'Famine reports exaggerated'
Bohdan Nahaylo Fifty years ago this week a memorable series of articles appeared in the Man- chester Guardian. At a time when George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs were hailing the Soviet Union as a 'New Civilisation and cultivating the pro-Stalin climate that was to produce traitors like PhilbY and Blunt, the newspaper's cor- respondent Malcolm Muggeridge struck a Markedly discordant note. In an exclusive, eye-witness account of the man-made famine which had gripped Ukraine and the North Caucasus, he revealed the terror Stalin had unleashed against the peasantry as Part of the drive to collectivise a, griculture. The Soviet Union has never ful- IY.recovered from the damage caused .by thI5 disaster: Muggeridge, profoundly in- fluenced by what he saw, was changed for life.
The young Muggeridge and his wife Kit- ty, the niece of Beatrice Webb, went to Moscow in September 1932 believing that caPitalism and the parliamentary system had broken down and that Soviet corn- Munism was the way of the future. 'My go- ing to Moscow as a journalist was simply a subterfuge,' he recalls. 'I had in fact already offered my services as a teacher to the Soviet state.' The Muggeridges fully in- tended eventually to exchange their British passports for Soviet ones and to settle in the land of 'hope and exhilaration'. But the secular 'God' that later was to fall Koestler, Gide and numerous other zealots, disappointed Muggeridge almost immediately. His diary became a chronicle of disillusion. He was struck by 'the ril°°Ininess of Soviet Russia', 'the heavy and of iron theory crushing out the lives of PeOple' and the incessant propaganda and official deceitfulness. Before the year was out, he noted, 'I don't care how soon I leave Russia.' On his arrival Moscow was buzzing with nnofficial reports about famine in the most Afertile regions of the Soviet Union. ithough the Soviet press provided some netaits a.bout local difficulties, the authorities were at pains to suppress in for- !nation about the existence of widespread h.Unger and starvation. The capital's con- l:ngent of foreign journalists discussed _ITIOng themselves the distrubing news ereaching them daily, but for the most part :bled their newspapers that the harvests ex ere good and that reports of famine were aggerated. Typically, Muggeridge's col- Teague, Walter Duranty of the New York intr".es, estimated in private that some seven „,1111on people had starved to death, but 't;:.cote a series of dispatches pooh-poohing the famine and was subsequently awarded "e Pulitzer Prize. Of all the correspon-
dents, only Muggeridge had the initiative to go and see for himself.
With surprising ease he got on to a train and headed south for the restricted areas. To his horror he discovered that the famine was not due to any natural catastrophes, but the result of a deliberate and planned campaign to starve the peasants into sub- mission. 'A state of war, a military occupa- tion' existed in the desolate countryside. 'The fields are neglected and full of weeds,' he wrote. `No cattle are to be seen anywhere, and few horses; only the military and the GPU are well fed, the rest of the population obviously starving, obviously terrorised.' Both in 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. Thousands of them have
been exiled; in certain cases whole villages have been sent to the North for forced labour.'
It was not until later that the enormous scale of this 'administrative famine', as Muggeridge called it, became known. In Ukraine, formerly known as the granary of Europe, the population was literally decimated between 1932 and 1933. Here collectivisation was pursued with a ruthlessness - unmtached anywhere else in the USSR. The war against individual pea- sant agriculture became simultaneously an offensive aimed at destroying the social basis of Ukrainain nationalism. While Moscow continued exporting wheat at competitive prices, at least six million Ukrainians starv- ed to death. Bearing in mind also those who died in the North Caucasus and along the Volga, it is not surprising that Stalin himself hinted to Churchill that as many as ten million might have perished.
During his travels in Ukraine, Mug- geridge had a remarkable religious ex- perience. In Kiev he stumbled upon a pack- ed church in which an Orthodox service was in progress. The theme, he remembers, was: 'Our situation is hopeless. Only God can help us.' The zeal and faith of the believers moved the atheist British spectator enor- mously. 'I felt closer to God in that church than I had before, or have since.'
Muggeridge was beginning to see the world in a new light. 'I realised that the whole idea of human beings creating a just and humane society through the exercise of power was a fantasy.' He began his long search for something to fill the inner void left by this revelation.
On returning to Moscow Muggeridge wrote three of the most important articles he has ever written. His description of the famine and its causes was in effect his public repudiation of Soviet communism and his former beliefs. Now, he argued, 'the tendency in Russia is towards a slave State'. The Fabian had become a harbinger of Stalinism.
In Britain Muggeridge's dispatches were received with scepticism and incredulity. In the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman he was actually accused of being a liar. The reaction of his former friends is best exemplified by the entry in Beatrice
Webb's diary: 'Malcolm has come back with stories about a terrible famine in the USSR. I have been to see Mr Maisky [the Soviet ambassador in Britain] about it, and I realise he's got it absolutely wrong.' Moreover, Muggeridge claims his standing as a journalist was damaged and no newspaper would hire him. Reluctantly he had to seek employment in Geneva and later Calcutta.
Today Muggeridge is still intrigued by what he regards as 'one of the great puzzles of our time'. 'Why,' he asks, 'should so many people who spend their lives ad- vocating freedom of expression and justice between the classes be so completely taken in by a regime which in the most monstrous and obvious manner represents the exact opposite?' It troubles him that when the 'great crimes of our time' are discussed, the Ukrainian famine of 1933 is rarely mention- ed. 'Somehow, after all these years it just doesn't seem to have registered that far more people were killed in the USSR during the 1930s than in Hitler's holocaust.'
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