Martin Amis - Koba The Dread - 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine

MARTIN AMIS - KOBA THE DREAD

1933 The Terror Famine - Page 137

We speak of famine 'raging', 'stalking the land', holding people 'in its grip'. Describing the immobility and silence within the villages, Vasily Grossman writes: 'Only famine was on the move. Only famine did not sleep'. Metaphorically we invest famine with volition and intent, but famine is just an absence - an absence of food, then an absence of life. It has a smell, noted for its extreme longevity: that of purulence. And Grossman writes that, despite the stillness, 'everything felt fierce and wild. And the earth crackled' .in considering the Terror-Famine of 1933, it is now asked of the reader forcefully to repersonify famine and call him Stalin. It is Stalin who is holding people in his grip, Stalin who is stalking the land, Stalin who is raging.

*And so did Khrushchev, whose 'secret speech' of 1956 was entitled 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences' (and dealt only with the purge of the Party, and not of the nation). One of Stalin's more energetic administrators (in 1937 he was sent to the Ukraine to kill 20,000 people), Khrushchev showed, nonetheless, that it was possible to recross Solzhenitsyn's 'threshold' and pick up the remains of his humanity

The use of famine as a weapon of the state against the populace is generally considered to be a Stalinist innovation (later taken up by Mao and other Communist leaders), but Lenin's famine of 1921-22 had its terroristic aspects. Both famines had the same cause: punitive food-requisitioning. Whereas Stalin nurtured and consolidated the mass starvation, Lenin, by contrast, reluctantly and tardily permitted the American intervention, which saved over 10 million lives. Yet in the Ukraine, at least, Lenin's famine overlapped with terror. As the historian H. H. Fisher put in 1927: 'The Government of Moscow not only failed to inform the American Relief Administration of the situation in the Ukraine, as it had done in the case of much more remote regions, but deliberately placed obstacles in the way.' Conquest adds: 'Indeed between 1 August 1921 and 1 August 1922, 10.6 million hundredweight of grain was actually taken from the Ukraine for distribution elsewhere'. All his adult life Lenin had been an admirer of famine as a 'radicalizer' (and secularizer) of the peasantry. And what else but terror-famine could he have had in mind when, in 1922, he warned Kamenev; 'It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror'. So, once again, Stalin in 1933 was merely showing himself to be 'Lenin's most able pupil'. His only qualitative novelty, apart from the Party purge, was the show trial. And we may recall Solzhenitsyn's comment of the 'demonstration' trial of the SRs in 1922: Lenin was 'so nearly there'.

Both Lenin and Stalin considered the Ukraine the most refractory of all the republics. During the chaos of 1918-20, when the administration in Kiev changed hands thirteen times, the Bolsheviks invaded, or reinvaded, in annual campaigns. And throughout the Stalin push of 1929-33, and beyond, every imaginable Ukrainian institution was repeatedly purged. The thoroughness of Stalin's attempt at de-Ukrainianization can be gauged from an account given in Shostakovich's Testimony. It concerns the date of the kobzars - peasant poets (many of them blind) who went from village to village with their verses and songs. They were not, one would have thought, an immediate threat to Soviet power, though they could be listed in separate categories of undesirables ('outdated elements', for example, or simply 'others' - a much-used classification). But they nonetheless reminded the Ukrainian peasants that they had once had a country. The kobzars, several hundred of them, were invited to their first All-Ukrainian Congress. 'Hurting a blind man', lamented Shotakovich, '--- what could be lower?' Some were imprisoned, but 'almost all' were shot, because (as Conquest notes) a blind man would not be worth feeding in the gulag.

Stalin then, had two reasons for assaulting the Ukrainian peasants: they were peasants, and they were Ukrainian. Thus, the USSR continued to export grain, and continued to store it. The food requisitioning continued until March 1933 - the epicentre of the famine. By now the collection brigades only bothered with households that weren't obviously starving. The Ukraine had other similarities to the 'vast Belsen' of Conquest's barricading, hundreds of thousands of peasants made their way to the cities, where they crawled around at knee height among the crowds, who themselves formed swaying, howling lines in front of the 'commercial' bread shops* (the cities, too, were ravaged, Stavropol losing 20,000, Krasnodar 40,000, Kharkov 120,000). In December 1932, to combat 'kulak infiltration of the towns', the regime tightened restrictions on internal travel:

The Central Committee and the government are in possession of definite proof that this massive exodus of the peasants had been organised by the enemies of the Soviet regime, by counter-revolutionaries, and by Polish agents as a propaganda coup against the process of collectivization in particular and the Soviet government in general.

Within the villages, within the families, Grossman writes, 'Mothers looked at their children and screamed in fear. They screamed as if a snake had crept into their house. And this snake was famine, starvation, death'. This snake was Stalin. As first the children cried all day for food; then, in addition, they cried for food all night. Some parents fled their children. Others took them to the towns and left them there. The Italian consul in Kharkov gave this report: So for a week now, the town has been patrolled by dvorniki, attendants in white uniforms, who collect the children and take them to the nearest police station. Around midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station at Severodonetsk. That's where all the children who are found in stations or on trains, the peasant families, the old people are gathered together. A medical team does a sort of selection process.. Anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to the Kholodnaya Gora buildings, where a constant population of 8,000 lies dying on straw beds in the big hangars. Most of them are children. People who are already beginning to swell up are moved out in goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town.

* These were black market outlets run by the government. Their prices were high.

Some parents killed their children. And other parents ate their children. Zachto? 'Why, what for, to what end?' as Grossman asks, His narrator goes on: It was then that I saw for myself that every starving person is like a cannibal. He is consuming his own flesh, leaving only his bones intact. He devours his fat to the last droplet. And then his mind goes dim, because he has consumed his own mind. In the end the starving man has devoured himself completely.

Twenty pages earlier Grossman similarly defines the fate, not of the victim, but of the executioner:

[O]nly one form of retribution is visited upon an executioner - the fact that he looks upon his victim as something other than a human being and thereby ceases to be a human being himself, and thereby executes himself as a human being. He is his own executioner.

This, perhaps is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal moral gangrene of Stalinism.

About 5 million died in the Ukraine, and about 2 million died in the Kuban, Don and Volga regions and in Kazakhstan. These were formerly the richest agricultural lands in the USSR.

The Beginnings of the Search for Decorum - Page 255

One evening in the autumn of 1999 my wife and I, together with the Conquests, attended a political meeting at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, Holborn, London, just over the road from the old New Statesman offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

* 'Above all, it was Trotsky,' writes Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, 'who in December 1918 ordered the formation of "blocking units" equipped with machine guns, whose role was simply to shoot front-line soldiers who attempted to retreat.'

We had come to hear the Hitchens brothers, Christopher (pro) and Peter (anti), discussing the European Union. So: a very boring subject indeed. But the debate was lively, and the audience passionately interactive: fierce questions posed in fierce regional accents, drunken braying by 'name' journalists, and, from various rotund politicos, the occasionally resonant 'hear hear' - which, if I remember my James Fenton aright (he was evoking a lethargic afternoon in the House of Commons), sounded like 'erdle erdle' and made you think of an enormous stomach digesting an enormous meal.

At one point, reminiscing, Christopher said that he knew this building well, having spent many an evening in it with many 'an old comrade'. The audience responded as Christopher knew it would (his remark was delivered with a practised air): the audience responded with affectionate laughter. Aftewards I asked Conquest, 'Did you laugh?' 'Yes,' he said. And I said, 'And so did I.' Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many 'an old blackshirt', the audience would have. Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher - or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little moustache and the big moustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million. This isn't right:

Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen.
Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.
Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann.
Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.
Everybody knows of the 6 million of the Holocaust.
Nobody knows of the 6 million of the Terror-Famine.

Yet I know, and I laughed. And Conquest laughed. Why won't laughter do the decent thing? Why won't laughter excuse itself and leave the room?

Let us go back, for a moment to Tibor Szamuely. Given eight years in the gulag for privately referring to Georgi Malenkov as a 'fat pig', Tibor was imprisoned en route to Vorkuta. This is my father's account from his Memoirs:

The big daily event in a Soviet gaol is the delivery of the copy of Pravda, and it was Tibor's right and duty, as the Professor, to read the contents out to the cell [which contained several dozen inmates].

* When Austria's Haider praised one of Hitler's employment policies, Europe spat him out, consulsively, as if he were a bad oyster. Russia's Putin praises Stalin, echoes Stalin ('to liquidate the oligarchs as a class'), and proposes to mint coins bearing Stalin's profile. He is welcomed at Downing Street, and has tea with the Queen. More substantively, between 1945 and 1966, writes Solzhenitsyn, 'eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And during the same period, in our country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), about ten men have been convicted'. In the 1980s, Molotov and Kaganovich, two elderly Eichmanns, were living on state pensions in Moscow.