Empire: World History - 94. The Bloody History of Russia & Ukraine

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

The history of Russia and Ukraine has been irrevocably entwined for centuries. When the Bolsheviks took over and Civil War erupted across the Russian Empire, Ukraine was one of the bloodiest centres of the conflict. Antisemitic pogroms and wanton violence destroyed whole communities. Then during the 1930s Russia inflicted upon Ukraine one of the deadliest famines in history, the death toll is estimated to be around 4m. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Pulitzer-winning historian Anne Applebaum to discuss the traumatic history of Russia and Ukraine. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello, Empire Podcast listeners, Anita here. Look, this episode is going to be one perhaps if you're of a delicate disposition, or you've got small children or even slightly bigger children who don't like gory story, you may not want to listen to it with them. Anyway, just a friendly warning on with the show.

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnond. And me, William Durimple. Yes, you're in India right now. I am in J-Poor at the moment. Looking suitably lavish behind you. It is, it's an unexpectedly lavish backdrop, but no one presumably on the podcast can see that. No, no, but I want to... all of our hearts to bleed with you as one.

That's all. The Sultan in his suite. There are worse places to be billeted than the Rabbag Hotel at this tree. I'm at home in case anybody was wondering. Same place. Same place. Anyway, listen, today we're very thrilled to be joined by Anne Applebaum-Pullets a prize-winning author of books on Russian and Soviet history,

including Red Famine's War on Ukraine and Iron Curtain, the crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 to 1956. You will have heard Anne everywhere, particularly of late, because Anne you are a special expert on All Matters Ukrainian. So, I mean, you are a fabulous person to talk about what happened and what might happen. Yeah, we should say straight up that Anne has been writing about this story, which is new to many of us for nearly 30 years now, and that been living in the region speaks the languages and is the most reliable Western guide to all this. Anne, welcome. Thank you.

That's a hard act to live up to, but I appreciate the introduction. Well, we have every faith in you, Anne. Absolutely, every faith in you. Look, we finished with Simon Seabag Montefiore's rather heartbreaking podcast about the destruction, annihilation of the Romanovs. It was a really difficult listen. Very, very movingly told by Seabag. Very movingly told.

Extraordinary form. But in amongst that sort of personal tragedy, there was also sort of a hint of geopolitics, which I'd just love to, because we'll pick up sort of formally from 1917, but even before that, the reasons that the white Russians failed. And he made an observation that there just wasn't an alliance between powerful people who could have matched and faced the Bolsheviks. One of the reasons he gave was that everybody was so very rude about, you know, Ukrainians or Cossacks that they, you know, wouldn't have anything to do with them,

or the Poles who were natural allies. But you also have another observation about this, which is really to do with empire as well and that kind of colonial mindset that got in the way. I think it's absolutely true that the white Russians, when they looked at defeating the Bolsheviks, it did not occur to them to ally either with the Poles, part of what's now modern Poland had been part of the Russian Empire. And of course, the Ukrainians and all of Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire. And they were unable to think of those nations as allies, and they could only see them as more enemies. And for that reason, they were unable to,

unify and beat the Bolshevik. So the deep assumptions about Ukraine, you know, that Ukraine's not really a country, that it's just southern Russia, or that it's little Russia, or it's somehow lesser, though our peasants, something like that, was so deeply ingrained in the Russian imperial consciousness that they couldn't give it up. And when we last really focused in on Ukraine, which was during the reign of Catherine the Great and Potemkin's campaigns in that area, Seabag told us that it wasn't completely clear at that period that there was a very clear Ukrainian sense of national identity that was completely distinct from a Russian identity. But that is not the case for the period we're dealing with now, is it?

No. By the 18th and certainly by the 19th century, which is by the way the era when most European nations created their modern identities, Germany, Italy, by that period, you know, there were Ukrainian poets. There was Ukrainian language that had been codified. There were Ukrainian dictionaries. There were Ukrainian newspapers. There were Ukrainian theaters, all of which had existed in Zaris, Russia, and some of which were actually quite severely repressed. So the idea that the Ukrainian language is somehow a threat to Russian imperial unity is a pretty old one. I mean, it goes back to the middle of the 19th century. And being Ukrainian in the second half of the 19th century even had a

kind of revolutionary edge. I mean, to say, I am Ukrainian was to say I'm against the empire. And it was sort of an anti-establishment thing to say. And so Ukrainians from already the beginning of the 20th century had implied revolutionary interests or revolutionary activity or anti-establishment activity. I mean, there was actually link between Ukrainianness and socialism more broadly drawn, that it was a peasant movement against the wealthy and against the imperial elite and so on. Was there something that was projected by people who were worried about political opposition? Or was it something that came from the grassroots up that people at the beginning of the 20th century thought, I am Ukrainian? No, I think it was a grassroots movement.

It linked together the peasantry in that part of the world. But there were also Ukrainian intellectuals. There were people writing histories of Ukraine and writing poetry in Ukraine. You know, the famous national poet emerges around that time in the second half of the 19th century, Shevchenko. And they begin to talk about themselves as a nation. And as I say, you know, it's by British standards, that's very late. But by European standards, not particularly.

You mentioned poets. How much is this nationalism growing out of a linguistic route? It's very deeply connected to the language. You know, the language, the sense of place, you know, we were always here. You know, we were farming the land while you. conquered us and took over the cities. And I should say also it was anti-Russian empire. It was also anti-Polish in this period because there is a difference between what's now Ukraine and the rest of Russia, namely prior to being part of the Russian Empire, it was Polish. It was part of the Polish

Commonwealth and from the late Middle Ages up through the 18th century. So when Catherine the Great took it, she took it from Poland. Well, a lot of it, not all of it, but quite a bit of it. So the reestablishment or the original establishment of Ukrainianness was against both of those powers, even though Poland wasn't at that time an imperial power. And a formal declaration of challenge, though, that happens in 1917, doesn't it, post the February revolution? And you've got, you know, a Ukrainian nationalist movement. It's gaining momentum. You've got a Mikhailo Rischetsky. I'm sure I've mangled that terribly. But he chairs the central Rada. Tell us what he wants and what he wants. he suddenly says that sets the hairs running.

So Hushchevsky and you all will appreciate this was a historian. And this is sort of one of those moments in history when historians become fantastically important, which of course we all wish that that was true all the time. In our heads it's still. Sadly, it's not. You're saying we're not incredibly important. But he moves into politics. So the central Rada is the sort of body of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists who

declare Ukrainian independence in 1917. And they go through a sort of evolution where first, it's not clear that they want their own nation. And then over a few months, it becomes clear. And there are massive huge demonstrations on the Maidan, which is the central square in the middle of Kiev, which later becomes the place where the demonstrations are held in 2014. And we should say that Rada is not a theatrical school, but a parliament. Yes, no. It means council or, I mean, Parliament is maybe pushing it because it wasn't exactly elected, but it was, you know, it spoke for it for the Ukrainian nation. Unfortunately, what happens immediately after that is that the Bolsheviks invade, occupy Ukraine, and immediately after

that, there's a massive peasant rebellion, the largest ever in European history. What I'm fascinated by, Anne, is the question of how far the Bolsheviks, for all that they're with the people and down with the workers, how far do they actually mirror the same nationalistic and imperial prejudice? as their Tsarist predecessors? Certainly the Bolshevik leadership is exactly every little bit as nationalist as their Zaharis predecessors. I mean, Lenin has some language about Ukraine, again, where he talks about it as South Russia. He talks about it as not really a place. They understand that Ukraine is important because Ukraine produces grain.

And because one of the reasons for the Bolshevik revolution was the lack of grain and bread in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he recognizes very early on that they have to conquer Ukraine for the agricultural land and for the grain. I mean, I'm just, I'm doodling while you're talking. I keep underlining the word that you just said Maidan, which, I mean, that's an Uru word, Medan as well, means exactly the same thing. Square. I mean, I just wonder, would you know what the etymological, historical connection might be?

I don't know if anybody knows that. I think it originally comes from Turkish and Mongol context. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, so interesting. That's so interesting. Anyway, sorry, dog leg in my head, back on track now. Okay.

So the Bolsheviks, you know, have similar attitudes to their Tsar's predecessors. How do they respond to this call for independence, this call for nationhood with the pesky Ukrainians sort of overstepping their mark as I suppose they would have thought? Lenin absolutely opposes it and sends Bolshevik troops in to quash this rebellion. Ethnic Russian Bolsheviks. Yeah, the Russian Bolsheviks say we cannot have an independent Ukraine and they immediately seek to quash the rebellion. I mean, how do they do that?

We heard some really dreadful stories with Seabag about the kind of tactics used by the Cheka. And I just wonder, what was the suppression of this movement like? The Chequer being the predecessor to the KGB. Yes, the Chequer was the early version of the KGB. So, I mean, the stories in Ukraine often involve confiscation of food. And this is important because it's what happens again later on. So these teams of soldiers and activists are sent by the Bolsheviks to go from house to house

and steal the peasant's grain. You know, Ukrainian intellectuals are also slaughtered to whatever extent they can use terror, and they're not as fantastically well organized in 1918 as they get to be later. They apply it. And this, as I said, the tactics are so harsh and create such an enormous reaction that in 1918, you have an enormous chaotic peasant rebellion. of a kind that we've never had before in Europe and might never have again. Prior to that, though, are the Russians going in, as they are now saying, we are liberating Ukraine?

I mean, is that the thing that they say when they march in? Oh, yes, of course. I mean, the Russians are always liberating. When they never invade anybody, they only liberate their fraternal, you know, Bolshevik friends. Yes, no. And, I mean, to be clear, there are Ukrainian communists, and this becomes an issue later on. There are Ukrainians who collaborate with the Bolsheviks. And there are some attempts at different times to set up little mini, there's a kind of mini-Bulshiv

in Kharkiv. You know, for a while, Harkiv becomes the capital because there are more people who are pro-Bulshivic there. You know, the main thing you need to know about Ukraine in 1918, in particular in 1919, is that it fractures into a million pieces. And there are white Russians, there are Bolsheviks, there are different Ukrainian groups. There's kind of Ukrainian guerrilla movement in eastern Ukraine, kind of anarchist movement led by an anarchist called Machno. They fight one another. The polls come in at one point

in the year 1918. I mean, Kiev is occupied something like 18 times by different groups. There's almost total chaos as different people fight for power. So at this point when, you know, you have different groups and they're all vying in this chaotic cauldron, what is the composition of the Donbass? Because we talk about the Donbass a lot these days about sort of being, you know, Russian and wanting to be Russian and what does it look like? Does it look any different to the rest of Ukraine at this time? The slight difference with the Donbass, so the city of Donetsk, which was originally called Heusufka, was a steel town and the mill there was founded by a Mr. Hughes, who was Welsh. Wow. So Donbass was, the difference was it was a newly industrialized area. And so

for that reason, lots of people were moving into it from other places, including people who are Russian speaking. So although the territory was Ukrainian speaking before that, as it becomes industrialized, it becomes more Russian speaking. What happened to Mr. Hughes? I mean, did he stick around during this time? Or where did he go? They go back to the valleys. He eventually went home. There's a connection between him and Gareth Jones. Gareth Jones, who is a Welsh journalist who is later on the one journals who goes into Ukraine during the famine in the sort of peak moment in 1933. Okay, well, come to that. But, okay.

His mother was a nanny for Mr. Hughes or had a relationship with Mr. Hughes. So there's a Welsh link to Ukraine that's very deep. A little known component. No, I love it so much. Don't you just like your heart flares up? It's like so exciting. The Welsh tell up everywhere. Argentina, there's a huge Welsh story there too, isn't it?

Going back to 1919, I guess there is now. pretense of liberation. Now it is, you know, crushing, crushing any revolt. So what develops after that? I mean, do they manage successfully to wipe out all opposition? Does it all go away? No. So what happens is that the Bolsheviks win militarily. Some of the territory is lost. So what had been Western Ukraine becomes part of Poland. So the map, you know, confusingly, the map of Poland is very different in between 1920 when Poland is finally established and the Second World War. And there's actually another, there's a Bolshevik war against Poland as well that follows this. And the Bolsheviks actually lose that war.

But they've won against Ukraine. And they reestablish Soviet power there. But they have a different idea. And they decide that instead of fighting Ukrainian nationalism, they're going to try and co-opt it. And so they create the Ukrainian, what eventually becomes the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. And this idea that the Soviet Union will be an agglomeration of different states, different national states. And this is something that Putin, to this day, blames Lenin for, isn't it? Putin came out with a bizarre theory blaming Lenin for it. Yes, he did. And it's one of his

explanations for why Ukraine isn't a real state. Although, as I say, the reason why the Bolsheviks did it was because having this very bloody war against Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian peasants and Ukrainian anarchists, they wanted to create some kind of Ukrainian state that expressed the difference of the place. And it was it was, it was, it was. It was, it was, It was their concession to keep the peace in that region. I should say there's a role for Stalin in this as well. And in what way? Tell us. So Stalin has the title in this era of he's the commissar of nationalities. And in that capacity, he comes a couple of times to Ukraine. And he personally witnesses some of the chaos and is personally responsible in a couple of places for giving really, you know, harsh orders, you know, murder everybody, take over the town. And he comes convinced that that Ukraine is a real. threat. And there's one particular moment when the white Russian armies see that, you know, Ukraine has created a kind of vacuum and they can march to Moscow. And they start marching through

Ukraine in the direction of Moscow. And that's actually the moment when the Bolshevik revolution came closest to failing. And so for the Bolsheviks, this is a key moment. So they almost lost because there was chaos and weakness in Ukraine. Oh my God. I mean, doesn't this sort of echo of Wagner's coming closer and closer, you know, in a moment of chaos. Just going back to this quadrant of violence, I'm fascinated by just the sheer brutality of this period of time. This is also the period of time where pogroms are taking place. But everyone seems to be at it. I mean, we're talking about, what, some 50,000 Ukrainian Jews are slaughtered at this time? Who is doing the killing? So the killing is done by, again, you're right, almost everybody, by Bolsheviks, by white

armies, by Ukrainians, you know, almost everybody who goes through a village. At that time, there are a lot of criminal bands roving around, and a lot of the pogroms involve, you know, wiping out a village and stealing everything that everybody owns. And you're right, it is a, it's a remarkable moment. And how large is the Jewish presence in Ukraine before all this? Large. So the Polish presence is quite large, especially in cities. And the Jewish presence is quite large. You know, there are Jewish villages all over Ukraine. Separate? Mostly separate, yes. And so all the more vulnerable to anti-Semitism and pogroms? You could just surround the village. All the more vulnerable to anti-Semitism pogroms. One explanation for the very high levels of

violence that take place in Ukraine in the 1930s is that a lot of the people in that period had experienced the pogroms and the violence earlier on. So this really horrific gouging people's eyes out, murdering babies, slaughtering whole villages, people who'd seen that or experienced it or knew about it were then often in positions of power a decade later. So the experience of violence, the memory of violence, you know, is thought to be one of the reasons why people were so cruel later on. Right. But I mean, the history of pogroms doesn't start in 1919, though, does it? I mean, there's a moment in a film I saw where in the modern day, somebody asks a Jewish man, why you sitting with your back to the wall in the restaurant. He goes, so I can see the Cossacks coming.

So there is a history here of violence in this region. Yes, I mean, that's all over Russia. But this is a particularly notable moment. I mean, so much so there, I looked through the records of some of the Jewish charities in New York that were sending money to people after the pogroms or trying to bring people out after the pogroms. So it was a, it was notable enough so that you know, Jews in America were aware of how horrible it was. So, Anne, in this first conception of a Soviet Union where there are normally independent states around Russia, joining fraternally into a wonderful Marxist utopia, how much real independence does Ukraine have, or is it completely under the boot of Moscow from the beginning? So it has a little bit of independence, and there is a phenomenon of something called national communists. So there are, you know, sort of Ukrainian bolsheviks who are pro-Ukrainian, but who are also Bolsheviks. And in this period, the Ukrainian language was allowed to be spoken in Ukraine. Ukrainian schools were created. There was actually a kind of moment of flowering of Ukrainian literature and the arts. There's a Ukrainian contemporary art movement, a Ukrainian constructivism. You can see some of the effects of it. in Kharkiv in particular, I don't know how much of it's been destroyed now. And there is a,

there's a moment when inspired by the new nation, you know, there's a Ukrainian school of design, there's a big national conversation about how we develop the peasantry and how we become a nation. And so it's not fake the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, at least in its initial phase. And there are people who believe at that time that you can be both. You can be a communist and you can be Ukrainian. Yeah, and from the Soviet side, or Soviet Central Control, there is this belief. Now we've got Ukraine, the grain issue will be sorted out. In the 1920s, which is this era in Soviet history when they have something called a new economic policy, and there is a bit of private capitalism allowed, and farmers are allowed to produce the way they used to produce, and there are private distribution

companies. Actually, the Soviet Union begins to recover in the 1920s, and the grain market recovers, and people begin to have food and things get to be a little better. The real turning point comes when Stalin decides that, you know, to push the Soviet Union to the next level, this is after he's effectively taken over control of the government. 1927 is that? Yeah, this is sort of after 1927, 28, he decides to collectivize agriculture. And he has a whole theory about why this is going to be a good idea.

And one of the pieces of the theory is, and this is a very colonial idea. And his idea, and he writes this in a couple of places, is that, okay, the British and the French should develop their countries. They had colonies. You know, they could suck out, you know, the blood of the colonies and the wealth of the colonies and build their nations. And we don't have colonies, but we have a peasantry. And so we can sort of suck out the wealth of the peasantry, and that will help us industrialize and build our industry. And so there is in, in his thinking, this idea, you know, the workers are the superior class, the workers are the avant-garde. This is the revolutionary class. The peasants are backwards. The peasants are holding us

back. We don't need the peasants. And this is where your Kulaks come in. Oh, tell us who the Kulaks. I remember them from my O-levels. Kulak, it's actually just a word that means wealthy peasant. It's not a word that's used much in Ukraine, by the way, before the revolution. But they use it to mean wealthy peasant. And the Kulaks become a kind of class enemy. So the Kulaks like aristocrats or like the old bourgeoisie. are fair game. You know, you can take land from the Kulaks, you can attack the Kulaks, and this becomes a kind of rallying cry in the run-up to the Ukrainian famine. So collectivization has two parts. Part of collectization is called decoulaqization, where they, you know, they arrest the Kulaks, they take them

away, they remove them from their farm, sometimes they send them into the Kulag, sometimes they move them somewhere else. And then the second piece of it is the collectivization of land. How much is that collectivization is something which is Stalin's new initiative and how much is it inherent in Bolshevik thinking already? So there's a little bit of it in the initial what was called war communism. Remember we were talking about 1918 when the Bolsheviks first came to Ukraine. You know, they have this idea of, you know, we're going to take all your land, but it doesn't work. It's a big, it's a failure. And then, of course, they get kicked out by, you know, there's, and there's, we have this warring period. And then, as I said, in 1920, the idea,

the 1920s, there's this idea that we can have a bit of capital. and a bit of, you know, a bit of socialism, and that will be all right. And collectivization is really the, the harshening and the strengthening of the revolution from Stalin's point of view. And his idea, how do we get the revolution to the next level? How do we industrialize the Soviet Union so that it compete, compete with the capitalist world? And his ideas, essentially, we take the peasants' land, we take everything that they have, and we begin to run those things in a more industrialized way. In other words, the peasants will become a kind of rural proletariat. You know, they're going to work on behalf of the state. Both it will have a

cultural effect. It will make them like the workers, right? They won't have their own land. They won't be able to have their own policies. They won't be able to have their own, you know, economic plans. And he also believed it would be economically successful and that it would produce more grain, which it didn't. Well, it didn't. And let's find out what the peasants have to say about this oppression after the break. Welcome back. We are. We are, with the fabulous Anne Applebaum. So, I mean, you detailed, you know, the crushing or the attempted crushing of the spirit of Ukraine, the decoulaquisition of Ukraine. Do the peasants resist at all? Can they resist? Are they in any position to fight back? So the peasants resist and they resist very

hard. And there are different kinds of resistance. There are these famous women's rebellions where groups of village women go and surround the activists who come to their village to collect their land. And they shout at them and they poke them with pitchforks and they, you know, chase them out of the village. There's a bit of that. We've seen that today, haven't we, with these fabulous Ukrainian women shouting at the Russian troops, very bravely. Very much so. And then there's a bit more serious resistance. So there's some armed resistance. There are in a few places where Ukrainians who have guns in their barns that left over from the civil war, including many who may have fought in the civil war, you know, with one of the Ukrainian factions, emerge and try and, you know, physically

defeat the, you know, I should say the people who've come to the villages to carry out collectivization, some of them are Russians, some of them come from Russia, or some of them are Ukrainians who come from cities, but they're always recognized and remembered as outsiders. You know, they came here to collectivize our village. There were also some collaborators inside the villages, so there were always some people who saw an opportunity to work with the activists and this becomes important later on during the famine. But the perception is, again, a colonial one. They are coming from outside. They are telling us what to do. They're taking our land away. They're physically taking our machinery, our horses, our pitchforks, our barns,

and they're taking them and they're making them into a collective estate-owned property. Another famous form of resistance was murdering all of your livestock. Which presumably for a farmer is heartbreaking to do. But it's also, you know, if you're going to take my cows anyway, then I'm going to kill them and I'm going to eat them now. And so there's this moment, even it comes off in some of the Soviet era fiction when, you know, you can smell the farmers making sausages out of their cows. And that's also considered to be a form of resistance. So, I mean, they resist, but it doesn't really work because, you know, the Bolsheviks meet such resistance with extraordinary violence. And so any idea that Stalin had that he would get his hands on the grain bank of Ukraine actually goes wrong.

I mean, you did what we call in this business here on this podcast. You did a Dalrymple. You have talked about the famine way early, but we're there now. No, no, no, no, no. It is a phrase that is now used across the land. So now we are at the point where, you know, this terrible miscalculation is going to affect everybody across the Soviet Union. Tell us about the famine. How does it start? So the first famine begins from collectivization. So there's not enough food.

So farmers who have no, you know, no motivation to plow their land because it's not their land anymore, stop doing it. This is 1929, 1930, 31, right? And there begins to be all over the Soviet Union, I should say. And, you know, all over Russia, there begin to be massive food shortages. And people begin to go hungry. And this is happening everywhere. and people begin to report this story to Stalin, you know, that collectivization is failing. There are letters that are written to Stalin from Bolsheviks who are taking trains around the country and they see starving peasants at the train stations. It is even thought, this is the moment when Stalin's wife kills herself.

Really? And there's some implication that maybe it's because of the terrible disaster of the famine. This has never really proven. This is one of the guesses about what had upset her so much. It is exactly at this moment. So it's the moment of the first one. wave of the famine. And there are all kinds of people begging Stalin. You know, don't let this famine continue. End collectivization. Let the peasants have their land back. You know, change the system because

people are really starving to death. And at this point, you know, the height of the famine, when he's under the most political pressure he's ever been in, when it looks like he's made a horrible mistake, you know, this collectivization was a very bad idea. He, instead of pulling back, he turns the screws. So he decides to use the famine as a way of getting rid of a problem. And the problem is Ukraine. The problem is Ukrainian nationalism. You know, he's going to tighten and increase and make the famine worse in Ukraine. He actually bans the word famine, doesn't he? People are not allowed to use it. The word famine is never used. You're not allowed to say it. So it never appears, for example, in the archives, you know, you have the archives and the records of these Politbuyramians.

meetings, nobody ever talks about the word famine. I mean, that's just a Western news. And of course, anyone living in a democracy is just such an extraordinary thing that you can excise the very word of the thing that everybody is going through. And people go along with it. They excise the word and later on they alter the statistics. So it looks like nobody's died. And there are a series of decrees that are passed in the autumn of 1932 that are focused

on Ukraine. For example, decrees that forbid peasants from moving from the countryside to the city, that close the borders of Ukraine, that lists particular villages and collective farms, puts them on blacklist so that they're not allowed to receive any food or any industrial goods at all. They essentially create a situation where Ukraine is locked down. Teams of activists go into Ukraine to collect food, and they aren't just collecting grain. They're collecting everything. And they go from village to village.

And this is very well documented in memoirs and also in archives. They go from village to village and they take everything. Thankfully, Anne, most of us will never know what a famine feels like, you know, touch wood. But what was it like in Ukraine at the time? You have to picture whole villages where no one is able to leave their house. People are lying on beds. Children are lying on the ground. Children have very swollen stomachs, you know, very thin faces.

There's an activist from Russia, actually one of the people who was sent to Ukraine to help carry out the famine to confiscate people's food, wrote this note. He describes the children as all alike, their heads like heavy kernels, their neck skinny as a storks, every bone movement visible beneath the skin on the arms and legs. The skin itself like yellow gauze stretched over their skeletons. And the faces of these children were old, exhausted, as if they had already lived on the earth for 70 years. What a quote. The scale of it and the extent of it, you know, if you walked through the series of villages, it would be as if you were going through and emptied out, you know, there had been a nuclear holocaust. It was so silent.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Gareth Jones, you know, your Welshman on foot would have seen. There were also, were there reports of cannibalism taking place as well? Yes, Gareth Jones did see this, and he does also describe it. And there are massive reports of cannibalism, some of which are actually in the archive. as well. So there were police reports, you know, police would go to a village and they would hear of somebody who'd captured a neighbor's child and cooked them and eat them. And there would be, you know, these angry reports. And some of those reports went back to Moscow. So people in Moscow had a very good idea of what was happening in Ukraine. It was very, it would have been clear to them. They would have

known what was going on. But they allowed it to happen because part of the point of the famine was to repress the peasantry, to eliminate Ukrainians, and then eventually to replace them. And one of the things that happens after the famine is that people from Russia come into Ukraine and are actually given farms where, you know, where everybody's been wiped out. One of the things that happens in any colonial situation is that you get stereotypes developing about the colonized and you get the rulers looking down on the people that they have colonized. Do you have a stereotype of Ukrainians developing in Russia at this time and so that they can shrug and say that's the kind of, you know, they hear about cannabis and they say that's the kind

a thing those Ukrainians would do. That's what they're like. Absolutely. There's a stereotype of a kind of backwards reactionary peasant, you know, who is trying to stop our revolution. And in the memoirs of activists, and there are a few people who wrote about what it was like to be on one of these grain details, people write about, I thought what we were doing was good because we were eliminating these, you know, these medieval peasants who were barely literate, they couldn't read or right. They knew nothing about our revolution. They were trying to prevent grain from getting to the workers in order to create progress. And so there was a kind of peasant, cunning, thuggish, you know, stereotype, which exists in Russia today. There's a slur, hoho, which means kind of Ukrainian peasant.

And you can hear Russian propagandists using that term now. It implies kind of stupid and backwards. It's a classic sort of colonial stereotype. There's a way in which also Stalin blame the Kulaks for the famine. So, you know, the, you know, I'm going to kill you and it's your fault. You know, he talks about them, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, that they've, you know, that they've brought themselves to this circumstance. So, so the, so the, the famine is portrayed to the rest of, of the Soviet Union as the fault of, you know, of the, of the backward peasantry. And when you're describing, you know, just this elimination of, of, you know, vast swathes of population, what happens to their bodies? I mean,

is this a place of mass graves and mass graves, mass burial. There are mass graves. And if you go to Ukraine now, outside of a lot of Ukrainian villages, you will see a little famine monument. And that will be the monument to the mass grave, to the people who are buried there. One of the reasons why statistics about the famine are hard to come by is that a lot of these were, you know, this wasn't counted. I mean, there was a, there was actually a doctors in Ukraine were told not to write the cause of death on death certificates. you weren't supposed to write that someone died of famine. And then, of course, there were children and people who were poor and illiterate who just weren't counted. When you were writing this history,

Anne, when you were researching this for your red famine book, how did you manage to come up with some sort of statistics? What were you doing? So there were a group of Ukrainian demographers who a few years ago went through the archives and they looked at population records, basically. You know, they didn't look at famine specific. Because there were censuses and there were other reasons why they had to know numbers of people. Remember, this was a centrally planned economy. And they make a kind of guess based on available information in the years before and in years later on about who's living there. This is exactly what historians have to do in India when they're trying to work out how many were killed by the British in 1857, because no one's recording the

numbers, but you do have numbers roughly for before and you do have numbers roughly for after. Right. And I should say the Ukrainian numbers are disputed. I mean, some people think they're much higher. But these are the only, you know, these are the only numbers that we have get us to, but I think it's 3.9 or 4 million people dead. And then if you, if you, and then so there's another figure that counts, babies not born or something like that in which you get four and a half million. But it's a, it's a lot of people. And it's, it's clearly felt and remembered. And there's a, there's a long echo of it in Ukrainian history. And people's grandmothers told them about it and people kept diaries that were hidden and so on. So it remains a something in the back of,

of the Ukrainian imagination in the late 1980s and 1990, when it becomes possible to talk publicly again about the real history of Ukraine, it is the first thing that comes up. Can I just get the one word we haven't used yet, which is the word that's attached to this, is Holodomor. I mean, what does that mean exactly? So Holodomor is a word that was created, you know, immediately after these events, which means terror famine. You know, essentially it means death famine. And is anything like this happening at the same time in Russia, or is this a word that specifically a colonial thing that the Russians are doing to their colony, Ukraine?

You know, there is quite harsh famine in some parts of the vulgar region of Russia. And there is another separate thing that happens in Kazakhstan, which is focused on nomads, you know, which is a similarly colonialist project. But the project in Ukraine is unique for two reasons. One, as I say, because the rules for all of Ukraine are different and they're only to do with the Ukrainian public. And also they are followed immediately, and this is carried out by the same secret policeman who carried out the famine, by a kind of de-Ukrainianization, you know, denationalization of Ukraine. So all these intellectuals and artists and cultural figures who were

flourishing in the early 1920s are arrested, sent to the Gulag, their institutions are taken apart, you know, Ukrainian dictionaries are banned, and there's an attack on Ukrainian national identity that happens at the same time as the famine. Do you have officials in Moscow dictating this, or are there sort of collaborating Ukrainians who are masterminding this from Ukraine itself? So there is a Ukrainian secret police. By this time, it's called the OGPU. There are Ukrainian secret policemen who collaborate, and in some of the villages, there are Ukrainians who collaborate with the activist teams. However, the plans are made in Moscow. So there are, as it were, collaborators with the colonial regime, but it is the colonial regime that is making the, you know, that decides that this is going to happen.

And also, you know, any attempt at trying to downplay what is going on with this famine and how many people are suffering, it's impossible because this is also the time of photography. So there are so many photographs of the time of painfully thin children and people sort of scrabbling around trying to get scraps of food. There's no way of suppressing this, is there? So actually, there are very few photographs. Oh, really? Oh, gosh, maybe I've seen the ones that are... Almost all the ones that you've seen were taken by one person. Whoa, that's mind-blown.

Really? Yes, there was one person who was an Austrian who was working in, you know, in... At that time, there were these concessions. There were foreign companies that were able to work inside the Soviet Union. And there was one Austrian who, all the pictures you've seen, you know, of the people lying on the street and, you know... Children sitting down and falling down from, you know, hunger. Yes, tell me about this. So they're almost all taken by him.

I am so astonished. And they eventually end up in an archive in Vienna, in a kind of Catholic Church archive of the diocese of Vienna, which is where they are now, the original photographs. Okay, may I just say, bloody hell? I never, I never realize that. A lot of the, some photographs that you have seen aren't of the Ukrainian famine. So there's another issue, which is that because there was also some,

hunger in Ukraine in 1920 following the civil war. And it was actually at that time when famously there were these American teams who came in and brought food and so on to Ukraine. This was the one time the Soviet Union allowed them in. And some of the photographs that were alleged to be of 1932, 33 were actually from this earlier period. I mean, I just, I love so much talking to somebody who just completely blows the bandoas off my brain. It is now, though, I mean, and it was a struggle to get it recognized as a genocide. I think, you know, the Ukrainian government defines it as a genocide in 2006. I mean, what did they say in Russia? And when did they accept that actually, looking back, this was a genocide or have they never accepted that? The Russians have never

accepted it. Really? Never. We all know those sort of posters of combined harvesters pouring through the Ukrainian planes. How much of this famine was getting out to the wider world? How much did people because this is the sort of time that Beatrice and Sidney Weber turning up in Moscow, worshipping Charlotte, H.G. Wells, likewise. Are people beginning to realize this? I think Robert Byron visits the Soviet Union at this time and realizes that there's famine going on. Do anyone else? So very little information gets out.

And there's a reason for this. And the reason is that Stalin didn't want the information to get out. And so, for example, there was a press corps in Moscow. at that time. Anybody who lived in Moscow then from outside could only do so with the explicit permission of the Soviet government. And anything that you wrote as a Moscow-based journalist went through censors. So it went out on a telex or whatever telegram system.

And it was seen by the foreign ministry before it was published anywhere. So you can't hide a famine. You can hide a famine. And the Moscow Press Corps did not write about the famine and knew they weren't allowed to write about the famine. And there's one particularly famous story. which is the sort of dean of the Moscow press court at that time, was an American, he's actually British originally, but he was at that time in American journals who worked for the New York Times

called Walter Durante. And Walter Durante had just won the Pulitzer Prize, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about collectivization, which I once went back and read. And they're all about how brilliant and successful and amazing collectivization is. This is very similar to what the webs were writing and so on. And what a brilliant, you know, step forward it was going to be for the Soviet system. And he, Walter Durante knew that the famine had happened. And we know that he knew because there's a, in the British Foreign Office archives, there's a record of, you know, one of the diplomats at the time saying he'd just talked to Mr. Durante, who talked about 10 million people dying, which is actually an exaggeration, but 10 million people dying and millions of people

dying, but he wasn't sharing this information with his readers. For ideological reasons, just because he supported. It was certainly not ideological. actually one of the reasons why Durante was useful to Stalin. Salon gave him a couple of interviews, was that he approached the Soviet history as a sort of pragmatic outsider. I'm not on the left. I'm just evaluating this as a pragmatic person, and I see that this is very successful.

And that was, of course, exactly right. My personal theory about him, which is not provable, is that what happened was that when collectivization failed, and he just won this prize and was lauded for his brilliant articles about it, he couldn't admit to himself that he was so completely wrong. He was unable to say, I made this enormous mistake. And so that's my guess. But he also, he also is the one who then there is one journalist who does go to Ukraine at this time. He is Gareth Jones. We mentioned him a minute ago. Yes. He's this very young Welsh freelance writer. Yeah.

Who uses some excuse, who gets on a train from Moscow to Harjeev, and at some point gets off the train and walks. So he walks through these villages in Ukraine at the absolute height of the famine, so spring of 1933. And he records what he sees in a series of notebooks. And then he comes back to Moscow and then he leaves Moscow and he goes to Berlin and he gives a press conference in which he talks about the famine. After which he's immediately denounced by Walter Durante, who says, this very young man, you know, he's terribly talented, but he doesn't really know, he doesn't see the bigger picture. he doesn't really understand what's going on. You know, it's all wrong.

And Durante, of course, is the star. I mean, he's the most famous journalist in Moscow. And Gareth Jones, nobody's ever heard of him. And so for that moment in history, Durante wins the argument. And now, of course, decades later, there's a reversal. Durante's a great villain. And Gareth Jones is, you know, there's plaques to him in all kinds of places. Yeah, I mean, you've said, and we've said,

what a terrible toll this took on the people of Ukraine. But let's put numbers on it, a place to form. million perished during this time. Every eighth person in the region, one in eight people in the region dying of hunger between this period of time that you're talking about, 1932 and 1934. To compare that, that's the great famine in Bengal in 1772 leaves five million dead. And that's the worst famine in Indian history as far as we know. Yeah. Just very quickly, just after the famine, And again, I'm scratching around into my GCSE Russian. But wasn't there this really ridiculous situation where from this region which had suffered so much,

you get this character called Stakanov, who sort of comes up, who is Stalin's poster boy? And I remember my Russian teacher at the time just saying he was the biggest pain in the ass to the Russian people because of mining. I mean, can you sum up the Stackenov story? So that was a slightly different subject, but it's a useful one. So, yes, Stachanov was a minor who over-fulfilled his quota. So in the Soviet system, workers would have daily quotas, and you had to meet your quota. And he over-fulfilled it. I can't remember by three times or four times.

And he became a great hero, and they put him on posters. I mean, this is a phenomenon of when you have a system where people aren't motivated to work, you don't get paid more, you don't get promoted, you don't own the fruits of your own labor in any way. how do you persuade the peasantry to work? And so they couldn't get people to do it out of any kind of self-interest. And so they had these propaganda campaigns. You know, they would campaign to persuade people that they should work harder for the good of the state and so on.

And that was what the Stachanavite phenomenon was. But is this right after the famine. And this is in Donets. So, I mean, it's in the Ukraine area that's been hit really hard. And this annoying man Stackanov, who keeps over-fulfilling and gets quite addicted to getting his face on posters, he gives rise to something now known as the stucanavite method, which is what Stalin then imposes on everybody, saying, look, Stacanov can do it. What's wrong with you? Yes, I mean, it was more of a propaganda campaign. It was more of a way to get, you know, people to actually work. I should say there, you mentioned Dynesk. There's an interesting phenomenon that happens during the famine, which is that actually the Dynetsk region is one of the least touched by the famines. And that's partly because it's industrial. And so more food goes there. And there are actually peasants who escape their farms and they go to Dignetsk as a way of saving themselves. So Dynetsk suffers a little bit less. And the regions that suffer the most are not

the parts of Ukraine that have historically been prone to famine, which is in the South. But actually, you know, the kind of Kharkiv and Kiev's central Ukraine districts, which were notably the regions that had had been most involved in the civil war. So they were the most politically engaged. That was where the peasantry was the most politicized. It's where there had been the most resistance to the Bolsheviks in 1918 and 1919. And so if you look at the map, I mean, there's almost an overlay between where the anti-Bolshev activity was strongest and where the famine hits hardest. And in 2006, the Ukrainian government formally defined the Holodomor as a genocide. Was it a genocide? By the original terms of the definition of the word genocide, yes. It was not an attempt to wipe out

every single Ukrainian. And as I said, there were some Ukrainian collaborators. But it was an attempt to destroy Ukraine as a nation, to wipe it from the map, which, you know, which is what Putin wants to do now, to eliminate it as a nation, as a people, to suppress the peasantry so that they wouldn't join the national movement, to eliminate the intellectuals and the cultural leaders so that they couldn't lead that national movement. So it was an attempt to eliminate Ukraine, yes, it was. Well, we're leading to a rather important period in history. The Second World War is on our horizon. It's a good point maybe to take a pause. And you are the best, and you really are fascinating. Thank you so very much. But come back for our next episode. I love the fact that you've been studying this for all these decades long before all the rest of us.

And we're all catching up now. We're all catching up really slowly. Look, we're going to have another podcast with The Marvelous, Anne Applebaum, where we talk about Ukraine in the Second World War and we hope to take it right up to date with what's going on now. That will be out on Tuesday, but please stay tuned to your empire feed for a very special announcement that will be coming out on Monday. So until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Derrimple.