainian villages,
the local authorities would make it impossible for a foreigner to travel there. Despite
uneasy and competing relations between the Narkomindel and the secret police,132
the
two agencies had to cooperate to implement these tasks. The individual personal and
professional characteristics of a visitor mattered, hence the Narkomindel, assisted by
the secret police and the VOKS, took the lead in gathering relevant information about
those who applied for Soviet visas.133
The risk of exposing Ukrainian villages in disarray was too great. The exposure of
coercion and subversion to a foreign eye would undermine the image of the Soviet state
as a state of justice and equality, and might provoke a foreign invasion, a fear which
the Kremlin constantly instigated and reinforced.134
On 11 December 1928, Fiodor
Rotshtein, a member of the Collegium of the Narkomindel and the head of its Press
Bureau that was responsible for shaping international attitudes toward Soviet developments,
issued official secret instruction no. 4860 about foreign visitors and their trips to
the countryside. Rotshtein’s instruction was sent to the Kharkiv Executive Committee
and was registered as Circular no. 984.135
It restricted foreigners’ mobility in Ukraine,
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and ordered the local authorities to inform the secret police about the movements of
foreign journalists within the republic.
Rotshtein’s instruction appears to be the result of intensive analytical work conducted
by the secret police and the Narkomindel. By late 1926, the Informational Operational
Department of the Ukrainian GPU provided the Narkomindel with a comprehensive
report about the deplorable situation in Ukrainian villages. Within a year, the secret
police had been gathering information about the peasants’ moods, their attitudes toward
Soviet power, and their political activism and participation in mass disturbances.136
Importantly,
secret agents emphasized that there was discontent with Soviet policies
among all social strata, including the poor peasantry. The peasants agitated to obtain
weapons to resist the Bolsheviks’ robbery. Hardships and dissatisfaction with the state,
the report claimed, produced mass alcoholism and banditry in the villages: the peasants
were depressed, demoralized, and aggressive.137
As discussed earlier, within a year the
situation escalated. Stalin was very well informed about it. From autumn 1929 to spring
1930, he received 50,000 letters of complaint from the peasants; Mikhail Kalinin, head
of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, received approximately 85,000 letters
of complaint.138
The measures undertaken by Moscow were supposed to create a dome
of silence over these realities. Rotshtein’s Circular seemed a necessary step for the state
to isolate the Ukrainian countryside from foreign attention.
Interestingly, the document, however, did not disclose the rationale for preventing
foreign journalists from traveling to Ukrainian villages. The reason behind this was
purely pragmatic and consistent with routine practices of the Narkomindel and the
Politburo. Analyzing the decision-making process in the Soviet Union, Russian scholar
Irina V. Pavlova has perceptively noted:
[The] concealment of motive was entirely deliberate. Party and state officials acted in
accordance with a Politburo decision dated 12 April 1923, the gist of which was that
‘‘in laying extraordinarily secret matters before the Politburo, the People’s Commissariats
(the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the Commissariat of Military Affairs, the OGPU
and others) should not give reasons for their proposals in writings, but introduce their
recommendations through preliminary confidential agreement (sgovor) with the Central
Committee Secretariat.’’139
Instead, the Circular camouflaged the true reasons behind the restrictions of foreigners’
movements in Ukraine by expressing concerns about the safety of foreigners who might
secretly travel to villages. The Narkomindel claimed that in cases when foreigners failed
to inform the GPU about the itinerary of their trips, it would be impossible for the state
to protect them against potential dangers in the countryside, and that travelers had to
bear full responsibility for their poor decision.140
The Circular also condemned the extraordinarily lavish treatment that foreign
journalists received from the Soviet authorities in the localities. Travelers were usually
provided with a car, were invited to give press conferences, and attended banquets
arranged by the local party elite. In the Narkomindel’s view, local party leaders engaged
in sycophantic and ingratiating behavior, ‘‘damaging state prestige.’’ Moscow officials
assured their Kharkiv counterparts that foreign citizens were certainly not treated like
royalty in their own ‘‘capitalist country.’’141
Hence, the Kharkiv authorities were instructed
to stop these shameful ostentatious displays unworthy of Communists.
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Quite cynically, the Narkomindel warned the local Soviet and party organs in
Kharkiv that they would bear full responsibility for any failure to monitor foreigners’
movements in Ukraine. In other words, Moscow granted visas but Kharkiv was responsible
for approving the candidates for visas and for not allowing these guests to travel to
the zones of conflict. Point 2 of the Circular stipulated that the Narkomindel would
provide the details about the pending trip of a foreign journalist, and if the Kharkiv
Okrvykonkom was interested in this trip and approved its itinerary, it should inform
the Narkomindel and the GPU accordingly. Ultimately, this obfuscated the initial responsibility
of the Narkomindel to make the final decision about granting permission
to a foreigner to travel to Ukraine. The center considered the potential ‘‘disloyalty’’ of
a foreign journalist a local responsibility with appropriate punitive measures aimed at
punishing local party and Soviet agencies’ bosses for their political shortsightedness.142
Moscow officials’ attempt at protecting their positions and masking the real reasons
behind the Circular were not simply the concealment of the realities, but it reflects
the very essence of the politics of silence: deception, manipulation, distortion, and
non-accountability which help change reality into another kind of reality for ‘‘brutal
claims to power.’’143
Significantly, December 1928, when the Circular was issued, marked an important
transitional period between collective leadership and personalized leadership in the
Politburo. The principle of collective leadership rejected authoritarian decisions, but at
the same time obscured the individual responsibility of high party officials. Prior to
early 1928, Stalin ‘‘appeared as the epitome of collective leadership,’’ and he was
extremely cautious in affirming his authoritarian position.144
Yet after April 1929,
when the ‘‘right opposition’’ was defeated, Stalin strengthened his position and his
circle made attempts at erecting Stalin’s cult. The consolidation of his position required
the reduction of his personal responsibility for the most crucial decisions, and Stalin
strategically designed several approaches to delegate this responsibility to other individuals
or agencies, often in localities. Preserving the illusion of the collective principle,
Stalin was able to put blame on local party leaders for the failures of his policies, or to
reward them in case they managed to successfully implement them.145
The symptoms
of this conceptual arrangement are evident in the Narkomindel document.146
As noted earlier, the secret police played a crucial role in handling ‘‘unreliable’’
foreigners who wanted to see for themselves whether the state employed starvation as
a tool to tame peasant resistance. The Circular is very specific about what was to be
done in a situation when a trip by foreign visitors ‘‘was undesirable’’ for the Soviet state
but inevitable because the Narkomindel granted them a visa. Moscow advised the
Kharkiv Okrvykonkom to limit contacts to a bare minimum with those individuals
who were not willing to inform the local authorities about their intentions. Moreover,
the Circular instructed Kharkiv to obstruct visitors’ attempts to obtain any information
about local developments. Any assistance in organizing their trips to border regions,
factories, and villages was strictly forbidden.147
The Okrvykonkom was supposed to
transfer the responsibility for visitors in this category to the local departments of the
GPU.148
Unquestionably, the Politburo tried to prevent interventions from the West in
the political and economic campaigns of 1927–1928 when the procurement of grain
became one of the most important tasks for the regime to support its industrialization,
and to keep internal problems secret. This period was characterized by heightened
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internal security, justified because of the threat of war, and the demand for building a
powerful defense industry. From mid-1927, the various people’s commissariats labored
to facilitate the process of constructing an efficient Soviet military economy. The mobilization
of the population was constantly fed by the fear of war, intentionally escalated
by the government, and any external intrusion in the anatomy of the scheme had to be
prevented. Ultimately, the chief responsibility of the Narkomindel and the GPU was to
maintain the myth about the first successful socialist egalitarian society, by preventing
truthful journalistic accounts that could reach the international community, and to
keep the Soviet scheme secret.
The 1928 Statute about Secrecy, signed by the head of the OGPU Special Department,
Gleb Bokii,149
was designed to accomplish exactly that, and reflects the intensity
of discussions about foreigners at the highest level in 1928 when the politics of silence
became instrumental to the success of collectivization and the concealment of its
unavoidable ‘‘side effects.’’ Interestingly enough, this document has a specific point
of reference to foreign visitors, which places the Statute and the Circular in the same
conspiratorial and political contexts. For instance, point 8 of the Statute (Section III
‘‘Political and Procedural Questions,’’ sub-section ‘‘Top Secret’’) emphasized that any
secret documents or inter-institutional correspondence about foreigners who resided
in the territory of the USSR, and specifically about their possible arrest, deportation,
or exchange for Soviet citizens, had to be strictly secret which meant that access to
these documents had to be limited to persons directly involved in these affairs.150
Clearly, the OGPU neither excluded the worst case scenario, the arrest of a foreigner
who violated the code of ‘‘appropriate’’ behavior in the territory of the USSR, nor was
reluctant to apply the strictest measures to a foreign citizen under one condition: the
information about the incident should be classified.
Significantly, the time when the OGPU Statute was revised and approved by the
Politburo (early January 1929), and when Circular no. 984 was issued (late December
1928) dovetails neatly with the time when the state advanced the brutal system of bread
procurements that lasted until late 1932. Most importantly, the state displayed an
amazing ability to keep its general populace and the international community in the
dark for quite some time about the Kremlin’s policies that devastated Ukrainian
villages. As Rosenfeldt has posited, ‘‘as the system was constructed, there was certainly
no possibility that the ‘disclosed secrets’ could circulate freely in the bureaucracy or
among the population as a whole.’’151
The Central Committee and Stalin personally
relished secrecy, and their entire production was built on the basis of written and
unwritten statutes about secrecy and conspiratorial practices, which cloaked the consequences
of the Soviets’ governing.
Conclusion
The Soviet politics of silence constituted an invisible and ‘‘unperceived form’’ of cultural
violence, or what Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek identified as symbolic or systemic
violence, which prepared the foundation for the direct violence of 1932–1933.152
Scholars
of Genocide Studies and the Holodomor have been familiar with the concept for quite
some time: it is now common knowledge that the Soviets attempted to conceal the
information of the brutalities associated with the collectivization campaign in Ukraine.
Yet documents, such as Circular no. 984, that would explicitly outline the course of
action that would prevent foreigners from observing mass disturbances, riots, and the
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famine of 1928–1929 in the Ukrainian countryside have been discovered for the first
time. The tangible evidence of concealment, a practice that the Kremlin used in Ukraine
in 1928–1929, reveals the intentionality of actions that were inconsistent with
the lofty humanistic rhetoric of the Soviet regime and its ideology of egalitarianism.153
Indeed, the Marxist-Leninist ideology imposed constraints on the Soviet government:
systematic coercion, violence, and mass killings could undermine the Bolsheviks’
claim to be legitimate followers of Marx and Lenin for Westerners and for insiders. The
state’s effort was focused on ‘‘the manipulation, adaptation, and selective interpretation
of the ideological heritage,’’154
which helped the center conceal doubtful practical applications
of Marxism to avoid negative publicity, especially in the West. In the context of
what happened after 1928–1929 in Ukraine—the Soviet genocide of 1932–1933—the
Circular permits us to better understand the destructive capabilities of silence. The
bond of the peasantry with the proletariat and its dictatorship that Stalin proclaimed
in 1926 was not only disadvantageous but also deadly for millions of people in Ukraine,
as subsequent events have demonstrated, and its consequences were hidden for quite
some time.
The politics of silence strategically demarcated and isolated Ukrainian villages from
the proper attention of their fellow citizens in the Union and internationally. Silence
was an effective political strategy that made resistance and political mobilization difficult,
but made it possible to identify and personalize the ‘‘transgression.’’155
More profoundly,
silence and the relatively hermetic information blockade created a space for
direct state violence that crushed the subsequent, more numerous and large-scale,
peasant rebellions in 1930–1931, producing a ghetto of exclusion. Cloaked by silence,
this opaque space did not simply exclude and isolate people’s experiences and suffering
from the rest of society, it fundamentally negated their existence, ‘‘making them inadmissible
for consideration.’’156
In this landscape, people’s experiences became a public
secret that muddied the truthful record about their disobedience and resistance, and the
state’s violent attempts to suppress them. Using August Comte’s term, in a ‘‘conspiracy of
silence,’’ coercion and starvation were used as political tools, and strategic silence helped
maintain the fictitious narrative about the successes of socialist construction promoted
by Soviet propaganda.157
Domestically, talk about the famine and state terror was criminalized, and the actual
tragedy of Ukrainian peasants fell into a catacomb of myths and rumors. In addition,
documents, such as Circular no. 984, cultivated xenophobia among local party bosses
and shaped their attitudes toward foreigners as potential enemies. These attitudes
migrated into the public sphere, instigating popular suspicion of foreigners and generating
people’s commitment to follow instructions from above which were based on deception
and sham. Moscow’s expectations were informed by hope that the conspiracy
of silence would become for Ukrainians as natural and habitual as their xenophobia.
Although over the last decade thousands of documents have been discovered that
unequivocally demonstrated the center’s conscious nature of repressive and extraordinary
measures in Ukraine, top secret Circular no. 984 best reflects its intention
to implement and to hide the terror to which Ukrainian peasants were subjected in
1928–1929. Importantly, recent scholarly studies have provided grounds to suggest
that Soviet authorities attempted to conceal more than the famine and state violence.
They attempted to camouflage the political and economic subversion of Ukraine, the
Ukrainians’ anti-Soviet and anti-colonial attitudes toward the state, and the inevitable
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Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 57
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ethnic changes, resulting from routine national operations in this geographical region.158
The plan was designed to exceed the political course attempted in the early 1920s to
win Ukraine and to transform it into a solid and long-lasting source of cash for industrialization.
Ukraine, as a frontier region southeastward and as a granary of the Soviet
Union, had to bear the burdens of increasing political and military centralization, and
had to serve the Soviet political system as an economic support of its power. Silence
became a strategic technique that helped achieve this goal.
In the Gulag (Vorkuta), Panas Butsenko, the recipient of Circular no. 984, ruminated
about the total political and economic subversion of Ukraine in the 1930s:
The reason is in ourselves. We lost the battle. We turned out to be mediocre politicians.
We failed to guarantee safety to our nation . . . . We perceived false assurances of friendship
as a reality. We were satisfied by power without power . . . . We did not defend ourselves.
We voluntarily entered the mouth of a boa . . . . Perhaps, a new clever generation
will come after us. It won’t repeat our mistakes.159
The ‘‘boa’’ swallowed millions of the Ukrainian peasantry, the intelligentsia, and the
clergy, without the possibility of restoring its initial ethnographic and cultural reserves.
Only after the collapse of the USSR and subsequent new archival findings, have historians
begun to realize the scale of this catastrophe.
From the inception of the USSR to its very end, Soviet national, social, cultural and
economic policies were shielded by the politics of silence which helped obscure their
essence and consequences. These policies were an array of crimes against humanity at
many levels. As mentioned earlier, definitions are important, although they are not
inclusive and never fully explain a phenomenon. The incredibly large number of
the regime’s victims, coupled with state violence and brutality, magnify its intrinsic
inhumane nature and place Soviet collectivization policies and their direct consequences,
such as famines, mass killings, and exile, squarely in the category of crimes against
humanity.
Olga Bertelsen is a Shklar/USF Research Fellow in the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and a
recipient of postdoctoral fellowships at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of
Toronto. She is the author of monographs on Ukrainian theatre (‘‘Smoloskyp,’’ 2017) and Soviet state
violence (Carl Beck Papers, 2013), and the editor of Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine (IbidemVerlag,
2017).
Notes
* Dedicated to the memory of Margaret Siriol Colley, niece of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones.
1. The Holodomor, a Ukrainian term for the famine, consists of two words, holod and mor which, when
combined, literally mean killing by hunger. It was the Soviet government-driven famine in Ukraine that
occurred in late 1932 to early 1933.
2. Frank Sysyn, ‘‘Thirty Years of Research on the Holodomor: A Balance Sheet,’’ in Contextualizing the
Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies, ed. Andrij Makuch and Frank E.
Sysyn (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015), 7–8; Nikolia Vert
(Nicolas Werth), ‘‘Velikii golod 1932–1933 gg. na Ukraine,’’ in Terror i besporiadok, http://krotov.info/
libr_min/03_v/er/t_2010_8.htm (accessed 15 Feb 2017).
3. Andrij Makuch and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of
Ukrainian Famine Studies (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015);
Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda, and Halyna Hryn, eds., After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact
of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HURI, Harvard UP, 2013); Bohdan Klid
and Alexander J. Motyl, eds., The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in
Ukraine (Edmonton; Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2012); Liudmyla Hrynevych,
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Khronika kolektyvizatsii ta Holodomoru v Ukraini, 1927–1933, vol. 1, books 1–3 (Krytyka: Kyiv, 2012);
Andrea Graziosi, ‘‘Stalin and Starvation as a Tool to Tame the Ukrainian Peasantry’’ (conference lecture,
Starvation as a Political Tool from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, Holodomor Research
and Education Consortium, October 22, 2015), http://holodomor.ca/starvation-as-a-political-toolsymposium/
(accessed Feb 2017); Olga Bertelsen and Myroslav Shkandrij, ‘‘The Secret Police and the
Campaign against Galicians in Soviet Ukraine, 1929–34,’’ Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism
and Ethnicity 42,1 (2014): 37–62; Myroslav Shkandrij and Olga Bertelsen, ‘‘The Soviet Regime’s National
Operations in Ukraine, 1929–1934,’’ Canadian Slavonic Papers, LV,3–4 (2013): 417–47.
4. On the significance of HDA SBU documents to analyses of the Holodomor that have been declassified
in 2006, see Iurii Shapoval, ‘‘Znachennia novovidnaidennykh dokumentiv DPU-NKVS dlia hlybshoho
rozuminnia holodu 1932–1933 rokiv,’’ in Rozsekrechena pam’iat’: Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraini
v dokumentakh HPU-NKVD, ed. Serhii Bohunov et al. (Kyiv: Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy; Mizhnarodnyi
blahodiinyi fond ‘‘Ukraina 3000,’’ 2008), 45–46.
5. Olga Andriewsky, ‘‘Towards a Decentred History: The Study of the Holodmor and Ukrainian Historiography,’’
in Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies, ed.
Andrij Makuch and Frank E. Sysyn (Edmonton; Toronto: The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
Press, 2015), 22–23.
6. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962).
7. Omelian Rudnytskyi et al., ‘‘Demography of a Man-Made Human Catastrophe: The Case of Massive
Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933,’’ Canadian Studies in Population 42,1–2 (2015): 53–80.
8. This document has been recently discovered in the DAKhO (State Archive of Kharkiv Oblast). Although
we generally know that the Soviets always prevented foreign journalists from visiting the USSR, to my
knowledge, prior to this discovery, there was no tangible evidence or documents (i.e., a written/signed
order/orders from Moscow’s institution/institutions of power) in which Moscow would specifically dictate
to the local authorities that foreigners were to be prevented from traveling to the Ukrainian countryside.
9. On the metaphor of violence as landscape, see Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal No (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1964), 181.
10. Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004). See also
Jacques Ranciere, ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics,’’ Theory & Event 5,3 (2001): 1–16; Jahmese M. Fort, ‘‘Politics
of Silence: Theorizing Silence as Altered Participation,’’ Kinesis: Graduate Journal of Philosophy 40,2
(2015): 65–74.
11. See also an analysis of various meanings of silence in more elaborate detail, from cultural, literary, and
political perspectives, in Mikhail Epshtein, ‘‘Slovo i molchanie v russkoi kul’ture,’’ Zvezda 10 (2005),
http://zvezdaspb.ru/index.php?page=8&nput=399 (accessed 12 May 2016).
12. John Gerring, ‘‘What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept
Formation in the Social Sciences,’’ Polity 31,3 (1999): 357–93; Alexander J. Motyl, ‘‘Putin’s Russia as a
Fascist Political System,’’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49,1 (2016): 25–36.
13. For a definition of ‘‘political strategic silence,’’ see Barry Brummett, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Silence as a
Political Strategy,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 66,3 (1980): 289; William Forrest Harlow, ‘‘The Rhetoric
of Silence and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire,’’ American Communication Journal 16,2 (2014): 52–66.
14. Nomi Dave, ‘‘The Politics of Silence: Music, Violence and Protest in Guinea,’’ Ethnomusicology 58,1
(2014): 18.
15. Sophia Dingli, ‘‘We Need to Talk about Silence: Re-examining Silence in International Relations Theory,’’
European Journal of International Relations 21,4 (2015): 732.
16. Johan Galtung, ‘‘Cultural violence,’’ Journal of Peace Research 27,3 (1990): 291; Johan Galtung, ‘‘Violence,
Peace and Peace Research,’’ Journal of Peace Research 6,3 (1969): 170–71. According to Galtung, ‘‘direct
violence’’ is associated with the deliberate action of one person in the form of physical or psychological
abuse aimed at another person, and ‘‘structural violence’’ means systematic measures and techniques
that the regime uses against people/communities/national groups to prevent them from achieving their
full potential, which becomes possible due to the misbalance of power.
17. See ‘‘Doxa and Common Life: An Interview. Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton,’’ in Slavoj Zizek,
Mapping Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1994), 270.
18. Glenn, Unspoken, 32.
19. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 160.
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20. Of course the politics of silence, as well as secrecy, was not an innovation of the 1930s. Moreover, it
goes without saying that historically, neither Tsarist Russia nor the early twentieth-century Civil War
in this region serve as points of departure for discussions about the politics of silence and secrecy. For
several thousand years, people governed societies using information as a tool of control, deliberately
keeping their subjects oblivious to realities.
21. On hidden and forgotten genocides, see Riccardo Armillei, Nikki Marczak, and Panayiotis Diamadis,
‘‘Forgotten and Concealed: The Emblematic Cases of the Assyrian and Romani Genocides,’’ Genocide
Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10,2 (2016): 98–120.
22. Roman Serbyn, ‘‘Editor’s Foreword,’’ Holodomor Studies 2,1 (2010): viii.
23. Robert Kindler, ‘‘Famines and Political Communication in Stalinism. Possibilities and Limits of the
Sayable,’’ Jahrbuecher fuer Geschicthe Osteuropas 62,2 (2014): 261.
24. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford, eds., Holodomor and Gorta Mo´r: Histories,
Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland (New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 5–6;
Stanislav V. Kulchytskyi, ‘‘Holodomor in Ukraine 1932-1933: An Interpretation of Facts’’ in Holodomor
and Gorta Mo´r: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland, ed. Christian
Noack, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford (New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 20.
25. Roman Serbyn, ‘‘Photographic Evidence of the Ukrainian Famines of 1921–1923 and 1932–1933,’’
Holodomor Studies 2,1 (2010): 66.
26. Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 79.
27. For discourses about continuity, discontinuity, and the theory of continuity and its application in politics
and social sciences, see, for instance, Hans S. Falck, ‘‘Social Continuity and Social Discontinuity: Social
Work and, in, against and Separate from Society,’’ The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 5,5 (1978):
723–30; James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1990); Stephen Padgett and Thomas Poguntke, eds., Continuity and Change in German
Politics: Beyond the Politics of Centrality? A Festschrift for Gordon Smith (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2002); Henk E. S. Woldring, ‘‘On the Purpose of the State: Continuity and Change in Political
Theories,’’ available at https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/Sweetman/Sweetman12.pdf (accessed 30 Dec 2016).
28. Zizek, Violence, 210–11.
29. Ibid., 211.
30. Kurkul (plural: kurkuli) is a Ukrainian term for what the Russians called ‘‘kulak,’’ a seemingly wealthy
peasant who, in the Bolshevik world, was an enemy of the Soviet state, and had to be de-kurkulized or
eliminated.
31. I. S. Rat’kovskii, Krasnyi terror i deiatel’nost’ VChK v 1918 godu (S.-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo
universiteta, 2006), 3, 43, 62. Moscow managed to create a united and all-pervasive system of the
Cheka only after 9 March 1918, when the Bolshevik government together with the secret organs moved
from Petrograd to Moscow.
32. Cheka is an early term for the Soviet secret police, afterwards GPU, an acronym for the Soviet secret
organs.
33. On the meaning of secrecy and its applications, see Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World: Stalin’s
Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, trans. Sally Laird and
John Kendal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), 1:65, 66–108. On control of information
by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 1930s, see Jonathan Bone, ‘‘Soviet Controls on the Circulation of the
Information in the 1920s and 1930s,’’ Cahiers du Monde russe 40,1–2 (1999): 65–89. Although some
Western scholars, including Rosenfeldt, use the terms konspiratsiia and conspiracy interchangeably,
they are not identical. These two notions have different meanings. Konspiratsiia (or konspirativnost’)
in Russian refers to the principle of secretiveness/secrecy that helps maintain secrecy about the matter,
one of the principles of the secret police, and should be translated into English as secrecy or secretiveness.
Conspiracy is a specific secret plan conceived by a group of individuals or institutions to do something
unlawful. This essay focuses on the former, not the latter.
34. Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:70.
35. The regulations about secrecy were issued, edited and printed in 1922, 1924, 1927, and 1929. See Rosenfeldt,
The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:70.
36. According to Stuart Kahan, this was also Lazar Kaganovich’s favorite expression that he learned from
his colleagues in the secret police. See Kahan’s The Wolf of the Kremlin (New York: William Morrow
and Company, Inc., 1987), 160. This source is compromised by several inconsistences, and hence it
cannot be treated as reliable. However, interestingly enough, this sentiment was conveyed by many
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GPU lieutenants in interrogation rooms in one form or another. See, for instance, AU SBUKhO
(Sectoral Archive of the Ukrainian Security Services in Kharkiv Oblast), spr. 010318; AU SBUKhO,
spr. 035261. On methods of gathering and manipulating information by the GPU, see Volodymyr
Iurynets’s obzornaia spravka in DAKhO, f. R6452, op. 4, spr. 724, ark. 149–56.
37. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War
II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2001), 70–72.
38. There were three waves of destruction of Soviet secret documents: in 1929–1930, 1937–1938 (the Great
Terror), and during the summer of 1941 on the eve of or immediately after the German invasion of the
Soviet Union. For more details, see Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:88–93. However, this notion
probably should be reconsidered in light of information, as yet unverified, about archival ‘‘bonfires’’ in
the internal yards of regional SBU archives in 1991, and during the Orange Revolution in 2004–2005
and Euromaidan in 2013–2014.
39. Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:99. On the rules of storage, copying, and return of secret and top
secret documents to Moscow, see the instructions issued on 30 May 1928 and signed by the member
of the collegium of the OGPU and the head of the Special Department Gleb Bokii in DAKhO, R857,
op. 1, spr. 12, ark. 15–17.
40. Okruha (plural: okruhy) refers to an administrative-territorial unit of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic. The system of okruhy existed from 1923 to 1930 and was replaced by the raion (district) system.
Where the term ‘‘district’’ is used, it means that a reference is associated with events that occurred before
1923, in 1930, or shortly thereafter.
41. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 134.
42. See, for instance, Alexander J. Motyl, ‘‘Fascistoid Russia: Whither Putin’s Brittle Realm,’’ World Affairs
(1 March 2012): 56.
43. TsDAHOU (Central State Archive of Civic Organizations in Ukraine), f. 1, op. 20, spr. 2316, ark. 10–11.
See also Oleg Mozokhin, VChK-OGPU: Karaiushchii mech diktatury proletariata (Moskva: Iauza and
EKSMO, 2004), 31.
44. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 2316, ark. 12, 74.
45. Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism (New York: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1934), 82. On
Bolshevik and Stalin’s policies, actions, and hostile attitudes toward the Ukrainian peasantry, and
Stalin’s views on the nationality question, see also Andrea Graziosi, ‘‘The Great Soviet Peasant War:
Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933,’’ Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1996); Klid and Motyl, The Holodomor Reader,
xxxviii, xliii.
46. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 80, 82. The book was published on 25 January 1926.
47. Ibid., 82–83.
48. Ibid., 84.
49. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. iak henotsyd: Trudnoshchi usvidomlennia (Kyiv: Nash
chas, 2008), 101–02, 107. On 14 December 1927, the TsK VKP(b) issued a directive that prescribed
forcible methods of solving the economic problem in the USSR. See V. Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia
sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivaniie: Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 (Moscow:
Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsyklopediia, 1999), 1:114.
50. Serhii Kokin, ‘‘Holodmor v Ukraini i DPU,’’ in Rozsekrechena pam’iat’: Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v
Ukraini v dokumentakh HPU-NKVD, ed. Serhii Bohunov et al. (Kyiv: Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy;
Mizhnarodnyi blahodiinyi fond ‘‘Ukraina 3000,’’ 2008), 65.
51. DAKhO, R-408, op. 6, spr. 375, ark. 1, 3, 5.
52. L. V. Hrynevych, ‘‘Osoblyvosti proiaviv politychnoi aktyvnosti naselennia USRR v umovakh nedorodiv i
holodu 1928–1929,’’ in Storinky istorii: Zbirnyk naukovykh prats’, vypusk 37 (Kyiv: Ministerstvo osvity i
nauky Ukrainy, Natsional’nyi tekhnichnyi universytet Ukrainy, 2014), 92.
53. Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet
Republic (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2014), 296–97. The Soviet state had not started
with a blank slate but it rather inherited these mechanisms of control from Tsarist Russia.
54. Ibid., 301.
55. Ibid., 319, 337–38.
56. Ibid., 344.
57. Ibid., 345.
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58. See, for instance, the 21 October 1929 petition of Ivan Bondarenko to the Andriivs’kyi tax office
(Iziums’kyi okruh). DAKhO, R1963, op. 2, spr. 73, ark. 2. See also DAKhO, R1963, op. 2, spr. 73, ark. 24.
59. DAKhO, R1963, op. 2, spr. 65, ark. 9.
60. DAKhO, R1963, op. 2, spr. 73, ark. 3, 5, 20, 22, 25, 27, 27, 31, 55, 102.
61. The course for total collectivization was officially announced at the November 1929 Plenum of the
Central Committee the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).
62. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 100. It should be noted here that peasant discontent
began to grow in 1926–1927: there was a wave of militant peasant uprisings across the country
(Khlevniuk, 2015; Kokin, 2007). According to the official statistics, on the Union level, the authorities
registered 63 large-scale anti-government rebellions in rural areas. In 1929, there were more than 1,300
reported incidents that involved 244,000 participants (Khlevniuk, 2015, 113). The lion’s share of this
information came from Ukraine. According to Hrynevych, in the late 1920s, Stalin could rely on only
5% of the Ukrainian society; the rest were hostile to Soviet collectivization. Considering the fact that the
rural population of the UkrSSR in 1926 constituted approximately 24 million people, one can imagine
the scale of peasant resistance. In 1928–1929, they rebelled against the regime, using various forms of
resistance—passive, active, armed, and so forth (Viola, 1996; Danilov et al., 2002). By late 1929, mass
riots involved hundreds of thousands of people, and the Ukrainian GPU lost control over eight okruhy
which was restored with great difficulty in early 1930. The official statistics on mass resistance in
Ukraine, provided by Hrynevych and other scholars for 1928–1929, are far from complete. More comprehensive
studies are needed to illustrate the scale of social and political discontent in Ukraine in the
late 1920s.
63. Kokin, ‘‘Holodmor v Ukraini i DPU,’’ 67.
64. Iurii Shapoval, ‘‘On Ukrainian Separatism: A GPU Circular of 1926,’’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18,3–4
(1994): 275–302.
65. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven and
London: Yale UP, 2015), 105.
66. On Stalin’s Siberian trip, see, for instance, James Hughes, Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New
Economic Policy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), 128–33.
67. Khlevniuk, Stalin, 102–04.
68. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power (London; New York: Pearson, Longman, 2005), 82–84;
Khlevniuk, Stalin, 107. On the same day Radek and several other of Stalin’s opponents were forcibly
removed to the Urals, and a couple of days later Lev Trotsky was deported to Alma Ata. See Hughes,
Stalin, 132.
69. Hanna Kapustian, ‘‘Peredvisnyky holodu pochatku 30-kh rokiv XX st. v Ukraini,’’ in Henotsyd ukrains’koho
narodu: istorychna pam’iat ta polityko-pravova otsinka, ed. V. A. Smolii et al. (Kyiv; New York:
Vydavnytstvo M. P. Kots’, 2003), 278.
70. Ibid., 279.
71. See the 4 May 1928 directive of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U in TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 16, spr. 4,
ark. 50–52. Also available in Iurii Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko, Vadym Zolotariov, ChK-GPU-NKVD
v Ukraini: Osoby, Fakty, Dokumenty (Kyiv: Abris, 1997), 268–69.
72. ‘‘Petliurites’’ is a derogatory term for Ukrainian nationalists. It originated from the last name of Simon
Petliura, head of the Ukrainian Directory, the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s executive organ founded in
1917, and military commander of the Directory’s armed forces. ‘‘Spekulianty’’ is a term that characterized
entrepreneurs who operated in the black market selling foodstuffs and consumer products for profit.
73. For a detailed discussion about these operations see Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, ‘‘Spilka
vyzvolennia Ukrainy’’: Nevidomi dokumenty i fakty (Kyiv: Intel, 1995); Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii
Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi i GPU-NKVD: trahichne desiatylittia 1924–1934 (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo
‘‘Ukraina,’’ 1996); Serhii Bilokin’, Masovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia v SRSR (1917–1941):
Dzhereloznavche doslidzhennia (Kyiv: Fundatsiia ‘‘Volia,’’ 1999); Shkandrij and Bertelsen, ‘‘The Soviet
Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine’’; Bertelsen and Shkandrij, ‘‘The Secret Police.’’
74. Hrynevych, ‘‘Osoblyvosti proiaviv,’’ 86–87.
75. Ibid., 88.
76. Khlevniuk, Stalin, 108. See also Francoise Thom, ‘‘Reflections on Stalin and the Holodomor,’’ in Contextualizing
the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies, ed. Andrij Makuch
and Frank E. Sysyn (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015), 76, 78.
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77. V. P. Danilov, ‘‘Vvedeniie (Istoki i nachalo derevenskoi tragedii),’’ in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia
i raskulachivaniie. Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1, Mai 1927—Noiabr’ 1929, ed. V. P. Danilov,
R. Manning, and L. Viola (Moskva: ROSSPEN, 1999), 32–36.
78. Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rr., 109–10, 114–15. See also Valery Vasil’ev, ‘‘Vinnitsa Oblast,’’ in
Centre-Local Relations in the Stalinist State, 1928-1941, ed. E. A. Rees (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002), 169.
79. Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932-1933 rr., 109, 114.
80. See criminal files of Bilenko and Baden in DAKO (State Archive of Kirovohrad oblast), f. FR 5907, spr.
4182; DAKO f. FR 5907, spr. 4217. Here, the term ‘‘district’’ is used, as it was employed by those who
created these criminal files, likely in early 1930 when the system of okruhy was replaced by the system
of raiony/districts.
81. See their group criminal file in DAKO, FR 5907, spr. 14142. Sil’rada refers to the Village Council.
82. See Hraliuk’s criminal file in DAKO, FR 5907, spr. 4172.
83. For a discussion about ‘‘mobilization’’ of foodstuffs from Ukraine to other regions of the USSR, see
Liudmyla Hrynevych, Khronika, vol. 1, book 3, 18–31; Liudmyla Hrynevych, ‘‘Metody khlibozahotivel’
1928/29 r. po-stalins’komu,’’ in Holod 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraini: prychyny ta naslidky (Kyiv: Naukova
dumka, 2003), 294.
84. This data is available in TsA FSB RF, f. 2, op. 7, spr. 502, ark. 125, and was collected immediately after
1991. See, for instance, Kapustian, 284.
85. For a discussion about the functions of the Ukrainian State Commission and state aid to those who
suffered from the famine of 1928–1929, see Hrynevych, Khronika, vol. 1, book 3, 66–85 (esp. 72).
86. Ibid., 73.
87. Kindler, 258; See Kulchytskyi, ‘‘Holodomor in Ukraine,’’ 24. On the basis of the third Land Decree
issued by the Soviet People’s Commissariat (Radnarkom) in late 1918, the Ukrainian Soviet government
began to collectivize the Ukrainian peasantry in March 1919, which resulted in armed rebellions. In
early April 1919, the Red Army burned to the ground the rebellious villages Romanivka and Khydovtsi
(Fastov district). Because of the catastrophic failure of collectivization in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks rejected
its forcible implementation at the VIII All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1920, and decided
to proceed more cautiously, employing systematic individual requisition of agricultural products. See
Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rr., 30–35.
88. Kindler, 258.
89. Hrynevych, Khronika, vol. 1, book 3, 145–46; Hrynevych, ‘‘Osoblyvosti proiaviv,’’ 99.
90. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 109; Liudmyla Hrynevych, ‘‘Chervona armiia i ukrains’ke suspil’stvo
pid chas kampanii likvidatsii kurkul’stva iak klasu (zyma-vesna 1930 r.): istorychnyi analiz sotsial’noi
psykholohii ta povedinky,’’ in Henotsyd ukrains’koho narodu: istorychna pam’iat ta polityko-pravova
otsinka, ed. V. A. Smolii et al. (Kyiv; New York: Vydavnytstvo M. P. Kots’, 2003), 341.
91. Vadym Zolotariov, ChK-DPU-NKVS na Kharkivshchyni: liudy ta doli. 1919-1941 (Kharkiv: Folio, 2003),
172.
92. Zolotariov, ChK-DPU-NKVS, 172–73. The families of the transgressors were also exiled to the Northern
regions of the USSR and their private property was confiscated.
93. R. W. Davies et al., eds., ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence. 1931–36 (New Haven
and London: Yale UP, 2003), 4–5.
94. See a group criminal file in DAKO, FR 5907, spr. 10030, ark. 1–10.
95. Ibid.
96. See, for instance, Ivan Strilets’s criminal file in DAKO, FR 5907, spr. 14189, ark, 1–5, 18–25. Their
property was confiscated.
97. Leaflets and proclamations in Ukraine differed from those in Russia. Many called for a free and independent
Ukraine, free of the Bolsheviks and Communist zhydy. See Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin,
120.
98. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 258.
99. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 303.
100. On bab’i bunty, women’s riots, see Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin, 181–204.
101. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 301.
102. Viktor Pryluts’kyi, ‘‘Represyvni zakhody proty molodi v USRR u period formuvannia totalitarnoho ladu
(1920–1936 rr.),’’ in Henotsyd ukrains’koho narodu: istorychna pam’iat ta polityko-pravova otsinka, ed.
V. A. Smolii et al. (Kyiv; New York: Vydavnytstvo M. P. Kots’, 2003), 231.
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103. See, for instance, Panasyk Perederii’s 25 January 1929 letter to Stalin in DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 589,
ark. 15–21.
104. On Soviet propaganda and collectivization, see Liudmyla Hrynevych, Holod 1928-1929 rr. u Radians’kii
Ukraini (Kyiv: Instytut istorii Ukrainy, NAN Ukrainy, 2013), 251–74.
105. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 53.
106. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 53–53 zv.
107. Kuromiya, Stalin, 112.
108. Hrynevych, ‘‘Osoblyvosti proiaviv,’’ 93; for the GPU’s statistics, see Vasil’ev, 171–72. For more specific
categories of terrorist acts, see Hrynevych, Holod 1928-1929 rr. u Radians’kii Ukraini, 310.
109. DAKhO, R846, op. 4, spr. 44, ark. 124.
110. A. Berelovich et al., eds., ‘‘Vvedeniie,’’ in Sovetskaiia derevnia 1923-1929 gg. po informatsionnym dokumentam
GPU/Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD. 1918-1939 gg. Dokumenty i materialy
4,2 (Moskva: ROSSPEN, 2000), 23.
111. In late 1929 to early 1930, people organized in groups (500–600), beating the militia in the villages of
Kharkiv okruha. See, for instance, DAKhO, f. R845, op. 8, spr. 164, ark. 4. One of the largest organized
riots in Ukraine occurred in Pavlohrad. It was suppressed on October 5–6, 1930. See Vasyl’ Danylenko,
ed., Pavlohrads’ke povstannia. 1930. Dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: ‘‘Ukrains’kyi pys’mennyk,’’ 2009). At
the Union level, in January 1930, the GPU registered 402 mass disturbances; in February 1,048; and in
March 6,528. In all, there were 13,754 mass disturbances, in which approximately three million people
participated. See R. W. Davies et al., The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 4; Mykola Doroshko,
Nomenklatura: Kerivna verkhivka Radians’koi Ukrainy (1917–1938 rr.) (Kyiv: Nika-Tsentr, 2008), 302.
112. Zolotariov, ChK-DPU-NKVS, 173.
113. ‘‘Doxa and Common Life,’’ 270.
114. This study does not delve into the differences between the grain procurement policies of 1928 and 1932
and the scale of violence associated with them, nor does it argue that the politics of silence prevented
or eliminated trips of foreigners to Ukraine or to the Ukrainian countryside. Rather it illuminates
the intent of human actions and examines the extent of the Soviet politics of silence that helped isolate
specific groups of people and perpetuate violence, using the information blockade.
115. During the interwar period, approximately 10,000 foreign visitors and tens of thousands of foreign
residents lived in the Soviet Union. The desire to witness the achievements of the Bolsheviks attracted
writers, journalists, businessmen, economists, politicians, and private citizens of foreign states. See
Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the
Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 32–33, 46.
116. F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, trans. Eric Mosbacher and
David Porter (New York: The Viking Press, 1951), 166; David-Fox, 59. For more details about the
VOKS and the fate of its directors, see Beck and Godin, 131–33.
117. David-Fox, 98–99, 101, 111. The rumors about ‘‘Potemkin villages’’ were circulated from the midtwenties
among foreign visitors, and many were aware of the Soviets’ tactics of following a scheme of
‘‘pre-planned visits’’ and selected places for excursions.
118. American writer Theodor Dreiser was among those who fully experienced the Soviets’ ‘‘friendly’’ grip
during his journey to Soviet Russia in 1927–1928. See Thomas P. Riggio and James L.W. West III,
eds., Dreiser’s Russian Diary (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996), 29, 220; David-Fox, 3–4.
119. David-Fox, 3.
120. From late 1928, mass disturbances and riots in Ukraine forced the state to mobilize the militia, the
Red Army, and GPU troops to put down the uprisings with force, using weapons and even artillery, as
Grigorii Ordzhonikidze who was dispatched to Ukraine to alleviate the situation noted in his diary. See
Vasil’ev, 172.
121. DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 439, ark. 11–11zv. From 1923 to 1929, Panas Butsenko headed the Kharkiv
okruha executive committee. In 1929, he was sent to the Far East (Vladivostok) to head the local
executive committee, but in the early thirties he was transferred to Moscow to work for the People’s
Commissariat of Heavy Industry where he was arrested as a member of a Ukrainian fascist organization
and exiled to Vorkuta. He miraculously survived the exile and died in Moscow in 1965. For more details
about Butsenko, see V. A. Smolii et al., eds., Entsyklopediia istorii Ukrainy (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo
‘‘Naukova dumka,’’ 2003), 1:688; Hryhorii Kostiuk, Zustrichi i proshchannia: Spohady u dvokh knyhakh
(Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2008), 1:80, 81, 103, 563–67, 623.
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122. The Soviets established a system of organizing classified materials, according to which documents were
designated as ‘‘confidential,’’ ‘‘secret,’’ and ‘‘strictly secret’’ (or ‘‘top secret’’). For details, see Rosenfeldt,
The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:71.
123. Rikke Haute, ‘‘Room for Discussion: the Correspondence of Narkomindel and the Soviet Embassy in
Denmark,’’ in Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union, ed. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen, and
Erik Kulavig (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 2000), 173–74.
124. Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:68.
125. Routine quarrels between Chicherin and Litvinov jeopardized the smooth enforcement of conspiratorial
principles, which fragmented the Narkomindel into groups and in many respects paralyzed the normal
work of the agency. For details see Grigorii Besedovskii, Na putiakh k Termidoru (Moskva: Sovremennik,
1997), 146. Chicherin held the position as its Commissar for seven years, from 6 July 1923 to 21 July 1930.
On Stalin’s order, his successor Maxim Litvinov was removed from the office on 3 May 1939, and
replaced by Viacheslav Molotov who led the Commissariat until its reorganization in March 1946.
126. Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 1:74, 76, 88. In 1927, a general rule was established that important
questions discussed in the Narkomindel and the OGPU were to be approved by the Politburo. These
joint discussions were held at the Politburo’s closed sessions. Of course, there is little doubt that the
Narkomindel and the OGPU fulfilled the will of the members of the Politburo. Intense secret correspondence
between the central party organs and the Narkomindel and the OGPU, as well as regular
joint meetings, occurred monthly and even weekly.
127. Kathryn Weathersby, ‘‘Foreign Policies under Stalin: The Case of Korea,’’ in Mechanisms of Power in the
Soviet Union, ed. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen, and Erik Kulavig (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
Inc., 2000), 228. Current scholarship on Stalin’s power politics does not argue that from 1928 Stalin
made major political decisions alone. Instead, it explains how decisions were made in favor of one
person, Stalin, under the guise of the principle of collective leadership that was allegedly enforced in
the highest institutions of power in 1928–1929. It suggests that through political manipulation and
intrigue, Stalin managed to control the ‘‘vote’’ in the Politburo (his opponents were discredited and the
majority in the Politburo became Stalin’s majority, people who were subservient to him). Arguments
positing that Stalin controlled the decision-making process only after WWII are inconsistent with
recent scholarship on the Politburo’s internal politics and Stalin’s role in it. According to the majority
of scholars, the process of consolidation of Stalin’s power occurred precisely in 1928–1929, which
allowed him to have a decisive voice in all major decisions, including those of the early and late 1930s
(the Holodomor and the Great Terror). For evidence of Stalin’s central role in the major political
decisions made from late 1928, see Kuromiya, 2005; Khlevniuk, 2009; Khlevniuk, 2015; Harris, 2016;
Thom, 2015.
128. Ukraine was sovereign only on paper. All state institutions were subordinate to the central institutions
in Moscow. Ruslan Pyrih, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine: Documents and Materials
(Kyiv: Kyiv Mohyla Academy Publishing House, 2008), 10–11.
129. See Grigory Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, in the Series of Russian Studies, trans.
Matthew Norgate (Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, Inc., 1977), 10, 12, 118.
130. David-Fox, 34; Leonid Naumov, Stalin and NKVD (Moskva: Novyi Khronograf, 2010), 342.
131. As previously mentioned, as early as 1923, one of its chief responsibilities was to evaluate foreigners’
attitudes toward the USSR, and to establish in detail their travel dates and itinerary in order to impose
as much structure as possible to prevent the travelers from seeing the sites of conflict and state violence.
See David-Fox, 48–49.
132. The Commissariat and its foreign embassies were infiltrated by GPU agents who kept the party leadership
informed about activities within these institutions. Usually the chiefs of Press Bureaus were working
for the secret police. For details about the relations between the Narkomindel and the secret police,
see Besedovskii, Na putiakh k Termidoru, 359; Bessedovsky, Revelations, 13–14, 70.
133. David-Fox, 52, 57–60, 295. The communication channels among these agencies, including their regional
branches, were established through telegraph and the OGPU’s Field Courier Corps. See Rosenfeldt, The
‘‘Special’’ World, 1:93–94, 261.
134. On the threat of war and Soviet propaganda, see Nikolia Vert (Nicolas Werth), ‘‘Porazhencheskiie
slukhi i nastroienia v SSSR v 1920-1930-ie gody,’’ in Terror i besporiadok, http://krotov.info/libr_min/
03_v/er/t_2010_8.htm.
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135. DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 439, ark. 11zv. For more details about Rotshtein, see Bessedovsky, Revelations,
101, or Besedovskii, Na putiakh k Termidoru, 146. The center appointed Volin as Rotshtein’s
deputy. Volin was in charge of a spy ring in Paris, while serving as a secretary at the Paris Embassy.
136. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 2316, ark. 1–195 (esp. 3, 4, 6). Pessimism and frustration with the Soviets
were characteristic of most regions in Ukraine: the peasants expressed concerns with high prices for
manufactured goods and low prices for grain established by the government. The GPU reported that,
at collective meetings, the peasants reached an agreement to sow as little as possible to harvest just
enough to sustain only their families for a year. A peasant from Uman’ okruha proclaimed: ‘‘I’ll be
naked and barefoot but I won’t surrender my bread for nothing.’’ By late 1926, a pud of rye grain cost
50–60 kopeks while a pair of boots was priced at 12–25 rubles (pud is a dry measure usually used in
tsarist Russia for grain and flour; 1 pud equals 16.38 kilograms). According to secret GPU reports,
the talks in the villages revolved around a second revolution that had to occur to demolish the coercive
Soviet power.
137. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 2316, ark. 27–28, 98, 105–07. According to GPU statistics, from 15
September to 1 November 1926, there were 6,048 robberies, 351 murders, and 999 arsons in the Ukrainian
countryside. The report is signed by the deputy head of the Ukrainian GPU Karl Karlson, the head
of the Statistical Operational Administration of the GPU Vasilii Ivanov, and the head of the Informational
Operational Department of the GPU Genrikh Liushkov. For more details on Karlson, see V. A.
Zolotar’ov and I. I. Shapoval, ‘‘‘Kolyvan’ u provedenni linii partii ne bulo’ (Storinky biohrafii K. M.
Karlsona),’’ Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal no. 1 (1996): 91–105; on Ivanov, see Vadym Zolotar’ov,
‘‘Komisar derzhavnoi bezpeky 3-ho ranhu: Storinky biohrafii Vasylia Ivanova,’’ Z arkhiviv VUChKGPU-NKVD-KGB
no. 1–2 (1999): 367–87; on Liushkov, see Vadym Zolotar’ov, ‘‘‘Prozrenie’ chekista
Liushkova,’’ V mire spetssluzhb no. 3 (2004): 66–69.
138. Kul’chyts’kyi, Holodomor 1932-1933 rr., 124, 130.
139. Irina V. Pavlova, ‘‘The Strength and Weakness of Stalin’s Power,’’ in Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet
Power, ed. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen, and Erik Kulavig (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc.,
2000), 35–36.
140. DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 439, ark. 11.
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid.
143. On cynicism as a form of ideology and the creation of a distorted reality, see Slavoj Zizek, ‘‘How Did
Marx Invent the Symptom?’’ in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London and New York: Verso,
2012), 312–14.
144. For more details about the principles of collective and personalized leadership in the highest party organs
in the late 1920s, see Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Melbourne, Australia:
Cambridge UP, 1990), 193–94.
145. Ibid., 206–07, 211–12.
146. DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 439, ark. 11.
147. Ibid.
148. DAKhO, f. R845, op. 2, spr. 439, ark. 11zv.
149. DAKhO, f. R857, op. 1sch, spr. 12, ark.17. Gleb Bokii (1879–1937) was a Ukrainian who was born in
Tiflis. From 1921 to 1934, he headed the special (coding) department in the VChK/GPU/OGPU of the
USSR. Until 1937, Bokii was a member of the NKVD Collegium in the RSFSR, a member of the
Supreme Court, and the head of the special department and the 9th department in the GUGB NKVD
in the USSR. He was arrested on 16 May 1937, and was shot on 15 November 1937. For more details
about Bokii, see N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD: 1934-1941, ed. N. G. Okhotin
and A. B. Roginskii (Moskva: ‘‘Zven’ia,’’ 1999), 114; Rosenfeldt, The ‘‘Special’’ World, 2:34–35.
150. DAKhO, f. R857, op. 1sch, spr. 12, ark. 33zv.
151. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, ‘‘The Importance of the Secret Apparatus of the Soviet Communist Party during
the Stalin Era,’’ in Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Power, ed. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen, and
Erik Kulavig (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 2000), 60.
152. ‘‘Doxa and Common Life,’’ 266.
153. Yet, Marx and Lenin never denied the importance of coercion and violence at the initial stage of the
revolution. For a discussion about ‘‘selective interpretation of the ideological heritage,’’ see Juan J. Linz,
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2000), 77. For various
analyses of Lenin’s views about state violence and his disposition to violence, see James Ryan, Lenin’s
6 2017 Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.11.1.02
Bertelsen66
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Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2012);
Rat’kovskii, Krasnyi terror; Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005); Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: Revelations from the Secret Archive in Annals
of Communism Series (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 1–11; Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 3
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995); George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (New York:
Oxford UP, 1981).
154. Linz, 77.
155. On the potential of silence to internalize and individualize threats and curtail political mobilization,
see Lene Hansen, ‘‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the
Copenhagen School,’’ Millennium—Journal of International Studies 29,2 (2000): 306.
156. For a more extensive discussion about silence’s capabilities, see Dingli, 726.
157. See an interesting discussion about strategic and public silence in John Keane, ‘‘Silence and Catastrophe:
New Reasons Why Politics Matters in the Early Years of the Twenty-first Century,’’ The Political
Quarterly 83,4 (2012): 660–68.
158. Vasyl’ Danylenko, ed., Ukrains’ka intelihentsiia i vlada: Zvedennia sekretnoho viddilu DPU USSR, 1927–
1929 rr. (Kyiv: Tempora, 2012); Klid and Motyl, The Holodomor Reader; Hrynevych, Holod 1928–1929
rr. u Radians’kii Ukraini; Bertelsen and Shkandrij, ‘‘The Secret Police.’’
159. Kostiuk, 1:566. Unfortunately, Butsenko survived the Gulag only to see a new wave of repression of
Ukrainian intellectuals in the sixties, and to witness new secrecy that accompanied the KGB’s arrests.
6 2017 Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.11.1.02
Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 67
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