The kulaks had long been hated by the revolutionary purists. A memo from Lenin himself came to light recently in an archive at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. It consisted of an order, sent to his faithful Soviet deputies superintending Penza, a region—a volost—four hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

  SEND TO PENZA

  TO COMRADES KURAEV, BOSH, MINKIN AND OTHER PENZA COMMUNISTS

  Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volosts must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle “with the kulaks.” We need to set an example.

  You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers.

  Publish their names.

  Take away all of their grain.

  Execute the hostages—in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

  This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let’s choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks.

  Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this.

  Yours, Lenin

  P.S. Use your toughest people for this.

  Once Sergei Syrtsov’s message, so similar in sentiment to Lenin’s of a decade before—and perhaps as an apposite memorial to him, now dead for four years—began to echo its way down from corridors of the Kremlin and thence down to the Party apparatchiks on the ground in the Ukraine and beyond, so the plan began to gather muscle and energy, and the misery began to unfold. By the summer of 1930, the first signs were beginning to show themselves. Kulaks were being rounded up and sent away—and the confiscations, the grain hoarding, the executions, and the hunger began. These policies would gather strength in 1932 and by early 1933, when Gareth Jones, acting on a tip that strange and terrible things were happening in the Ukraine and in the countryside south of Moscow, made his first visit and managed to tell the world of an unfolding tragedy of quite dreadful proportions.

  In essence, what had happened since the start of the attacks on the kulaks and the true beginnings of the famine proper had borne out Syrtsov’s initial apprehensions: the kulaks and the poorer peasantry had indeed rebelled—both at the first attempts to collectivize their farms, and also at the huge amounts of grain that the farmers were being ordered to send out of the region, to feed the immense and growing armies of the newly industrializing country. The kulaks didn’t want to give up their very modest but somewhat secure lifestyles, and the region as a whole didn’t want to let the food it produced for its own consumption be spirited away to distant factories. By all means, the kulaks said to the Party commissars, take the surplus, as had always been the case; but leave enough for the locals to be able to eat.

  At first the collectivization machine worked fairly effectively, if brutally. Local Party chiefs saw to it that landowners, however puny their holdings, were turfed off their properties, their farm equipment was confiscated, fences were torn down, and tractors and harvesters were moved to gigantic newly built garages. “All boundary lines separating the land allotments,” came the order from Moscow, “are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single landmass.” The giant new kolkhozes—it was a new word, coined specifically to denote a collective farm—began to sprout all through the spreading reaches of the nation’s grain-producing regions; but the agrogoroda—another newfangled word meant to signify the enormous agricultural cities where the displaced peasants would be housed—never did take hold, and such new population centers as were built were known, less pretentiously, simply as kolkhoz settlements

  That was how it was all supposed to happen—and indeed, for a short while, the success rate was prodigious: the number of families absorbed into collectivized farms reached eleven million in the first two months of 1930. Stalin himself started to fret that the rate of change was too fast for the peasantry: famously, he wrote an essay in March 1930 for Pravda saying that he was “dizzy with success” and that maybe some of his Party shock troops and those of the twenty-five thousand hastily trained proselytizers sent down from the capital might ease off for a while, so as not to unduly annoy the farming community.

  He was wasting his breath. The locals had already become angry, rebellious even. By the end of 1930, the success and extent of a simmering mutiny had wholly infuriated the Moscow leadership, and despite his initial concerns, Stalin most especially. The much vaunted Five Year Plan was seeming to sputter, again. The Politburo’s public relations machine, normally so skilled at producing the kind of propaganda that Walter Duranty would be happy to write for his audience back in New York, was beginning to sense that they were losing control of the story. Factory workers needed to eat. Socialist principles needed to be firmly applied to the kulaks’ smallholdings. The twenty million small family farms that existed in the Soviet Union in 1929 now needed to be converted, vigorously, into some two hundred thousand kolkhozes—a feat of territorial prestidigitation that could be achieved only through coercion, threats, or brute force. Moscow’s orders now needed to be obeyed. And so Moscow felt obliged to act, decisively, to bring the wavering peasantry into line.

  This it started to do in the summer of 1932. Communist agents fanned out into the fields, demanding disciplined acceptance of the New Economic Policy (as the Five Year Plan was officially called), that kulaks give up their holdings forthwith and obey instructions with immediate effect, such that all crops produced in the new farms henceforward be sent to the state warehouses, and that not one single ear of grain be kept behind for the peasants’ own use. They might grow the food. But they had no right to use it, either to feed themselves or to nourish their families. The land was no longer theirs but belonged unequivocally to the state. Anyone disagreeing with such precepts would be arrested, deported to the gulags, or shot on the spot. And if there was suffering caused by this new policy, it was by no means the fault of the new policies. Rather, to quote Stalin’s words, it had come about because “the old government, the landlords and capitalists, have left us a heritage of such browbeaten peoples . . . these peoples were doomed to incredible suffering.”

  The suffering began swiftly. The trials, the shootings, the miseries of the de-kulakization policy, the attacks on churches (which were so central to village life), the deportations, the summary executions—all these were horrific enough. But what remains most haunting was the growing hunger of a people who were being completely denied their food, and who spent their dying winter days searching frantically for something to feed their crying children, let alone themselves. But there was nothing: warehouses filled with grain destined for the factories were guarded by lantern-jawed militiamen, and anyone caught stealing grain or hoarding even the slightest amount was exposed for sabotage or counterrevolutionary activity and hauled off, most probably to be shot. The villagers were silent, cowed, and starving.

  The best account of the Holodomor remains The Harvest of Sorrow, written in 1986—when, admittedly, the archives had not been as fully opened as more recently—by the British historian Robert Conquest. He quotes a Ukrainian villager’s description of the searches for hidden food, carried out by activist brigades, much like the Red Guards of Mao’s China. These brigades, writes Conquest,

  consisted of the following persons: one member from the presidium of the village soviet, or simply any member for the village soviet; two or three Komsomols; one Communist; and the local schoolteacher. Sometimes the head or another member from the cooperative administration was included, and, during summer vacations, several students.

  Every brigade had a so-called specialist for searching out grain. He was equipped with a long iron crowbar with which he probed for hidden grain.

  A slow and painful death from hunger was the fate for millions of Ukrainians during the Holodomor, a famine that is still widely regarded as a genocide specifically ordered by Stalin.

  The brigade went from house to house. At first they entered homes and asked, “How much grain have you got for the government?” “I haven’t any. If you don’t believe me search for yourselves” was the usual laconic answer.

  And so the “search” began. They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and cellar. Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary and straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crowbar. In 1931 there were still a few instances of hidden grain being discovered, usually about 100 pounds, sometimes 200. In 1932 however, there was none. The most that could be found was about ten or twenty pounds kept for chicken feed. Even this “surplus” was taken away.

  But by 1932 there was nothing left to find, no surplus, nothing to hide—and so in their thousands, people began to starve. Limbs withered. Stomachs began to swell with kwashiorkor. Heads began to loll. People staggered and fell by the roadside, dying in full view even as others limped painfully by. Even the very appearance of imminent starvation caused the brigades to take interest, not pity—the assumption being that if you were starving but alive you must have a stash of illegal food somewhere. One brigade member “after searching the house of one peasant who had failed to swell up finally found a small bag of flour mixed with ground bark and leaves, which he then poured into the village pond.”

  It is important to remember that the central plank of Stalin’s draconian policy was the collectivization of the land—a policy that was at first voluntary but had later to be enforced because of the vehement opposition of the kulaks. That being said, it is impossible to minimize the tragedy that resulted—whether it was the state-directed annihilation of the kulak class, the catastrophic failure of the policy itself, or the failure of Soviet communism as a whole, fifty years later in the nation’s history. Nor is it possible to minimize the nature of the starvation, as another activist, tortured by remorse and quoted by Robert Conquest, recalled:

  With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who could not see the forest for the trees.

  In the terrible spring of 1933, I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue but still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov. I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who sent me out to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade their barely-walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to fulfil the Bolshevik sowing plan in shock worker style.

  Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.

  The cruelest regulation that Stalin enacted and saw brutally enforced has come to be known as “the law of five ears of wheat.” It was enacted in August 1932, and it held that any gleaning—any removal of leftover grain from collective-farm fields that had been harvested—was henceforward punishable by imprisonment for at least ten years, or by death, with executions performed on the spot. Even children caught picking leftover ears of grain would be taken away, and either deported or shot. Those Ukrainians left behind were terrified; those who survived, and who live today, remain suffused with anger and bitterness toward the Russians.

  I spent some weeks in the searing summer of 2019 traveling down the Dnieper River valley, south of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, into a region as much the breadbasket of southeastern Europe as Kansas and Nebraska are the granaries of the United States, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba of Canada. The landscape is rolling and lush and very, very fertile. High hedges or lines of tall poplars wall off fields that in the high summer are butter yellow with acres of wheat and or deep green with corn, brilliant yellow with rapeseed, or paler green with soybeans or broccoli, potatoes, barley, beet, or sunflowers. Some eight million acres of Ukraine’s land is rich with thick, black soil, soil so obviously fertile that it almost looks good enough to eat without any tiresome need to pass vegetables through it. The endless fields stretch to the horizon—more human-scale here than in the American prairies, since there are hills and streams and patches of forest rich with wild boar, pigeons, and partridges. The farmers here are as happy a breed as farmers are ever likely to be, proud of their land, thankful for the riches that are the bounty of this very special portion of the Earth.

  And they give their thanks in the domed Orthodox churches that can be seen in every village across the countryside, and in which the villagers pray with enthusiasm each Sunday, and often more frequently than that. They prayed and gave thanks in churches in all the villages that I visited: small places like Rosava and Pustovity, and in larger towns like Mironovka and Vladyslavka. And they paused outside too, to spend moments in the cemeteries, where the victims of the Holodomor are buried. Each memorial has, fashioned from a piece of bent iron wire, a gathering of ears of wheat tied with an iron ribbon, in commemoration. Nowadays the graves of the Holodomor dead have been joined by those, now neatly trimmed, of young soldiers from the east of the country, who have been fighting in vain against the Russian invasion, and whose parents or brothers and sisters and wives pray that one day the Russians will go away, will leave Crimea, will leave Ukraine in the kind of peace these people seem never to have enjoyed, and which most believe they never will.

  For the grim truth is that Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine’s landscape are near eternal, and are rooted in history, language, religion, and emotional connections, all of which are as powerfully magnetic as they are difficult either to define or to quantify. As long ago as the ninth century, the Kievian Rus was the spiritual center of what would become the Russian empire, the birthplace of the Orthodox church, the location of the vast wealth of the chernozem soils whose crops were destined to feed the vast neighbor nation to the north. The evils that Stalin perpetrated against the Ukrainian people will never be forgotten from the Belarus border to the Black Sea, from the Carpathians to the Urals, and the Ukrainians retain an anger and a bitterness that no emollient words from Moscow will ever manage to soothe. This land is their land, all Ukrainians firmly and ineluctably believe.

  But Russia needs the bounty of this land too, or firmly believes that it does—and Russia is so vast and so needy, and its people so reliant on the gifts with which Ukraine’s geography and geology have for so long bestowed upon them, so they believe, that they will probably never relax their claims. And this will be so, no matter how many Ukrainians turn up in church each Sunday and bow their heads in reverence before the wire-framed ears of wheat in the country churchyards, and no matter how long, chiseled into the great black marble slabs in the immense new Kyiv Holodomor Museum, are the meticulously maintained lists of the names of the millions who died on these lands, victims of one of the twentieth century’s most appalling genocides.

  That the land itself survives, and is now so fertile, is a savage irony, considering how many millions who once lived on it and farmed it with such evident and placid contentment died so horribly. They survive today only in the popular memory, their names incised onto marble memorials, or perhaps mentioned in now-yellowing newspaper articles written by heroic young journalists like Gareth Jones, that teacher’s son from the south of Wales, who told his stories when he was not yet thirty years old. And with the victims now buried in the rich and fertile black soil of the land on which they starved.

  4

  Concentration and Confiscation

  HERE WE ADMIT A WRONG

  —CARVED INTO THE SANDSTONE OF THE U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE MEMORIAL TO JAPANESE-AMERICAN PATRIOTISM, WASHINGTON, D.C., FROM A FORMAL APOLOGY BY PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN (1988)

  It was a Monday morning in late April 1944, and an unseasonably chilly and dust-laden wind was howling down the Idaho plains from the Sawtooth Mountains. It was then, so far as we can reconstruct, that a thirty-one-year-old former strawberry farmer named Akira Aramaki was shaken awake in his prison barracks bed by a party of soldiers. Somewhat unusually, the men were smiling. They didn’t say why, but they told him to walk, and preferably at the double, across to the camp office—fully half a mile away, the camp being so large and spread out—to collect an envelope.

  Mr. Aramaki suspected what was coming. He had been waiting for this moment for the past month, ever since rumors began to swirl in the late winter, when he and the few thousand other Americans of Japanese origin who were cloistered in the huts around him had been told that some of them no longer deemed “a threat to national security” were going to be freed from their two years of imprisonment in this vast concentration camp complex known as Minidoka. There were nine other such camps spread out across the western states, and some 120,000 others like Aramaki, his wife, and their newborn son were also about to be given their long delayed freedom. So he walked steadily, but then, with gathering excitement, he started to trot and finally to run between the barrack blocks up to the front door of the administration building. A cluster of others—some of whom he knew; but with 8000 prisoners in the camp, he was only on nodding terms with most—were already there, lined up waiting to be called.