The Ukraine

Stalin Seen As the Monster He Was

We have been working our way through Anne Appelbaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (London: Penguin/Random House, 2017).  It is grim reading, raising the question of why we persist in reading until the end.  Well, there are a number of reasons, but chiefly we feel a deep sense of obligation to hear the voices of those who suffered and died.  Maybe by reading respectfully their stories some sense can be made of their sufferings.

The famine in the Ukraine of 1931 onwards was a deliberate outcome created by Stalin.  If one ever wants an object lesson on what happens when a human being gains totalitarian control over subjects, Ukraine provides it.

Stalin set grain production targets and volumes for the Ukraine.  The numbers he came up with reflect wishful thinking on a gargantuan scale.  If villages failed to deliver the amount of grain stipulated by Stalin, they were beaten, tortured, and stripped of everything--including any remaining scraps of food.

Appelbaum writes dispassionately about starvation.  It is in most cases a horrible death.

The starvation of a human body, once it  begins, always follow the same course.  In the first phase, the body consumes its stores of glucose.  Feelings of extreme hunger set in, along with constant thoughts of food.  in the second phase, which can last for several weeks, the body begins to consume its own fats, and the organism weakens drastically.  In the third phase, the body devours its own proteins, cannibalizing tissues and muscles.  Eventually, the skin becomes thin, the eyes distended, the legs and belly swollen as extreme imbalances lead the body to retain water.  Small amounts of effort lead to exhaustion.  Along the way, different kinds of diseases can hasten death: scurvy, kwashiorkor, marasmus, pneumonia, typhus, diptheria, and a wide range of infections and skin diseases caused, directly or indirectly, by lack of food.  [Ibid., p. 246.]

In some cases the survivors have had their stories preserved.   One said that "people didn't look like people--they were more like starving ghosts."  Some other accounts are used by Appelbaum to "paint the picture" as it were:

Another survivor remembered that his mother "looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water.  All her body that could be seen . . . was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag."  A third remembers his brother lying down, "alive but completely swollen, his body shining as if it were made of glass."  We felt "giddy", another recalled: "everything was as if in  a fog.  There was a horrible pain in our legs, as if someone were pulling the tendons out of them."  [Ibid., p. 247.]

Millions upon millions died.

One of the greatest indictments of the human race has been man's inhumanity to man.  Communism is one of its worst manifestations.  Stalin was its most predatory animal.  But behind him, around him, and supporting him were legions of like-minded predators.