Category Archives: Russian-language children’s books

“Death from Starvation Threatens every working Man”: A 1932 Soviet Book about Famine in the Ukraine

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Today is the third anniversary of the Ukraine War.  To mark the occasion, here is Polina Popova’s sobering 2022 post about  how the Stalin’s government tried to justify in a children’s book the terrible food shortages in the Ukraine, known as Holodomor.

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In the year 1929, massive collectivization campaigns began all over the USSR. It was also the second year of the first Five Year Plan, when forced grain procurements were introduced. Despite the brutal enforcement of the regime, many peasants still resisted grain requisitions and refused to join collective farms. Acts of active and passive resistance from the peasants led to more repression from the government; the collectivization campaign went slowly and inefficiently. Despite the “voluntarily character” of the collective-farm movement affirmed by Stalin in his “Dizzy with Success” article on March 2, 1930, during the spring of that year, around 180,000 militant young activists were sent to the villages to enforce the campaign was followed through.[1]

Since Ukraine was the USSR’s primary grain supplying region, it suffered the most from mass collectivization. Serious food shortages in this region started as early as 1929.[2] By March of 1930 more than 60% of the Ukrainian peasants were collectivized.[3] 1931 became a turning point for many Ukrainians, because crop requisitions remained constant while the harvest was 20 per cent lower than in 1930.[4] Hunger had always been present in the Soviet countryside and small cities since the beginning of the 1920s, but 1932 would mark the beginning of the first man-made famine in Ukraine called, later, the Holodomor.[5] Famine brought not only disease, death, and despair to Ukrainian peasants, but also new abuses of power: people were punished for not meeting grain quotas and were arrested. Worse, on the basis of a law instituted on August 7, 1932, criminalizing “theft of socialist property,” many were sent to labor camps for stealing even a small amount of grain. [6] Yet, the government (or Stalin himself?) refused to make any concessions to grain quotas that would have prevented mass starvation. Thus, at the beginning of 1933, famine spread all over Ukraine, and death on a mass scale occurred in every small city or village in the region.[7] Famine also spread to other regions such as Kazakhstan, the Don and Kuban, the North Caucuses, and the Volga region.[8] The peak of the famine lasted through the whole of 1933 through the winter of 1934.[9] During 1933 at least 3.5 million people died of famine in Ukraine alone.[10]

With this sobering context in mind, we can examine one of the treasures of the Cotsen collection – Za Vladu, Rabotu, Khlib (Kyiv: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932), which can be translated “For power, for work, for bread”. The book is short but attractive and full of illustrations; with concise, clearly written paragraphs, it was probably intended for young schoolchildren (illustrated by E. Rachova, and written by I. Broĭde). Two pages slightly resemble modern-day graphic novels, with small illustrations one after another, creating a plot that follows the short story. Laconic, straightforward, and avant-garde in illustration style, the book was, perhaps surprisingly, expensively produced.

Front wrapper, Za Vladu Robotu Khlīb. [Kiev: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932].(Cotsen 38417)

Was it accidental that a children’s book about bread – and a rather expensive edition of such – was published in Ukrainian and not in Russia, the language that most Soviet children’s books were published in? Not at all. Obviously, its target audience was the children of Ukraine in 1932 and after. To put it bluntly, this beautiful book is a perfect example of Stalinist propaganda, which had two goals (and as is often the case for totalitarian regimes – the goals contradict each other). [11] On the one hand, the book normalized hunger for Ukrainian children. It argues that everyone, even people in capitalist states such as Germany, face extreme hunger. Though true to a certain extent, this claim is highly exaggerated in the book. On the other hand, the book demonstrates that the communist Soviet Union does not face this problem (a complete and utter hypocritical lie).

Illustrations on page 1 of the book are very telling: we see a family of four with no food at the table and hungry small children clutching their mom, seeking support. The father of the family is helpless in the ugly face of starvation. But the following image shows two “rich people” sitting at a restaurant ordering food (presumably, judging by the sizes of the two capitalists’ bodies, they are ordering in abundance). The text says that workers in Germany and other capitalist countries do not have work and bread, while capitalists use working peoples’ money “to build tanks and cannons.” Here, the book has another propogandist message, typical for 1930s Soviet children’s books – that enemy capitalist countries are inherently militaristic and war hungry; unlike the peaceful Soviet Union. On that same page, there is a vivid description of how workers are forced to stand in long lines to get “a [single] piece of bread” and even end up sleeping “in gardens and under fences.” Reading this, another graphic image comes to mind – an image common in the memoirs of people living in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and Uman’ during the 1932-1933 famine. Ukrainians in big cities of the time really witnessed starving people (most of them – fleeing from the countryside) standing in long lines at bread stores, begging for food in the streets, or lying in the streets (quite literally “under fences”), often with bloated stomachs, many of them dead.[12]

Page [1] vignettes, (Cotsen 38417)

The book describes how capitalists deliberately dump flour and grain in the sea to drive up food prices. Ironically, one can think of parallels with Bolshevik policies and inefficiencies. For example, grain was often lost due to poor storage capacities which lead peasants to starve. At the end of the first page, in bold, we see the statement “ГОЛОДНА СМЕРТЬ ЗАГРОЖУЄ КОЖНIЙ РОБIТНИЧIЙ (Sic!) РОДИНI” (“Death from starvation threatens every working [man] of [his] homeland”). How ironic that these words were applied to foreigners and not Ukrainians or other Soviet citizens. Although the famine was most severe in Ukraine, peasants were starving all around the USSR. One wonders how many Ukrainians understood this false rhetoric of the time presented by this book and by the Soviet authorities.

Page [1] bottom, (Cotsen 38417)

Other descriptions of the supposed brutalities of the Germany state against its starving and jobless workers, on page 3, depict policemen on the streets of Berlin looking for signs of discontent and riots. In response, children had to save the day, or better to say – “save the night,” as they secretly glued leaflets calling for a strike.

Page [3] vignette, (Cotsen 38417)

The book has an open ending in which workers are still striking in the factories. The goal of this kind of story was not to have a happy ending, but rather to present an impressionistic bricolage of hunger, children begging for food, helpless parents who are unable to provide it to the little ones, long lines for bread, homelessness, and the politicization of children. Soviet Ukrainian children were already too familiar with these realities, yet were supposedly spared from them by the Communist government.

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[1] Joseph Stalin, “Dizzy with Success” (Pravda, No. 60, March 2, 1930), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm (accessed March 24, 2022).

[2]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933. Report to Congress. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1988), 191.

[3]Ivnitskiĭ, Sud’ba raskulachennikh v SSSR (Moskva: Sobranie, 2004), 19.

[4]Bohdan Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933” from Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933, ed. by Bohdan Krawchenko and Roman Serbyn (Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 20.

[5]Nikolai Ivnitskii, Golod 1932-1933 godov v SSSR: Ukraina, Kazakhstan, SeverniyKavkaz, Povolzh’e, Tsentral’no-Chernozemnaia oblast’ (Moskva: Sobranie, 2009), 192.

[6]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21. Sergei Maksudov, “Victory Over the Peasantry,” in Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54.

[7] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 243.

[8]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933, 135.

[9]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21.

[10]Ivnitskiĭ, Golod 1932-1933 Godov v SSSR, 209.

[11] Something that was noticed by Umberto Eco in his famous list of fourteen features of “Eternal” Fascist regimes was the controversial, often illogical dichotomies that the oppressive totalitarian regimes operate within. One of the examples is an imaginary enemy who is strong and weak at the same time. Umberto Eco. “Ur Fascism,” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ (accessed April 13th, 2022).

[12] Robert Kusznierz, “The Impact of the Great Famine on Ukrainian Cities: Evidence from the Polish Archives,” in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), 16.

Vera Smirnova’s Optimistic Picture Book Komu plokho, komu khorosho (1930)

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Polina Popova, Cotsen’s roving Russian-language picture book expert, has written a new post about author Vera Smirnova and her contribution to the genre of life “before and after” the Soviets took power from 1930.  As always, her continuing interest in introducing non-Russian speakers to the wealth of Russian children’s literature is most welcome!

Today, let’s look at another rare book in the Cotsen Children’s Library—the 1930 story Komu plokho, komu khorosho  (Who Has it Bad and Who Has it Good).[1] Its author, Vera Vasil’evna Smirnova, was born in 1898 in Saint Petersburg but spent her childhood years in Skobelev (now called Fergana, Uzbekistan), where she graduated from the Women’s gymnasium and later from a teachers’ college followed by working as a teacher.[2] In 1916 she came to Saint Petersburg to attended the prestigious Bestuzhev Courses for well-born young ladies and Meyerhold’s theatre studio (a fact she would hide throughout the 1930s but later highlight).[3] Smirnova’s first literary works, poems, were first published in 1924.[4] In the 1920s, Smirnova lived in Kyiv taking care of her preschool-aged daughter Irina and two nieces. Vera had arrived in Kyiv in 1925 to help babysit her sister Alexandra’s girls while her sister and brother-in-law, both theater directors, traveled around the country.[5] During this time, Smirnova wrote short stories about life with her charges. In 1927, she published her first collection of poems, Glinianii kuvshin (Clay Jug). Smirnova moved to Moscow in 1929, and in 1931 her sister’s family moved to Leningrad but were still traveling with their theatre around the USSR.[6]

Smirnova’s book from the Cotsen collection, Komu plokho, komu khorosho (Who Has It Bad and Who Has It Good), follows the standard pattern of the late 1920s and early 1930s children’s literature, contrasting the life “before” and the life “after” the Soviets came to power, illustrated with avant-grade-style illustrations (Figure 1). One of the most famous examples of “nasty before and radiant after” was Marshak’s 1930 Vchera i segodnia (Yesterday and Today”; Figure 2). Such temporal—or thematic (such as capitalist vs. communist)—contrasts in children’s books prevailed in Russian and non-Russian Soviet books of the 1930s. Thus, for example, in 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a book entitled Dva svity (“Two Worlds”) contrasted the lives of working men in the USA and the Soviet Union.[7]

Figures 1 and 2. Covers for Smirnova’s 1930 Komu plokho, komu khorosho and Marshak’s 1930 Vchera i segodnia.Komu plokho, komu khorosho is set in Soviet Central Asia, in Uzbekistan, where two local men are unhappy to discover that life around them is dominated by modern machines, such as cars and trains. One argues that they used to live without them and (even though badly) “yet they lived.” They keep arguing over tea in a chaikhona (tea house) about when was the better time—before or now. The two men are passing by a young pioneer girl smiling at the grumpy Mullah (Figure 3) who tells the reader his story: he used to have power over people, but now no one listens to him and his sermons. In short, in addition to the strong anti-religious message, it is very clear who lost power and status, and who was empowered by the Soviet regime and its progress: the pioneer girl “has it good,” and the angry mullah “has it bad.”

Figure 3. A happy Uzbek pioneer and an old angry Mullah.After that, we see another person who “has it good”—a student who, during his summer break, works at the field helping Uzbek peasants. The two Uzbek men ask him if his life is bad or good, but the student is simply busy watering the cotton; he does not respond but continues working, singing joyfully. Finally, the two friends meet a young Uzbek woman with a short haircut, dressed in European clothes who turns out to be an engineer (Figure 4). When she sees their surprised attitude, Khadicha (that was woman’s name) explains that before women could not work as engineers building factories, but now they can. The book stresses not only some technical advantages of life during communism vs. life before, or the social progress that Uzbek society made compared to how it used to be (controlled by power-thirsty Mullahs), but also (and importantly!) through the episode with Khadicha, Smirnova’s book makes a case for progress in terms of the gender equality. Khadicha mentions to the men that “her husband is a communist, [thus] he does not beat his wife and would never allow anyone else to beat her.”[8]

Figure 4. A female Uzbek engineer and the two Uzbek men surprised to see an unveiled woman.And that gender equality argument was stressed even more by the final episode in the book when two men see a group of preschool children bathing in the river: they are members of a collective, so they attend preschool and their mothers are freed from domestic labor (or that was at least the message that Smirnova conveyed). Students are doing well now, women are doing just as well, too, and their husbands are now good and decent, while the children are happy in schools, freeing their working parents.

The book is charming in its own way and has colorful, vivid illustrations on each page. It was probably aimed at the Soviet preschoolers, kindergarteners, and young schoolchildren to colorfully and simply demonstrate to them the drastic technological, social, economic, and political changes that had taken place in the first decade of Bolshevik rule in Central Asia. The book was among many children’s books of the late 1920s and the early 1930s which promoted the idea that there was a huge cultural, technological, and social gap between Tsarist Russia and the USSR with its stress on supposed progress and a drastic rise in the quality of life. As Stalin put it in his 1935 speech to Stakhanovites, “Life has become more joyous, comrades.”

[1] https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/9991492053506421

[2] E. Emdin, “Smirnova V.V.” (Literaturnaia entsiklopediia: V 11 t., vol. 10, Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1937), 921-922.

[3] Vera Smirnova, “V studii Meīerkhol’da” from Iz raznikh let: stat’I i vospominaniia (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 197), 600.

[4] I. Inozemtsev, “Vera Smirnova”(Detskaia literatura, Vol. 111, 197), 56; B. Brainina, “Chuvstvo puti [O Vere Smirnovoi]” (Detskaia literatura, Vol. 10, 1968), 23.

[5] Elena Boitsova, “Posleslovie” in Vera Smirnova, Devochki (Sankt-Peterburg, Moskva: Rech, 2016), 145.

[6] E. Boitsova, afterword to Vera Smirnova, Devochki (Sankt Peterburg Moskva: Rech’, 2016), 148-149.

[7] For more information on this book, see: Polina Popova, “Death from starvation threatens every working man”: A Soviet book about hunger, but not the Ukrainian people,” Cotsen Library Blog

(https://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/2022/04/death-from-starvation-threatens-every-working-man-a-soviet-book-about-hunger-but-not-the-ukrainian-people/, Accessed September 20, 2024).

[8] “Мой муж—коммунист, жену не бьет и другим не позволяет.”