Destitute on both sides of the Dniestr

Under cover of darkness on the night of 23 February 1932, dozens of people moved slowly towards the eastern bank of the Dniestr River, hoping to cross unnoticed from Soviet Ukraine into northeast Romania. They were fleeing from a deadly famine, the result of brutal Soviet collectivization. According to a Romanian report, Soviet border guards spotted the group crossing the icy river by foot around 11 p.m. and opened fire with their machine guns. Then they threw a couple of grenades. 40 of the 62 would-be refugees were killed.1

Romanian border guards noted that all of those who managed to cross the Dniester, ethnic Moldovans and Ukrainians from a border village of Nezavertailovca, sustained firearm wounds. Some of the people rescued by the Romanian frontier police died just days later. Pondering on the motivation of the refugees to try to cross the Dniester, General Ion Rășcanu noted in his report to the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 23 April 1932 that ‘the peasants had been stripped by the Soviets of their agricultural produce and their property in general, unwilling to join in the created collectives’. They were willing to flee to Romania, ‘facing death that awaited them at every step’.2

Illegal migration from the Soviet Union to Romania had been an ongoing occurrence since the Soviets forced peasants to work on collective farms in 1929. The Romanians were constantly apprehending refugees on the border. Attitudes towards the new arrivals ranged from humanitarian concern to suspicion that a large proportion of those fleeing the USSR were Soviet spies attempting to infiltrate Romania and spread Bolshevik propaganda. This lack of clarity over the refugees’ true motivations meant that Romanian border guards were generally eager to turn them back into Soviet hands. This time, however, the sheer brutality of the Soviet response was shocking, even to people who just a month earlier had been advocating for the mass expulsion of refugees.

International response

The Romanian state had a rather complicated perception of these refugees. On the one hand, the border guards and policemen were quick to declare their humanitarian duty to care for people persecuted by the Soviets. A significant number of the refugees were ethnic Moldavians – a people viewed by Romanian bureaucrats within the Ministry of Interior as part of the Romanian nation – which contributed to the authority’s willingness to support them. On the other hand, activities of the Romanian state were also informed by an ongoing struggle with Soviet intelligence services constantly trying to undermine Romanian authorities. Soviet propaganda positioned Romania as anti-communist, aligning the country with anyone opposed to the Bolsheviks. This mixture of distrust, nationalist solidarity and anti-communist sentiment provided the refugees with a certain space for negotiating their right to remain in Romania, even if the chances of establishing their right to stay were stacked against them.

The extent of Soviet persecution at the border on this time, however, sparked an outcry, both within Romania and internationally. In Romania, it culminated in a speech by Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga on 25 March 1932. Iorga urged diplomats in Geneva and elsewhere to request a special response from the League of Nations, while recognizing that it was unlikely that the Soviets would respond to a country that was not a member of the League at the time.3 This speech was one of the few uncontroversial acts by the highly unpopular and divisive Iorga, who even contributed some money from his own pocket for food and shelter to aid the refugees who had crossed the Dniester.4

Western European countries began to dispatch correspondents to the Dniestr. Le Journal, a large Parisian newspaper, sent its legal correspondent, Géo London, to Tighina (now Bender), a city on the Dniestr that ‘separated not only Russia and Romania but also the civilization of Stalin and the civilization of old Europe’. The son of an East Prussian Jew, London was described by his French colleagues as an eternal sceptic who treated the antisemitism of the French far right with casual irony. This time, however, he was writing sober, and his reports from the Dniester displayed surprising compassion. He chronicled the malnourished peasants, who were arriving daily in Romania without any money, as well as the Romanians willing to treat refugees with sympathy but unable to provide relief in a country on its third year of global economic crisis. In total, Géo London pushed out ten reports published between 21 and 31 March 1932 in a special section entitled ‘Le Journal en Dniester’.5

Political regrouping and campaigning

After the nascent Ukrainian People’s Republic was defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Romania became a place of asylum to a large number of exiled soldiers and officers. From there, they could establish ties to their political leaders, who had left Ukraine through Poland and then moved on to Paris, forming a government-in-exile. Ukrainian émigré politicians in France went to great lengths to bring the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union to the attention of European politicians. Their attempts to ride a wave of popular interest over the 1930 League of Nations inquiry into allegations of Liberian officials selling indigenous people as slaves to Spanish plantation owners in order to draw attention to the Soviet Gulag system largely failed. This time, however, they had struck gold. The need of Romanian authorities to find additional funds to provide help to the refugees created a de facto alliance between Ukrainian emigrants and the Romanian state. And being associated with a state – even if not their own – enabled the refugees to act.

On 20 March 1932, Oleksandr Shulhyn, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian community in Paris, attended a meeting in Brussels as a head of the Paris-based Ukrainian Committee of supporters of the League of Nations. Shulhyn had two topics to present: the issue of the neocolonial relationship between Russia and Ukraine within the USSR; and the shootings on the Dniester. While the former did not grab the attention of his colleagues,6 the latter raised interest from the British Liberal politicians he was obliged to work with. During the presentation, a Romanian delegate and member of parliament emphasized that the mass shooting ‘may provide more conclusive evidence on what is happening in the USSR than any kind of statistical data’.7 Shulhyn lent heavily on his colleagues’ emotions, graphically describing the ‘corpses on the Dniester being eaten by wild birds’. He urged a swift response from the League of Nations Union, the British organization dedicated to fostering ideals of international peace, justice and security, calling on the Secretariat of the League of Nations and the Nansen International Office for Refugees to take care of Soviet refugees entering Romania.

Lord Willoughby Dickinson, a Liberal Party politician from London and deputy head of the British delegation to the meeting in Brussels, asked for clarification. He wanted to know who the refugees were. Initially, the Romanian representative and Shulhyn did not understand the question and answered that the refugees were Moldavians and Ukrainians. ‘Yes,’ replied Dickinson, ‘but what country were they subjects of?’

The Ukrainian representatives responded unequivocally: all refugees shot at the border were Soviet citizens. According to Shulhyn,8 Dickinson was shocked by this news and requested that action be taken immediately: a telegram was to be sent to the Secretariate of the League of Nations as well as to the Nansen Office. On returning from Brussels, the British delegates diligently relayed the information to the Executive Committee of the London-based League of Nations Union, emphasizing that all those who had been shot while crossing the border were Soviet citizens. However, the end of the rather dry communiqué cast doubt upon the veracity of the information passed to the UK ambassador to Romania: ‘You will of course realise that our Minister is not in a position to check the accuracy of these events’.9

Despite this distrust, the meeting influenced the redistribution of funds within the Nansen Office. Both Ukrainian and Moldovan/Romanian émigré organizations in Romania began receiving loans of thousands of Swiss francs. In its reports from the first half of 1932, the Nansen Office declared that the ‘Governing Body made a grant of CHF 8,000 to enable an experimental settlement’ of Soviet refugees who had crossed the Dniester.10 The majority of funds, however, were not provided as grants but rather in the form of long-term credit. The Ukrainian Relief Committee, created by Ukrainian anti-communist émigrés in Romania, for example, received a loan of CHF 10,000 to assist refugees. This was not a particularly large sum of money, and yet, given the previously dire situation in which the Ukrainian relief committee only had enough money to take care of eight people after a year of campaigning,11 it was formidable assistance, which reflected the attention of the Western European public sphere.

Economic crisis and shifting political affiliations

Attention to the plight of the refugees, however, turned out to be brief. By the summer of 1932, large sections of Western European society were facing a third year of global economic crisis and domestic issues took precedence. Ukrainian émigrés struggled to find the money to cover their basic needs, let alone help the desperate people crossing into Bessarabia. In a terrible twist of irony, interest in Ukraine disappeared at the very moment in 1932 when the Soviets started to confiscate the harvest from peasants en masse. The Holodomor thus began at a time when the French and British public sphere stopped, for the most part, paying attention to the plight of Ukrainian peasants.

Over the course of 1932, attitudes to the famine and persecutions in the Soviet Union split along political lines. According to Ukrainian-French historian and author Iryna Dmytrychyn, the issue of famine in Ukraine ‘was treated according to political affiliations: ignored or questioned in the communist or leftist press, it was highlighted in anti-communist or right-wing newspapers’.12 British and French intellectuals and elites, disappointed in the mishandling of the global economic crisis, were drawn in the early 1930s to two conflicting extremist outlooks: one seeing the future in the novel Italian fascist projects of the corporative state; the other enthralled by the promises of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

Right-wing political movements in Western Europe were using anti-communist sentiment to mobilize their support base. In April 1932, Octav-George Lecca, a Romanian historian and former member of the Romanian parliament, gave a lecture to ‘Moscou Attaque!’, a conference circle of the Belgian anti-communist league, a small group of liberal and increasingly antisemitic Belgian and French WWI veterans. In his lecture, Le Dniester sanglant (the bloody Dniester), Lecca urged that signing any non-aggression pacts with the Soviets would be harmful and dangerous.13 In a couple of years, this circle would move sharply to the right and become an advocate for the nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, raising funds and even travelling to Spain to fight for the Francoist cause.14

Le Journal, the French newspaper, which had documented the plight of the Dniester refugees so extensively, would also move further to the right during the 1930s, publishing an interview with Adolph Hitler in 1937 with an introduction praising ‘the great efforts of the National-Socialist regime to maintain social order and peace’.15 As the end of the decade approached, political positions would become increasingly radicalized – both on the right and the left.

Dividing lines over the Bolsheviks

Another change also solidified the question of Holodomor as deeply partisan. As German historians Guido Hausmann and Tanja Penter point out, the Nazi party heavily utilized the Holodomor during its political campaign in Germany in 1933. On 2 March, Adolf Hitler gave a speech in which he used the famine to criticize Marxism: ‘Millions of people are starving in a land that could become the breadbasket of the whole world’.16 Hitler’s rise to power fundamentally changed the European diplomatic landscape, creating additional issues to the already heavily antagonized interstate relations.

The staunchly antisemitic policies of the Third Reich and its initial wave of brutality against political opposition set the scene for another wave of forced emigration, one that for French, Belgian and British liberal observers was much closer to their sympathies. Jews, social democrats, communists and Catholic politicians began fleeing Germany, escaping the increasingly repressive Nazi regime. The League of Nations had to make ad-hoc arrangements in order to accommodate these new refugees. The more distant issue of refugees from the Soviet Union fell off the radar in Western Europe. Even less relief was available for those arriving from beyond the Dniester, fleeing from Soviet Ukraine in much larger numbers.

The rapid escalation of German revisionism and repression suddenly made another pariah state – the Soviet Union – a more palatable political partner. Central European countries such as Poland and Romania began to test the waters as early as 1932, hoping to negotiate a non-agreement pact with the Soviets. In 1933, the USSR was showing interest in joining the League of Nations and, in comparison to the nascent Third Reich, the Soviets were perceived by centrist politicians as either the lesser evil, or even as a model of how to deal with mass unemployment and economic stagnation. In these circumstances, any rhetoric that did not laud Soviet achievements, let alone condemn Bolshevik actions, would be perceived as playing into Hitler’s hand.

In the case of Romania, newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs Nicolae Titulescu was responsible for adopting more Soviet-friendly policies. An ardent Anglophile and staunch supporter of the League of Nations, where he served two consecutive terms as Chairman of the Assembly, Titulescu aimed to ease tensions in Soviet-Romanian relations by proposing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and the recognition of Romanian hegemony over Bessarabia. While Titulescu’s policy didn’t work out, it did result in mutual recognition between Romania and the USSR, and the establishment of direct diplomatic ties.

In France, nobody did more to legitimize the Soviet Union among left-leaning sections of society than Edouard Herriot. A member of the Parti Radical, mayor of Lyon and two-times prime minister, Herriot made a trip to the Soviet Union from August to September 1933. Among the places he visited was the town of Biliaivka, located just 12 km from the Soviet-Romanian border, where at least 200 people had died of starvation during the winter of 1932-1933. Out of desperation, many of the town’s residents had crossed the Dniester, where they were noted by the Romanian border guards. In 1933, however, Herriot did not find starving people but rather an exemplary collective farm with well-fed peasants – an elaborate charade put on by the Soviet secret police. This experience was aimed at dispelling any possible doubts: the famine in Ukraine was nothing more than a Hitlerite ploy to discredit the Soviet Union, ‘a proponent of a strong League of Nations’, as presented by the Soviet head of diplomacy Maxim Litvinov, capable of holding the Nazis back. Ukrainian politician and writer Milena Rudnycka, in referencing another Sovietophile, French writer Romain Rollan, also highlighted how famine in Ukraine was reframed from 1933 onwards. ‘I don’t want to hear that,’ wrote Rollan. ‘My duty is to combat a closer and greater evil. I fight Hitlerism.’17

Awareness of the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine and the further persecution of those fleeing starvation went from international outrage to suppressed knowledge in less than two years. The Soviet false narrative of collectivization productivity became one of several convenient projections enabling renewed political affiliation with the Soviet Union. Those who were being genuinely hurt by Soviet policies were disregarded to combat a different threat – one that hit closer to home. One atrocity overshadowed another. Hitler became enemy number one. But in this forced transition, the extreme suffering of a people at the hands of Stalin was disregarded, leaving refugees both destitute and silenced on both sides of the Dniestr River.