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The second phase of the attack focused on peasant families who had not been categorized as kulaks. Deprived of their land and animals, they were hustled into collective farms by zealous Communist Party activists. Resistance was widespread. Babski bunty -- women's rebellions -- erupted among mothers who relied on the family cows to provide milk for their children. In some regions military aircraft were used to strafe villages in revolt. Peasants retaliated by slaughtering more than 40% of the nation's cattle. Tens of thousands of men and women were shot; one border police commander reported to the Politburo that the rivers were filled with bodies going downstream. Meanwhile, productivity plummeted; Soviet agriculture lay in ruins.
The final blow was the artificially induced famine of 1932-33. It was caused by Moscow's impossibly large requisitions of grain from the depleted farms, and it was maintained by preventing outside help from reaching the starving. No soup kitchens were set up, as they had been during the much less severe famines of the czarist era. Conquest argues that Stalin was aiming at the genocide of the Ukrainians, whose nationalist yearnings he despised and feared. The toll supports his view. Of the 7 million who died of hunger, 6 million were Ukrainians.
The accounts of the famine are excruciating to read. Arthur Koestler, then an ardent Communist, was traveling through the Ukraine by train. He recalls women outside his compartment window holding up babies who looked like "embryos out of alcohol bottles." For soup, people boiled rats, nettles, tree bark and the skin of old furs. While guarded warehouses nearby were filled with grain, peasants were beaten, arrested and even shot for trying to take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields of collective farms. In one village, families gathered acorns from under the snow and baked them into a sort of bread. A party official complained, "Look at the parasites! They went digging for acorns in the snow with their bare hands -- they'll do anything to get out of working." Villages became ghost towns, with families lying dead in every house. Conquest reckons that the final death toll from the entire war against the peasants was 14.5 million souls.
A symbol of the peasants' martyrdom was provided by a Christian Science Monitor correspondent who visited the Ukraine in 1933. On the road he noticed that an icon, hung in the traditional way at the entrance of a village, had been disfigured. The face of Christ had been obliterated; only the crown of thorns remained. The image may stand for all the innocents who perished on the Soviet land. Now, 50 years after they were effaced from memory, Conquest has succeeded in restoring their human faces.