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Why do we suffer so much

By Margaret Siriol Colley

Why do we suffer so much? Winter is over. Very heavy restrictions were made in December, and this resulted in us becoming helpless and destitute. December, January, February, for three whole months we were tortured, and now we have to starve to death if no one helps us. Bread was taken from us, grain, everything that we call corn; different types of seeds, vegetables, everything was collected and taken away by the State. All the potatoes, meat, eggs and dairy products. We have nothing! Oh Lord, where can we find help, who will pity us? Oh dear uncle, please find help for us unhappy people. Oh, pity us. Oh brothers and sisters, may the Lord put this letter into your hands. Please put your hands together to save us from starvation. Oh, help, help, please, please! Soon I will no longer exist, soon the flood of death will wash over me, I will die soon, Oh Word (of the Lord)! Soon I will be carried away! Oh uncle, please, please send us alms, even just a little piece. Oh, if only I had some corn bread, I would always be thankful and would praise the Lord for ever. In eternity we will take your hands and thank you.[i]

So wrote one German peasant woman from the North Caucasus.  Just one poor soul looking forward to death in the Great Famine of 1932 -1933. Merely a statistic amongst the 10 million persons who died in Ukraine and the Caucasus. The Holodomor in Ukraine was caused by the complete removal of all food on an ethnically targetted basis. Kuban, the North Caucasus was also ethnically Ukrainian. Even that master exponent of duplicity, Walter Duranty accounted for five million deaths in Ukraine, two million in the Caucasus and three million in Russia.[ii]

The Great Famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, has become a forgotten genocide-famine and obliterated in the annals of history. Political events of the spring 1933 took precedence. The world was in the depths of the Depression.  Roosevelt had just been inaugurated, as President of the U.S.A. and America, despite its isolationism, desired diplomatic recognition by the U.S.S.R. In March Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and Adolph Hitler, was newly voted the Chancellor of Germany.  Britain feared the clouds of war that were gathering and the British government was following a policy of appeasement.

In the years following Lenin’s death his New Economic Policy improved the prosperity of the peasant farmer by creating a mixed economy, combining the state control of large-scale industry with a limited measure of private enterprise. The industrious farmer was thus able to sell his surplus food on the open market. But from 1926 on the government was demanding more grain and agricultural products from them to pay for the manufactured commodities.

In 1928 Stalin introduced his initial Five-Year Plan of Industrialisation and Collectivisation. He wished to create the rapid mechanization of the Soviet Union and thus major focus was placed on the development of heavy industry. Foreign advisers were brought in to achieve his aim. Resources were also needed to build up a formidable army on the borders with Manchukuo as the Soviet Union feared an invasion by the Japanese from the recently established Manchukuo with their desire to strike north into Siberia and expand territorially.

 Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms - kolkhozy.  The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. In Soviet Ukraine this policy had a dramatic effect on the Ukrainian ethnic population and its culture as 86% of the population lived in rural settings.  The success of the Five-Year Plan depended on the export of goods mainly wheat from the breadbasket areas of the U.S.S.R. Due to the global slump of the Depression the Soviet Union was finding it difficult to export her wheat, timber and other goods to an ever- diminishing market with a decreasing financial return to pay for imports of machinery for her newly-founded industries and for armaments to combat an anticipated attack by the Japanese. Despite starvation in the Soviet Union, the ruthless Stalin continued to sell grain on the open market endeavouring to convince the outside world that peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were not suffering nor dying of starvation. 

Late in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Govern­ment issued a decree setting forth the agricultural yield which it relied on receiving in 1933 from each district. The new tax, by which the collective farms would pay so much grain (usually about 2 and half centners) per hectare and be free to sell, the rest on the open market. But the peasants were sceptical about this expecting the yield to be so small that the government would take all away being leaving less than the tax.

On January 13th, 1933, it was announced that political workers would be sent to strengthen the collective farm organizations. Many thousands of town workers, called the Political Department were sent into the villages. “Their task was to crush all opposition and organize work in the collective farms. They are ruthless men who may be relied upon to do their task with violence. While they may succeed in terrorizing the peasants, it is difficult to see how they can succeed in increasing the harvest.”

Stalin, with his endeavour to carry out his plan of Collectivisation, brought about starvation of unbelievable severity. Despite the efforts of a few brave journalists the memory of the tragic deaths of millions of peasants in the U.S.S.R fell on fallow ground and soon was wiped out of history. 

In the autumn of 1932 news was filtering into London of the famine conditions in the Soviet Union and that the country was facing the worst crisis since 1921. In September 1932 Jones wrote to the entrepreneur, Ivy Lee in Wall Street, New York: “The harvest is a failure and millions will be suffering from starvation.  There is at the present moment famine in Ukraine.”[iii]  During the summer of 1932, twenty socialist journalists from Britain were escorted on a month’s tour of the Soviet Union and Ukraine and a number were shocked at the situation. One was a Professor Jules Menken who told Jones there was already famine in Ukraine. In October the Professor wrote three articles for The Economist. He and the editor of the journal, Sir Walter Layton were ‘laid on the mat’ by the Soviet Ambassador, possibly Maisky because they painted too black a picture of situation.[iv] In November Jones lunched with the Minister of Agriculture, Walter Eliot and others. In particular he translated passages for one guest, Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman.[v] Martin was writing the text for Low’s Russian Sketch Book. The contents in this book are strangely contradictory, Martin being complementary about the régime but a character, Macpherson, possibly a fictitious character, was quite derogatory.

Imbued with ideas of a Communist utopia, the journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge left Britain in July 1932 expecting to settle in the U.S.S.R. with his wife, but he was already disillusioned by September. His first article about the failure of the régime in the Soviet Union was published in January 13, 1933 entitled ‘Russia’s Plan, Virtual Breakdown of Agriculture, Officials Shot and Failure of Food Supply’.[vi]

Later in March in further articles in the Manchester Guardian Muggeridge wrote about having asked one man about the crisis: “He looked round anxiously to see that no soldiers were about. ‘We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away,’ he said and hurried on. This was what I heard again and again and again. ‘We have nothing. They have taken everything away.’ … It was also true that everything had been taken away. The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them - and the peasants know this quite well - is still being exported to foreign countries.[vii] …

“To say that there is famine in some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth; there is not only famine but - in the case of the North Caucasus at least - a state of war, a military occupation. In both the Ukraine and the North Caucasus the grain collection has been carried out with such thoroughness and brutality that the peasants are now quite without bread.”[viii]

In March 1933 Gareth Jones, a freelance journalist and former aide to Lloyd George, travelled to Ukraine - his third trip, intent on seeing the situation for himself.  Despite Moscow having forbidden journalists to travel there Jones, a fluent speaker of Russian made an unescorted visit. He reported what he had seen there, "I walked alone through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread; we are dying.'" Jones estimated that a million people had perished in Kazakhstan out of five since 1930, and now in Ukraine millions more were threatened.

On March 29^th Jones gave a press release in Berlin and this was published in the world wide press, including in the New York Evening Post:

“Russia today is in the grip of famine, which is proving as disastrous as the catastrophe of 1921, when millions died. …In a train [en route to Ukraine] a Communist denied to me that there was a famine.  I flung into the spittoon a crust of bread I had been eating from my own supply.  The peasant, my fellow passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it.  I threw orange peel into the peasant again grabbed and devoured it.  The Communist subsided. … There is insufficient seed.  Many of the peasants are too weak to work the land.  The new taxation policy which promised to take only a fixed amount of grain from the peasants will fail to encourage production because the peasants refuse to trust the Government.

“In short, concluded Mr. Jones, the Government’s policy of collectivisation and the peasants’ resistance to it had brought Russia to the worst catastrophe since the famine of 1921 swept away the population of entire districts.  Coupled with this, the prime reason for the breakdown was the lack of skilled labour and the collapse of transport and finance.[ix]

The United Press Moscow correspondent, Eugene Lyons, was to call this the first reliable press report in the English-speaking world. Jones was the first journalist to write under his own name.

In August The Daily Telegraph obtained a report by Otto Schiller who had been Military attaché in Moscow.  It was he who told Jones of the tremendous death rate in Caucasus. The account he wrote in May was presumably for the German Embassy and was not for official publication. The observations of Otto Schiller make Muggeridge’s and Jones’s articles appear mild in comparison.  Though his observations apply to Kuban and North Caucasus, the treatment of the peasants in Ukraine cannot have been dissimilar. These are a few excerpts from his writing:[x]

The present situation in the Northern Caucasus may be summed up as follows:  “In some villages the population is almost extinct; in others about half the population have died out. Finally, there are still villages in which death from famine is not so frequent, but famine in some degree reigns everywhere in the regions that I have visited.

“In the villages I visited the number of deaths varied between twenty and thirty a day.  The people still alive are in the last stages of enfeeblement through semi-starvation, and also through eating such unnatural food as grass, roots, charred bones, and dead horses.

“Large Cossack settlements in the Kuban Province are at present almost uninhabited. … Resigned despair and complete apathy characterize the people, rather, than wrath and bitterness. 

“A distinctive feature of this famine is that the authorities have not acknowledged, and do not now acknowledge, that famine exists. … The Soviet Government itself does nothing.  I was told of many cases of sufferers, swollen from famine, who implored help from the village soviets.  They were told that they should eat the bread which they had hidden away, and that no famine at all existed.  In fact, the authorities explain the present situation by insisting that there is no lack of grain that the peasants hide it, and it is only a matter of finding it.”

Schiller considered: “A million people could be fed though poorly, upon 100,000 tons of grain from the beginning of the year until the end of July - a million saved from death by starvation. The Soviet Government exported 4,500,000 tons of grain from last year’s crop. …But since the Government so resolutely refrains from saving the famished population from death we may assume, firstly, that the Government grossly miscalculates last year’s crop and the amount of gram left in the villages; and secondly, that it feels its position sufficiently strong to allow it to ignore the present calamitous condition of the country.  It may very well be that the extermination of the Cossack population was advantageous and desirable to the Soviet Government.”

It was not until February 1934 that the newspaper Answers published Whiting Williams two horrific articles; described as “an expert investigator, who travelled across Russian Ukraine, it gave a vivid word picture of the famine which has killed off millions of people.”[xi]

“During the last twelve months, in one European country, millions of people have died of starvation.  They are still dying like flies today.  Dying in a land which was formerly one of the richest of all the peasant states, after what has been officially described as the biggest wheat crop for fifty years.

“But I am not reporting merely what I have heard.  Once I was off the beaten track which the tourists follow I saw with my own eyes the victims of famine.  Men and women who were literally dying of hunger in the gutter.

 “Something like 18,000 children were abandoned in this manner – abandoned because that was the only way in which their parents could help them - in Kharkov alone. These children were not sent to homes.  Bread was too scarce.  They were put into railway wagons and unloaded out in the open country – too far out for it to be possible to walk back to town. And once, at least, three wagons filled with youngsters were shunted into a siding and forgotten for three days. When, at the end of that time, someone found them, not one of the children remained alive.

“In all Russia, how many victims - how many millions of victims - has the famine already claimed?  I can’t pretend to say.  There are no statistics.  Officially, no one dies of hunger in the land of the Soviets.  The doctors are Government employees, and they dare not report any death as caused by starvation.  “Weak heart” or exposure” is the favourite formula.

“I have told in these articles what I have seen and heard in Russia. I have given you the explanations that have been given to me. What is not explained - what I believe the civilised world will say cannot be explained - is why no effort has been made to relieve the famine-stricken millions; why the Soviet Government has kept all news of their plight from a world whose willingness to help no one can doubt. 

“This, indeed, may be the solution of the agrarian crisis in Russia; that the balance between production and consumption may be restored, not by increasing production, but by the annihilation of millions of people who cannot be fed by ruined agriculture.”

Andrew Cairns, the Canadian agricultural specialist wrote some of the best, most comprehensive and chilling accounts of the Genocide-Famine following his tours of the U.S.S.R. in 1930 and in the spring and summer of 1932.  But for his and Schiller’s record of the situation the whole picture of the famine would be very incomplete. For 50 years his extensive reports and briefer telegrams and communications lay dormant.  These vividly exposed the tragedy of the starvation and death of peasants in the black earth district, the fertile wheat growing area of the Soviet Union and painted a terrible portrait of the Ukrainians suffering which Stalin had callously brought on in his endeavour to achieve his Five–Year Plan. 

Allan Monkhouse, one of Metrovik engineers arrested in March 1933 in his memoirs wrote:

Throughout 1931 the merciless war on the kulaks and the wealthy peasants was carried on. “The kulaks must be liquidated as a class,” was again the cry of every Party leader from Stalin downwards. ... The fate of these unfortunate peasants was heart-rending to witness. Every railway junction lying between the agricultural districts and the timber forests of the north was crowded with peasants who had been expelled from their homes. … Whatever the conditions are in the timber camps, the principle of wrenching hard-working peasants from their homes, confiscating their property, and compelling them to labour in the Far North under appalling conditions, cannot be reconciled with the declarations which spokesmen of the Soviet Union have not infrequently made when pleading the case of the Soviet before the outside world. More often than not the children of these unfortunate peasants became separated from their parents, and the difficulties which the Soviet Government had in dealing with the “wild children” of the civil-war period have again pre­sented themselves. In 1932, homeless children—the result of the Soviet Government’s policy of liquida­ting the kulaks and wealthy peasants—again appeared on the streets of Moscow.[xii]

In 1930, “Stalin recently announced in the paper that for Russia to regain economic equilibrium 50% must be starved to death.”[xiii]  The dictator, to suppress his adversaries in Ukraine and Kuban and to achieve his aims, brought about “a state of war, a military occupation”. Duranty wrote with full knowledge of the real situation, “the mechanisation and collectivisation of Russian agriculture have come to stay and the Kremlin has won its battle”.[xiv]

*****

Was the clue to Stalin’s ruthlessness to be found in the traditions of the Kremlin, which had no respect for the life or rights of any human individual?   Stalin as the ‘Red Czar’ was merely following the footsteps of his predecessors in this Russian callousness to carry out his Five-Year Plan.

Following the October Revolution Lenin placed Mykola Skrypnik in position of power in Ukraine and Ukrainian Nationalism was encouraged by him. He replaced Oleksander Shums’ki as Commissar for Education 1925.  Ukraine became an autonomous, though remained a Bolshevik country. Skrypnik wished to promote Ukrainianization, the Ukrainian language and, Ukrainian ‘national’ interests. Schools and Universities were taught in the Ukrainian language and by 1931 nearly 90 % of the newspapers published in their native tongue.

However Stalin had become obsessed for the total control in Ukraine, and the elimination of all whom he perceived as disloyal. In January 1933 “Stalin had sent his henchman, Pavel Postyshev to replace Skrypnik who was accused of Ukrainianisation. “Postvshev was in fact given full free reign to root out from the party all persons suspected of ‘nationalist deviation.’ The object was to crush whatever opposition to Stalin still existed within the Ukrainian party.”[xv]

 “During the first year of Postyshev’s presence in Ukraine, nearly 100,000 were purged.”[xvi] The Soviet authorities liquidated the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the clergy and the ruling politicians and their place filled by Stalin’s faithful. Skrypnik committed “suicide” in the July 1933.

It was to become the first of Stalin’s purges.  The dictator feared Ukraine becoming an independent state and starvation was the weapon by which he intended to prevent this occurring. Kerensky[xvii] was to explain it thus. “Stalin"  and his assistants know the real situation in Russia, and they want, by a terrible increase of terror, to frighten the growing opposition within the party.” 

According to Monkhouse, President Kalinin was no less considerate of the peasants: “Last autumn, [1932] sixteen villages in the Ukraine failed to produce the grain required from them, and their failure was attributed by the authorities to de­liberate sabotage. A decree was published in the local papers, announcing that all grain hoarded in the offending villages was to be confiscated, the co-operative stores in the villages were to be closed, and no State distributing authority was to arrange to send food to them—in other sixteen villages were condemned to starve or secretly flee from their homes with difficulty.[xviii] Speaking at Nijni Novgorod in June 1933, Kalinin himself is reported as having said: ‘There are collective farms in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus where the supply of bread does not suffice, or suffices with difficulty.’ He interpreted as a righteous judgment upon the collective farms where work had not proceeded energetically.”[xix]

Evangelical Charity called 'Brüder in Not' (Brothers in Need) was founded by Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, and was administered by Dr. Ewald Ammende. Despite the fact that Russian Government denied that starvation existed it received numerous distressing letters from Germans in the U.S.S.R. One entitled “Exigency in the Ukraine“ was a report by a special correspondent from Kharkiv [Ukraine] dated 18^th May 1933: 

“The famine is spreading and has already surpassed the famine of 1921/1922. Dangerous substitute substances and dead cattle are eaten, and there have even been authentic reports of cannibalism. In some villages there are no cattle, not even poultry, cats or dogs. Rows of houses stand empty, as whole families have died out. The dead are no longer buried. The population is too weak to work, the spring sowing has not been completed. Only a tenth of the workload has been achieved, with meagre results. The prospect for the next harvest is bad, due to the poor cultivation and lack of seed, even though the weather has been good. The harvest in many regions is endangered, as one is in doubt whether there will be enough able bodied people to work in the autumn. The peasants have already been informed about how much grain and other fruits from this years' harvest they have to give to the state. A relief action by the authorities, to help the most endangered regions, has not been put into action. ...

“The famine has become very noticable in the city, even though the authorities have tried their best to stop the migration from the country. Starving people are everywhere, many dying in the streets. The authorities seem only to help the children, but even here they are not able to cope. The doorways of many collecting points are blocked with corpses. Gangs of youths terrorise the citizens by snatching valubles off people in the markets and on trams, pulling off earrings, injuring and even poisoning their victims. Bystanders and the police are not able to intervene, as they are afraid of  revenge.” 

Within the country, the O.G.P.U., the Soviet Secret Police, spread fear amongst the inhabitants. Terror was manifest in the Soviet Union, and would increase in the succeeding years. No one was sure who might be a member – who might inform on him or her and report of being a counter revolutionary.  Shock troops were sent to the collectives.  The slightest failure of duties and a factory worker would be sacked, his bread card taken away and left to starve.

On March 12, 1933 the O.G.P.U. chief, M. Menzhinsky charged thirty-five prominent workers in the Commissariat of Agriculture and in the Commissariat of State Farms, including the Vice-Commissar of Agriculture, and Mr. Wolff, an agricultural of complicity and sabotage in a counter-revolutionary plot in connection with agrarian difficulties.  Arrested and tried in court the 35 were shot without any plea of mitigation “The sentences were carried into execution.” 22 others were sentenced to ten years’ im­prisonment, and 18 to eight years, They were accused or forced accept the guilt, of smashing tractors, of burning tractor stations and flax factories, of stealing grain reserves, of disorganising the sowing campaign and of destroying cattle. "Pravda " (March 5) stated that ‘the activities of the arrested men had as their aim the ruining of agriculture and the creation of famine in the country.”[xx]

Great effort was made by Stalin to divert attention from the famine and find blame elsewhere. The most infamous act by the O.G.P.U. was on March 12, 1933, when six British engineers were arrested. They were detained in the dreaded Lubyanka, the head quarters of the secret police.  The men, employees of Metropolitan-Vickers, were accused of ‘wilfully wrecking the Soviet electrical industry and of having plotted against the Soviet Government, of military espionage, and bribery’. One of the six was Allan Monkhouse who, though released shortly afterwards was detained for interrogation for a continuous 19 hours. Soviet citizens were also arrested as well as Madame Kutuzova. The latter was Monkhouse’s private Secretary and cross-examined by the secret police forcing her to give evidence against him.  For the next month until after the trial, this event was to take precedence over any news of an on-going famine.   Large sections of the British newspapers were filled with reports of their detention.  For example, The Times in their ‘Parliamentary Procedures’ and ‘Overseas News’ sections, devoted whole columns entirely to the arrest and trial, but never made a single mention to the disastrous agricultural conditions in the U.S.S.R. during this crisis. By July 1933 the last of these British engineers were released.

Jones, a loose cannon and freelance, was known to be returning to the Berlin to expose the famine following his tramp through Ukraine and gave his Press release of March 29th 1933. “Famine grips Russia: Millions Dying, Idle on Rise,” The article was published in the New York Evening Post in full by H.R. Knickerbocker and also in many British newspapers including the Manchester Guardian, the London Evening Standard, the Yorkshire Post and even the Nottingham Guardian.

An endeavour was made to forestall Jones and decry his exposure of the famine by Walter Duranty, a U.S. correspondent, and 1932 Pulitzer Prize Winner. Two days later, March 31^st 1933 in the New York Times. Duranty who had been long in Soviet good graces, denied there was famine and promptly presented a rebuttal, but it was a rebuttal of classic Orwellian ‘doublespeak’. He wrote: “There is no actual starvation or death from starvation, but there is widespread is mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. . . .”

The New York Times on May 13^th, 1933 printed a reply from ‘Mr. Jones’ to Walter Duranty’s article of March 31^st in which Jones, in a letter to the newspaper said he stood by his statement that the Soviet Union was suffering from a severe famine.  The Soviet censors had turned the journalists into masters of euphemism and understatement and hence they gave “famine” the polite name of “food shortage” and “starving to death” was softened to read as “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.

Countering Walter Duranty’s rebuttal in the New York Times, Gareth Jones congratulated the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the U. S. S. R..  “Moscow is not Russia, and the sight of well-fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.”

The Moscow correspondent, Eugene Lyons in his book Assignment in Utopia[xxi], published in 1937 described how Gareth Jones’ portrayal of the shocking situation in Soviet Russia and Ukraine was publicly denied by the Moscow Foreign Correspondents.

Persuaded by the head censor in the Bolshevik News Agency, Comrade Umansky, the correspondents were placed in position where they more or less had to condemn Gareth Jones as a liar. Had they not complied the journalists would not have been permitted to report on the trial and despite urgent queries from their home offices on the subject they went along with the Soviet Press Spokesman.  To quote Lyons: “The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors at least for the duration of the trial of the British engineers was for all of us a compelling professional necessity.  The throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.

“We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. ...”

And of one fact there can be no doubt, that the Soviet government effectively and efficiently kept any knowledge of the Famine from the world

It is understandable that the young unemployed man of the 1930s was prepared to think that that capitalism had failed, that the future lay in the Communism and that the U.S.S.R. had succeeded in carrying out its policy of self-sufficiency.  But in Britain there were confirmed socialists who were not prepared to accept that there was a famine crisis in the Soviet Union, engineered by Joseph Stalin’s policies.   Numbered amongst these were the founder members of the socialist Fabian Society, Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb and the red Dean, Hewlett Johnson who found atheistic Marxism ‘profoundly Christian’.  The egocentric clown, Shaw [xxii]who was despised by the man in the street in the Soviet Union was said to have thrown his ration of food out of the train window as he entered Russia and to have denied any evidence of Bolshevik slavery.  He considered the Soviet experiment to be a great success and that it should not be discredited.  He described Stalin as a great man (as for that matter did David Lloyd George).  These well-known persons appeared to speak with authority and they were listened to by their devotees.

The Soviet propaganda machine deceived another important visitor. In late August 1933 Edouard Herriot, Former Prime Minister of France spent two weeks in Ukraine hoping to persuade the Soviets to buy French industrial machinery rather than German.  The proverbial red carpet was laid out for him and he was tricked in to thinking that the Bolshevik experiment was a great success.  A great charade was played out.  He dined lavishly and was shown what appeared to be happy, contented and well fed Ukrainians.  Edward Coote[xxiii] wrote, “undesirable elements” had been removed from the streets and railway stations, and clothes and food rations were issued to the townspeople.”  As soon as the Frenchman was out of sight these were removed from the poor victims of deceit.  Herriot was completely taken in and returned home to write a number of articles praising the achievements of the Soviets. He reported in the press: “I saw a hard working population, but by no means poverty stricken; I saw fine healthy children.”  Laurence Collier reported that, “M. Herriot seems surprisingly gullible,” … and stated that Herriot said, “the reports of famine in Ukraine were gross libels”.  On the whole, however, the cover-up was remarkably successful. 

As an Embassy dispatch put it, “Soviet organizations can now do anything they like in or outside of the Soviet Union, as the majority of educated and responsible opinion in Europe and America is simply incredulous of any criticism of the Soviet Union, Soviet decency or good faith.”x[xiv]

The British Ambassador, Sir Esmond Ovey was well-versed in information about the crisis and dutifully informed the Foreign Office in London with his dispatches regularly taken to London in the Diplomatic bag.  Despite his efforts to convey the distressing information, his message to them was unheeded.  In May 1932 the Ambassador made a visit to the Ukraine to which the Foreign Office made a disparaging remarks about the report.  In Kiev he saw the German consul who was very pessimistic.[xxv] In fact Ovey enclosed a sample of so-called bread to which potato had been added.  He wrote that it was not the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but the [xxvi]dictatorship over the proletariat. In a letter to Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary on August 12^th, Ovey included with it, Mr Cairns’ lengthy document of August 3^rd describing the situation in Ukraine.  He wrote that ‘his [Cairns] reports have a unique value of the state of the country at the present time’[xxvii] Mr Vyvyan accompanied Cairns for part of this trip and corroborated Cairns’ findings.  On August 22^nd Cairns wrote his final report before returning home to London.  With Otto Schiller’s report the British Foreign Office, the Foreign Minister, Sir John Simon and the British Government were well aware of the desperate situation that was gripping the Soviet Union and Ukraine.

Looking back to 75 years ago it would seem that the British Government have a great deal to answer for in turning a ‘blind eye’ to the tragic calamity of the peasants in the Soviet Union.  Despite full knowledge of the Famine the British Foreign Office expediently showed a complacent inertia towards the situation.  The politics and economics of the era were more important than a humane consideration of the starving population.  It was important not to interfere with the government of a powerful nation, who were not a military threat as was the apparent aggressive policy of Nazi Germany.  The Bolshevists were little known or understood and were an unknown quantity but they might make usefully allies against Germany.  Trade was all-important in this period of Depression.  Not only had the Arcos Affair of 1927 with the cessation of Diplomatic relations caused Britain to lose a large proportion of her trade with the Soviet Union but also most other countries were competing for exports and prepared, ruthlessly to try to win trade with her despite that fact that the Soviet Union was insolvent.  The most important reason for the British government’s silence was economic: it saw the Soviet Union as a profitable market for the exports of its beleaguered industries and as a source of cheap food with which to feed its disgruntled unemployed.  The Soviets were endeavouring to sell their grain and other commodities to pay for their imports which they desperately need to achieve Stalin’s Five-Year plan.  Another factor was that Britain and other countries had lent Germany money which she had in turn used to trade with the U.S.S.R. for industrial material. 

Sir Esmond Ovey was withdrawn as Ambassador from Moscow at the end of March ‘33 not long after Gareth had interviewed Maxim Litvinov and Lord Chilton did not replace him until late in the summer.  William Strang was left in charge of the Embassy during this period.

Two of the most active advocates of better relations with the Soviet Union were Robert Vansittart [xxviii] and Laurence Collier.  By July 1933, Vansittart who was wary of the Germans and leant favourably towards the French had made up his mind that Nazism was more dangerous for Britain than Communism. “It does not help us,” he wrote to Simon, “to compare the internal excesses of Hitlerism with those of Bolshevism:…”[xxix]

Collier had a similar view. “I believe that it is important for us and for France,” he wrote in January 1936, “to cultivate good relations with the Soviet Government in view both of the German menace in Europe and of the Japanese menace in the Far East; and I do not believe that it is either possible or desirable to attempt to reverse our present policy by coming to an understanding with Germany at the expense of Russia.’[xxx]

The mixed emotions of fear and war guilt were conducive to a policy of appeasement towards Germany. The establishment and politicians did not wish to compromise the Soviet Government and Joseph Stalin.  In the quagmire of the Great Depression, the industrial nations of the world were unable to have a clear vision of how to extricate themselves from the abyss. 

The world stood by and selfishly looked in the other direction preferring not to see the Genocide-Famine in Ukraine, and North Caucasus and condoned Stalin’s callousness towards the peasants of the Soviet Union.  The politicians lacked humanity.  Cowardice was product of appeasement.  Trade had become the holy grail of economics.

*******

 Stalin managed to suppress the knowledge of the famine in Ukraine very quickly and no endeavour was made to expose it for 50 years. Robert Conquest gave the first full account of the terror in his book Harvest of Sorrow.

 Earlier, in 1982, James William Crowl had written a well-researched account in his book, Angels in Stalin’s Paradise.