Before the Famine: Peasant Deportations to the North

By Orest Zakydalsky

On November 9, 2005 the Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture was delivered by Professor Lynne Viola at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. The event was sponsored by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress–Toronto Branch, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the Toronto Ukrainian Charitable Fund and the Petro Jacyk Centre for the Study of Ukraine at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Viola is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. The focus of her research is Soviet history, with an emphasis on the Stalinist period. She began working in the Soviet archives in the early 1980s and is acknowledged as one of the leading scholars in her field. She has held many distinguished fellowships and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and she has written or edited many scholarly works, including Peasant Rebels Under Stalin (1996), and The Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987). 

Dr. Viola’s lecture was entitled "Before the Famine: Peasant Deportations to the North." She spoke about the dekulakization process in Ukraine and focused on the experience of the deportees in the settlements where they were forced to live. Dr. Viola argued that these mass deportations were the first phase in the repression of villages. They were a precursor to the Great Famine and part of the attempt by the Soviet authorities to decapitate the village of its leadership and thereby stamp out any opposition to Bolshevik rule. In 1930-31 some 318,600 peasants–men, women and children–were labeled kulaks and deported from Ukraine. This was the largest single category of Soviet citizens deported during dekulakization, and represented almost 35 percent of all deportees.

Many were sent to places like Arkhangelsk and Vologda in the Soviet Far North. These peasants were deported because they were considered to be "class enemies," and thus thought to be hostile to socialism. The regime expropriated their property with the aim of using it as capital for the new collective farms. Dr. Viola further noted that dekulakization was used as a stimulus for the collectivization of the countryside. Either peasants joined the collective farms or they were labeled kulaks and deported.

The large-scale deportations began in February 1930. The process was marked by chaos and disorder. There was a general lack of food and warm clothing for the deportees. As a result, many died en route. Often, families were separated. Upon arrival in the North, the able-bodied deportees were sent to work as forced labourers, mainly extracting raw materials, chiefly timber, in order to facilitate large-scale industrialization projects. The families of the labourers were left behind in atrocious conditions. Overcrowding and lack of supplies led to widespread disease, malnutrition and death. Dr. Viola read some heartbreaking first person accounts of these experiences. Dr. V. V. Lebedev wrote about what he saw in Vologda in the spring of 1930:

“A great many dekulakized are accumulating in Vologda...They will be sent on further north, to the most distant, uninhabited and ruinous places, but they are temporarily housed in Vologda churches, the majority of which have already been long closed to believers. There, they built bunks and the people are packed into the church buildings and typhus is breaking out. Horrors have begun...The gubernyi GPU called me in and the chief said to me: “If you don’t liquidate the typhus—I will shoot you.” I went to one of the churches together with some GPU men. A guard stood at the church, and behind the door—groans and cries. They opened the doors. And there I saw hell. The sick, the healthy, the dying—men, women, old people, children. And the live ones cried out and raised their arms to us: “Water! Water!” I have seen many terrible things in my life but nothing like this.”

The deportees were expected to construct the settlements in which they were to live. They were also expected to work for the state, often for up to 12 hours a day. The brutality was exacerbated by the fact that the OGPU (secret police) commandants in charge of the settlements were from the bottom of the barrel of the secret police, as only the most incompetent and cruel officers would go work in the Far North. Indeed, the conditions in these special settlements were in every sense as terrible as in the Gulag labour camps. Thus, Dr. Viola is quite right when she speaks of the special settlements as the “Other Archipelago.”

The lecture was followed by a lively question-answer session. A particularly poignant question was asked by Professor Olga Andriewsky (Trent University), who asked about the political character of the deportations. Most of the deportations were from areas that historically were the most resistant to Tsarist and, later, Soviet rule. Dr. Viola acknowledged that in addition to ideological and economic considerations, politics indeed played a role in the deportations.

Dr. Viola’s lecture was both insightful and interesting. Her use of first-person accounts, in the form of letters written by deportees, complemented her arguments well. Her work is of particular importance because while the labour camps have been studied extensively by scholars, the plight of the ‘special settlers’ is relatively unknown and unexplored. It is hoped that with the work of Dr. Viola and other such scholars, this area will continue to be investigated and we will gain a greater understanding of why the Ukrainian experience under Soviet rule was so tragic an historic episode.

Orest Zakydalsky is a graduate student at the Centre for European Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is studying institutional changes in the democratization process in Ukraine.