Chapter 1

protested vociferously to the German authorities demanding his recall, albeit unsuccessfully. 10 His full story was published only a decade later. 11

Ewald Ammende, Secretary General of the European Congress of Nationalities, was tapped in 1933 by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna to head an Interfaith Relief Committee to aid victims of the Famine. In 1935 he published a widely circulated book on the Famine in Vienna in 1935 and an English translation the following year. Ammende’s book was not only the best survey of press accounts of the Famine ever to have been compiled, it was also virtually the only one immediately recognizing the link between the Famine and Soviet nationality policy. Ammende pointed out that any treatment of the Famine would be incomplete without understanding that “parallel to the fight for bread, a determined fight against the nationalities, their rights and their cultural individuality, has been carried on for some time.” He explained that the regions drained of foodstuffs by the Soviet state were “largely inhabited not by Russians but by other peoples and races,” and from this it followed “that, apart from the great human tragedy of the famine, all national movements of the local populations are mercilessly attacked.” 12

After briefly describing the national-cultural concessions made by the Soviets to the various non-Russians in the 1920s, Ammende explained:

”

The famine with all its attendant phenomena changed this position altogether. The local Communists resisted, as far as possible, the drastic measures for the collection of grain in their starving districts. And so, in due course, the “fight for bread” came to be accompanied by the “fight against local nationalist tendencies” as a real foundation of the machinations of all enemies of the state, kulaks, and grain saboteurs. A reckoning with the local Communists, to whom this development was due, though long avoided, had now become inevitable; and at last the Government proceeded to eliminate every stressing of local and national peculiarity as inimical to the State and the regime. Naturally, the fight was fiercest in the Ukraine, which next to Great Russia, is the biggest of the federative republics of the Soviet state.” 13

An interesting account of the Ukrainian Famine from a clinical standpoint appeared in The British Medical Journal in July 1936. The author, Professor William Horsley Gantt of Johns Hopkins University, first went to Russia as chief of the American Relief Administration’s medical unit in Petrograd in 1922, met the famous Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, and remained as Pavlov’s student until 1929. In the summer of 1933, Gantt returned to visit his aged mentor, and his wide contacts with Soviet public health officials allowed him to gain a measure of knowledge about conditions which few if any outsiders could rival.

Gantt considered himself a friend of the Soviet Union, and bis observations contain accounts of Soviet achievements since the revolution. Indeed, he even praised the reintroduction of internal passports in 1932, crediting them with having

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10 Ewald Ammende, Muss Rutland hungem? Menschen- und Volkerschicksale in der Sowjetunion (Vienna, Braumuller, 1935), p. 2n. See also the slightly abridged English translation: Idem., Human Life in Russia (London, Allen and Unwin, 1936; reprint: Cleveland, John Zubal, 1984), p. 30.
11 Otto Schiller, Die Landwinschaftspolitik der Sowjets und ihre Ergebnisse (Soviet Agricultural Policy and Its Results) (Berlin, Reichsnahrstandsverlag, Berlin, 1943), pp. 74-79. This account concentrates upon the North Caucasus which Schiller visited during the Famine.
12 Ewald Ammende, Human Life in Russia, p. 104.
13 Ibid, pp. 107-108.