乌克兰大饥荒：斯大林的罪行至今仍在回响

Stalin’s War on Ukraine

By Anne Applebaum

461 pp. Doubleday. $35. 《红色饥荒：斯大林对乌克兰的战争》

(RED FAMINE: Stalin’s War on Ukraine)

作者：安妮·阿普尔鲍姆(Anne Applebaum)

461页。双日出版社(Doubleday)，35美元。

The Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has long lived in and written about Eastern Europe and is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag: A History.” But my favorite of her books is the quirky and original 1994 “Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe,” in which she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, entirely through regions and cities that had found themselves situated, over the course of the 20th century, in several different countries. Today’s Lviv, for example, in western Ukraine, was previously Lvov in the Soviet Union, and before that Lwow in interwar Poland, and prior to 1914 was Lemberg in Austria-Hungary. And that’s not even counting its occupation by czarist Russia in World War I, Nazi Germany in World War II and a short-lived Ukrainian nationalist group in 1918.

《华盛顿邮报》(The Washington Post)的专栏作家安妮·阿普尔鲍姆长期以来一直住在东欧，撰写关于那里的文章，她最著名的作品是获得普利策奖的《古拉格：一部历史》(Gulag: A History)。但在她的书中，我最喜欢的是1994年出版的怪异而新颖的《东西之间：跨越欧洲边界》(Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe)，她从波罗的海旅行至黑海，她所经过的地区和城市在20世纪里曾先后属于七个不同的国家。例如，今天的乌克兰西部城市利沃夫(Lviv)曾是苏联的Lvov;之前在两次大战之间曾是波兰的Lwow;1914年之前，它是奥匈帝国的Lemberg。这还不包括它曾在一战期间被沙皇俄国占领，在二战期间被纳粹德国占领，1918年被一个短命的乌克兰民族主义组织占领。

Most of the people she spoke to on that journey shared a sense of ethnic identity under threat by a nation in which they were now absorbed, or had been oppressed by in the past. They felt themselves to be unfairly Lithuanianized Poles, or Belarusified Lithuanians or Ruthenians denied a country when everyone else seemed to be getting their own. The book was prescient, for it is exactly that sense of aggrieved, wounded ethnic or national pride that has been cultivated so skillfully by politicians who have emerged in recent years, from Viktor Orban in Budapest to Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Donald Trump in Washington.

在那次旅行中，她所采访的大多数人都有一种民族身份受到威胁的感觉，威胁这种民族身份的正是他们现在所属的、过去压迫他们的这个国家。他们觉得自己不公平地变成了立陶宛化的波兰人，或者是白俄罗斯化了的立陶宛人或鲁塞尼亚人——鲁塞尼亚人没有自己的国家，而其他人似乎都有自己的国家。这本书很有先见之明，因为近几年崛起的政治人士所精心培养的，正是这种怨愤的、受伤的民族或国家自豪感，从布达佩斯的维克托·欧尔班(Viktor Orban)、莫斯科的弗拉基米尔·普京(Vladimir Putin)，到华盛顿的唐纳德·特朗普。

The specter of clashing nationalisms also runs through Applebaum’s new book, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” a richly detailed history of the great famine, peaking in 1933, which killed an estimated five million or more Soviets, more than 3.9 million of them Ukrainian. Stalin, beginning several years earlier, had ruthlessly forced millions of independent small farmers into the new collective farms that he was certain would increase production and feed Soviet cities. The farmers understandably resisted giving up their land, often slaughtered and ate the animals they were ordered to bring with them, and had little incentive to work once they were taken, sometimes at gunpoint, to the collectives.

这种冲突的民族主义的幽灵也贯穿着阿普尔鲍姆的新书《红色饥荒：斯大林对乌克兰的战争》，该书详细讲述了于1933年达到顶峰的大饥荒，据估计，它导致500多万苏联人和390多万乌克兰人死亡。斯大林在之前的几年里无情地强迫数百万独立的小农户进入新的集体农场，他确信这样会提高生产力、养活苏联的城市。那些农民当然拒绝放弃自己的土地，经常屠杀和吃掉被要求跟他们一起带走的家畜。他们被带去集体农场后——有时是被拿枪指着去的——几乎毫无劳动积极性。

This is certainly part of the story, but Applebaum puts more emphasis on something that has great relevance for today: Russia’s prolonged fear of losing a territory it had long treated as a lucrative colony. Even Alexander II, the reformer czar who freed the serfs, outlawed Ukrainian books and magazines and forbade the use of the language in theaters and opera. Schoolchildren generally had to be educated in Russian even when, despite the many ethnic Russians in Ukrainian cities, in the countryside most people spoke Ukrainian.

这当然是故事的一部分，但阿普尔鲍姆更多地是强调与今天关系重大的一点：俄罗斯一直担心失去那块被它长期以来视为有利可图的殖民地的领土。甚至连解放农奴的前沙皇亚历山大二世(Alexander II)也将乌克兰语书籍和杂志列为禁书，禁止在剧院和歌剧中使用这种语言。当时，尽管乌克兰的城市里有很多俄罗斯族人，但农村地区的大部分人讲乌克兰语;然而，学校里的儿童总体上必须接受俄语教育。

In the chaos of dissolving empires toward the end of World War I, Ukraine declared itself independent, but its famously fertile black earth and Black Sea ports were tempting prizes for rival independence movements, for both White Russians and Bolsheviks, and for the territory’s neighbors. After several extremely bloody years of fighting (Kiev changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919), Ukraine was divided between two newborn states: Poland and — taking the lion’s share — the Soviet Union.

一战快结束时，在各个帝国纷纷崩溃的混乱中，乌克兰宣布独立，但它著名的肥沃黑土和黑海港口成为相互对抗的独立运动的诱人战利品，遭到白俄罗斯人、布尔什维克以及其它邻国的争夺。经过数年十分血腥的争夺之后(1919年，基辅十多次易手)，乌克兰被两个新生国家瓜分：波兰和苏联，后者抢占了大部分领土。

Even before the disastrous imposition of collective farming, Russia’s new rulers “once again followed the precedent set by the czars,” Applebaum writes; “they banned Ukrainian newspapers, stopped the use of Ukrainian in schools and shut down Ukrainian theaters.” By the mid-1920s, once Soviet power had been firmly established, the regime tried a new policy, as it did in other non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union, giving official status to the Ukrainian language and allowing the production of a definitive Ukrainian-Russian dictionary.

阿普尔鲍姆写道，甚至在实施灾难性的集体农业生产之前，俄罗斯的新统治者“再次遵循沙皇设定的先例”，“他们查封了乌克兰语报纸，禁止在学校使用乌克兰语，关闭了乌克兰语剧院”。20世纪20年代中期，苏联政权稳固确立后，开始尝试一项新政策，像在苏联的其他非俄罗斯地区一样，将乌克兰语列为官方语言，允许出版选定的乌克兰语—俄罗斯语词典。

But rather than making the Ukrainians into happy Soviets, this period of limited tolerance only produced more demands for Ukrainian-language schools for the nearly eight million ethnic Ukrainians living in Russia itself, and for Ukrainian border expansions to include some of those ethnic communities. An alarmed Kremlin quickly reversed course.

然而，这个实施有限宽容政策的时期并没有让乌克兰人成为幸福的苏联人，只是令近800万居住在俄罗斯的乌克兰人需要更多乌克兰语学校;乌克兰人还要求进一步扩展边界，吞并一些民族社区。克里姆林宫感到警惕，因此迅速逆转了政策。

The end of the 1920s saw a crackdown on the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church and arrests of tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and intellectuals — 45 of whom were the subject of a show trial at the Kharkiv Opera House. Thousands of Ukrainian books were removed from schools and libraries. The dictionary project was now judged subversive, and many of those who worked on it were arrested and shot. Ukrainian-language newspapers and magazines were given lists of words not to be used, and replacements closer to Russian. One letter was even removed from Ukrainian Cyrillic, to make it more like the Russian, as if the very alphabet were guilty of treason and had to be punished.

1920年代末期，东正教的乌克兰教派遭到镇压，上万名乌克兰教师和知识分子遭到逮捕，其中45人在哈尔科夫歌剧院接受了一场作秀式的审判。在学校和图书馆中，数以千计的乌克兰语书籍被清理出去。那个字典项目如今被判定为颠覆行动，很多项目工作人员遭到逮捕和枪杀。一些乌克兰词语被规定不得在报刊上使用，必须以更近似俄语的词汇代替。官方甚至从乌克兰语的西里尔字母表中删掉了一个字母，让它看上去更像俄文，仿佛字母表也犯了叛国罪，不得不受到惩罚。

Then came the senseless scheme of compelling some of the Soviet Union’s most productive farmers to abandon their land and move to the untried new collectives. Not only was this imposing an ideological blueprint that didn’t work; it was carried out with a cruelty that guaranteed millions of people in the ethnically Ukrainian rural areas would starve. Peasant families were allowed to keep no food for themselves: Teams of Communist Party activists ripped up floorboards and poked through haylofts with iron rods, confiscating all they found, including grain being kept as seed for the next year’s crop. Despite the rotting, emaciated corpses of starved adults and children piling up along streets and highways and the wolves that took over abandoned farmhouses, the seizures continued, in part to find grain the state could sell abroad for hard currency. When even loyal party officials raised objections, they were fired, jailed or shot. If resistance to the requisitions and to collectivization was not stamped out, Stalin wrote to Lazar Kaganovich, one of his henchmen, in 1932, “we may lose Ukraine.”

然后则是一个毫无意义的计划，迫使苏联若干最高产的农民放弃土地，搬到未经开发的新集体农庄。这不仅是一个失败的意识形态规划，其执行过程也极为残酷，令数以百万计的乌克兰农民忍饥挨饿。农民家中不允许私藏食物：共产党积极分子小队到他们家中搜查，敲碎地板，用铁棒戳穿草堆，发现任何东西一律没收，连下一年的庄稼种子也不放过。无数男女老少因饥饿而死，一具具瘦骨如柴的腐烂尸体在路边堆积如山，野狼侵占了废弃的农舍。然而，搜查行动还在继续，搜出来的粮食有一部分被出口海外换取硬通货。就连忠诚的党员也开始表示反对，之后就遭到解职、监禁或枪杀的命运。斯大林在1932年写信给亲信拉扎尔·卡冈诺维奇(Lazar Kaganovich)的信上写道，如果对强征和集体化的抵制情绪不加以镇压，“我们就有可能失去乌克兰。”

The planned starvation, the execution of the territory’s best artists and intellectuals, the destruction of churches and the crushing of traditional village culture terrified into silence any Ukrainians who wanted autonomy or independence. Then finally, 60 years later, what Stalin had feared happened virtually overnight, and Russia did lose Ukraine. The history of all that happened between these two tragically intertwined peoples in the early 20th century fills in the background to Putin’s ruthless desire to gain influence or control over Ukraine once again.

有计划的饥荒，处死该国最优秀的艺术家与知识分子，对教会的破坏，以及对该国传统村庄文化的摧毁，这一切吓住了所有希望自治与独立的乌克兰人，令他们只能缄口不语。最终，60年过去了，斯大林所担心的事情几乎在一夜之间发生，俄罗斯真的失去了乌克兰。如今，普京决心恢复俄罗斯对乌克兰的影响或控制力，20世纪之初两国人民交织在一起的这段悲惨历史为他提供了背景。

Applebaum has painstakingly mined a vast array of sources, many of which were not available when the historian Robert Conquest wrote his pioneering history of the famine, “The Harvest of Sorrow,” 30 years ago: oral histories of survivors; national and local archives in Ukraine, including those of the secret police; and archives in Russia, which opened in the 1990s and then partly closed again, but not before various scholars published collections of documents from them.

阿普尔鲍姆辛勤挖掘了大量资料来源，包括饥荒幸存者的口述史;乌克兰的国家与地方档案(包括秘密警察档案);以及俄罗斯于1990年代公开的档案——其后部分档案又遭到封存，但是许多学者事先已经把其中不少文件公之于众。历史学家罗伯特·考奎斯特(Robert Conquest)曾在30年前著有《悲伤的丰收》(The Hearvest of Sorrow)一书，堪称研究这段历史的开创性著作，阿普尔鲍姆收集的许多资料都是他当年无法得到的。

One account of the famine comes from the young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who walked 40 miles through starvation-ridden districts in 1933 and, after he left the country, wrote one of the very few eyewitness descriptions of the carnage to appear in the Western press. Jones has been celebrated before, but Applebaum also tells the less known story of how, after he spoke out, Stalin’s government successfully strong-armed British and American correspondents in Moscow into denying what he said — even though some of them had been his sources, telling him what would have been censored from their own dispatches. It is a reminder of the lengths that demagogues will go to in order to suppress or distort the truth — something no less a problem in many a country today than it was in the Soviet Union more than eight decades ago.

其中一段描述来自年轻的威尔士记者加雷斯·琼斯(Gareth Jones)。1933年，他在遭受饥荒的地区徒步走了40英里，离开这个国家后，他为这场浩劫写下了一份对于西方媒体来说非常罕见的亲历实录。琼斯曾为此受到赞扬，但是关于他，阿普尔鲍姆还讲述了另一个鲜为人知的故事：琼斯说出自己的经历之后，斯大林政府成功采取强硬手段，令英美驻莫斯科记者出言否认他所说的一切——尽管这些记者当中有些人还是琼斯的消息来源，把如果由他们自己报道就会遭到审查的信息透露给他。这个故事提醒人们，政客为了封锁或扭曲真相可以做出多么过分的行径：如今在很多国家，这个问题的严重性丝毫不亚于80年前的苏联。