1933 — The Holodomor reaches its peak
As the famine progressed, it became even more clear that Stalin viewed the situation not as an economic or humanitarian crisis, but as a political one. Based on the archival record, Stalin knew that large numbers of people were dying of starvation, but instead of providing relief, he doubled-down on repression. He admitted in his own words that the battle in Ukraine was about "counter-revolution". He believed that Ukrainian Communists (especially those blaming the regime for the collectivization disaster) needed to be purged, and that a "shattering blow" was required in the form of house-to-house searches for "stolen grain" and the confiscation of food.
The measures that he and his top subordinates approved intensified the famine with the full knowledge that it would devastate the countryside, which was the home of the small-scale village farmers that formed the Ukrainian nation's spine.
Stalin’s New Year’s telegram
The year 1933 began ominously from the very beginning: a telegram sent by Stalin on New Year’s Day that instructed Bolshevik Ukrainian leaders to inform the villagers that those who voluntarily turned in “stolen or hidden grain” would not be subject to repression. This implied that farmers who did not do so and were discovered to have “illegal” foodstuffs would be prosecuted, and possibly executed, under the “Five Ears of Grain” law. Mass searches took place throughout Soviet Ukraine in early January. In many cases, all food products (not just grain) found in village households were confiscated or intentionally destroyed. These raids further cut the food supplies for village farmers and were a significant contributor to the massive mortality spike in 1933.Blockades
On January 22, an explicit order was issued in Moscow to prohibit villagers in Ukraine and the Kuban from leaving famine-stricken regions into neighboring areas of Belarus and the Russian Federation. Just in the month of February, 220,000 people were arrested by secret police and militia units stationed at the border of the Ukrainian republic. Of these, 190,000 were forced to return back to their villages and very likely died of starvation.This border blockade was on top of existing de facto restrictions that prevented rural farmers from traveling to major cities where food was somewhat less scarce. This did not stop starving people from attempting the journey: dead and dying villagers could routinely be seen on the streets of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
The closure of the internal border was intended to prevent a mass exodus of the kind that happened a year earlier. But it also had a political motivation: Stalin and Molotov wrote that the Soviet central government had determined (contrary to all evidence) that the flight of starving farmers from Ukraine was not a spontaneous, rational reaction to famine but was “organized by enemies of Soviet power, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Polish agents”.
In fact, Stalin went even further. He absurdly insisted that farmers were waging a "'secret' war against Soviet power" using "hunger as a weapon". In other words, reactionary farmers were purposely starving themselves in order to sabotage Soviet economic progress. This is reminiscent of “accusation in a mirror”, where the perpetrator of a malicious action falsely attributes their own intentions to the victim. In this case, it allowed the Kremlin to justify further starvation by claiming that any existing starvation was not the result of decisions made by the regime, but was due to “saboteurs” who were “hiding food”. Based on this warped logic, further food requisitions were the only way to extract those "hidden" commodities.
Purges and repressions
Early 1933 saw Stalin continuing his measures to bring Ukraine under direct Kremlin control. Pavel Postyshev was sent to Ukraine to be, in effect, Stalin’s viceroy. Postyshev soon began repressions against Ukrainian cultural and political figures, accusing them of "nationalism". Those repressed included Communists who supported the cultural, economic, and political autonomy of Soviet Ukraine, as well as thousands of collective farm leaders and local Party committee secretaries.Some prominent individuals saw the writing on the wall and took matters into their own hands. The writer Mykola Khvylovy and Ukrainian Communist leader Mykola Skrypnyk both committed suicide in 1933. They had become disillusioned and lost their faith in the Bolshevik revolution that they had such great hopes for. Part of what led Khvylovy to the breaking point was his witnessing of the horrors of the Holodomor. May 13, 1933, the day of his suicide, has been considered by some to be the day that early 20th century literary modernism died in Ukraine. The Executed Renaissance had begun.
Desperate attempts at survival
Even though searches and confiscations had stripped the Ukrainian countryside of nearly all food, the requisition campaign continued under Potyshev’s orders into early February. By spring, there were literally no food products left to eat in the countryside. People who had gold or foreign currency and had the means to get to a city could buy food at a Torgsin. Those who couldn’t resorted to eating dogs, cats, dead livestock, insects, tree leaves, bark, weeds, and almost anything that could conceivably provide a few calories. There were substantiated reports of cannibalism. Children were abandoned in towns and cities, where they begged for food.The number of people dying from hunger skyrocketed, eventually reaching nearly 30,000 per day in the late spring and early summer of 1933. The number of deaths was so large and the survivors were so weak that in many places normal funeral practices stopped: corpses would be collected in a cart by a designated individual and simply dumped into a common grave.
