Stalin and His Hangmen (32 page)

New ways were needed to approach these targets. Foreign investment, given Stalin’s hostility to foreigners as saboteurs, played a minor part, although Henry Ford greedily offered assembly lines for tractors and trucks. Capital reserves were too small. In the world depression, Russia’s oil and timber fetched less than ever. Grain had to be taken from the peasants even more ruthlessly. Russia had vast reserves of coal, gold and rare earths in its frozen far north, but even the one and a half million unemployed in the cities could not be lured there. Despite the losses of the First World War and the civil war, Russia had labour in plenty – but it had to be forced.

Enslaving the Peasantry

And behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill-favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the… brink of the river. And the ill-favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven
well-favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.                         Genesis 41:3 – 4

Stalin’s campaign of 1929 against the peasantry might be seen by a cold-blooded cynic as a long-overdue cure for an overpopulated countryside. In the nineteenth century Europe had sent surplus peasantry to its colonies. In the twentieth century Stalin had Siberia and Kazakhstan to absorb the peasants of Russia and the Ukraine who, despite the terrible mortality of the civil war, were still too numerous for the land to support. The suffering that ensued has few parallels in human history; it can only be compared in its scale and monstrosity with the African slave trade. But whereas the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese took 200 years to transport some ten million souls into slavery, and kill about two million of them, Stalin matched this figure in a matter of four years.

This was an act of unprecedented monstrosity, and the almost total silence and indifference of Europe and America to the fate of the Russian peasantry suggests that the rest of the world, like Lenin, Stalin and Menzhinsky, considered the Russian peasant hardly human. The Nazi persecution of the Jews began as Stalin completed his genocide of the Russian peasant. We are still shocked today by Europe’s connivance at Nazi racism but, compared with Europe’s indifference to the introduction of slave labour in Russia and to the eradication of the Russian peasant, its murmurs about Nazi atrocities seem like an outcry. The Soviet authorities tried to confine journalists and diplomats to Moscow but could not stop them looking at the countryside from train windows; nor could it prevent foreign technicians working on projects in the provinces from talking. A few European journalists – Nikolaus Basseches in Germany, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge in England – reported accurately and extensively, but their voices were drowned by the disgracefully bland reassurances of such experts as the British professor Sir Bernard Pares or the American journalist Walter Duranty that nothing
untoward was happening. Some journalists, notably Duranty, had been suborned by Iagoda and retailed Stalin’s propaganda not just to secure privileged access to commissars but also to avoid unpleasant revelations about their own activities.

Stalin, the party and OGPU were not worried. Apparently, putting a dozen foreign technologists on trial hurt Soviet prestige, but enslaving and exterminating millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants did not. In January 1929 the Politbiuro instructed Menzhinsky, Nikolai Ianson (then commissar for justice) and Krylenko to combine forces, ‘to ensure maximum speed in carrying out repressions of kulak terrorists’.
³⁰
In May a Politbiuro resolution entitled ‘On the use of the labour of criminal convicts’, strictly secret and signed by Stalin, was addressed to Iagoda in OGPU and to Krylenko in the prosecutor’s office. It runs: ‘To move to a system of mass exploitation for pay of labour by criminal convicts with a sentence of less than three years in the regions of Ukhta, Indigo, etc.’
³¹
In July ‘concentration camps’ became ‘corrective labour camps’; the GULAG came of age.

In April 1930 Stanisław Messing, Menzhinsky’s deputy and a Polish veteran of the suppression of the Kronstadt rising, set up a vast economic empire. Its nominal head was Lazar Kogan, who had run OGPU’s border guards; Kogan’s deputies were Matvei Berman, the most ruthless exploiter of unskilled labour in history, who would at the age of thirty-four take over the GULAG, and Iakov Rapoport, one of just two GULAG pioneers who would survive Stalin.

Most of the inmates who flowed into these camps were not convicts, but ‘socially dangerous elements’ by OGPU’s criteria: kulaks of the first category, in other words prosperous farmers who might resist dispossession. Arrests and deportations at first nearly overwhelmed the system. Menzhinsky and Iagoda atoned for their mishandling of the first show trials and of Trotsky’s departure by taking energetic measures to provide a pool of labour, albeit unskilled, for the mines of the far north. Iagoda’s strategy, which Stalin backed, was to change the
raison d’être
of OGPU’s empire from a political to an economic one. Political prisoners had formerly been idle playthings for sadistic, disgraced Cheka officers. As Menzhinsky sickened, Iagoda took the initiative and replaced feral camp administrations with more subservient ones; he directed prisoners’ physical strength into whatever earned, or saved, foreign currency: logging,
mining and finally massive construction projects like the White Sea canal.

Arrests and executions carried out by OGPU soared: 162,726 persons were arrested in 1929, mostly for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, 2,109 were shot, some 25,000 were sent to camps and as many again into exile. In 1930 arrests doubled to a third of a million and executions increased tenfold to 20,000.
³²
The camps received over 100,000. By 1934 there would be half a million slave labourers. The camp economies, with their terrible mortality and relentless thirst for expendable labourers, would come to dictate the number of arrests.

Stalin’s five-year plan involved urbanization, and depopulating the countryside was the obvious method. The grain requisitioning of 1928 and the taxation that had beggared every farmer gave the peasantry no incentive to stay on the land and the state continued to pillage and terrorize the countryside. The ‘great turnabout’ announced by Stalin in November 1929, a programme of total collectivization in grain-producing regions, was the next step. Collectivization had been officially under way since 1921, but fewer than 5 per cent of peasants had joined, even on paper, collective farms.

Skirmishes escalated into civil war in the winter of 1929-30, with hundreds of thousands of peasants armed with pitchforks and shotguns against OGPU paramilitaries with machine guns. In many areas, despite Menzhinsky’s fears about their loyalties, Red Army units used artillery and aerial bombardment. In the Ukraine, the civil war commanders Iona Iakir and Vitali Primakov led punitive raids. All resistance, even demonstrations in which communist activists were merely beaten up, was met with overwhelming force. A few army men defected to the peasantry and on one occasion pilots were shot for refusing to bomb rebellious villages. Even OGPU men revolted: in March 1930, in the Altai mountains of Siberia, Fiodor Dobytin, the district GPU plenipotentiary, arrested eighty-nine party members, shot nine of them and liberated 400 imprisoned kulaks, whom he armed with rifles.
³³

The last opposition in the Politbiuro, Bukharin and his liberal economists, was gagged, while the capitalist world, indifferent to the holocaust, seemed happy to sell machinery and technology for Soviet industrialization. Stalin did as he wished. Targets for collectivization were stepped up as the process became irreversible. Over 27,000 party activists were mobilized. Molotov urged Stalin to even more severe measures and in
mid-January 1930 took overall charge, on a commission with Krylenko, Iagoda and one of OGPU’s most bestial men Efim Evdokimov.

These men were interested only in class war, in eradicating kulaks, although fewer than 2.5 per cent of Russia’s peasantry were prosperous enough to be classified as such. But Iagoda, Evdokimov and Krylenko marked out over 5 per cent of peasants for destitution, deportation and, in many cases, extermination. Kulaks were divided into three categories: ‘hostile’ – to be shot or put in camps, ‘dangerous’ – to be exiled to non-arable land in the far north or to Kazakhstan, and ‘not posing a threat’ – to be dispossessed and released in their own region. By the end of January 1930, Molotov’s commission had put 210,000 households, one and a half million human beings, in the first two categories. Kulaks were evicted into the freezing winter, their neighbours forbidden under pain of sharing their fate to give them food or shelter. Their money – even their savings books – was confiscated together with any property not in their hands or on their backs. Those that survived the trains to Siberia were at the mercy of one of OGPU’s most vicious chiefs, Leonid Zakovsky, who had not built even shacks to house them.

On paper the campaign was a success: by mid-February 1930 Molotov was able to report that some 13,500,000 households – over half of the peasantry – had handed over land, livestock and tools to collective farms. Given that the kulaks had left everything behind, the poor and middle peasantry should have prospered since they now had more arable land and equipment per head. Some poor peasants were given warm clothes and shoes stripped from kulaks – gifts that Iagoda hoped might win their loyalty. In fact, many collective farms existed only on paper, in regions where all that had happened was decimation of the population and disruption of the economy. The peasantry slaughtered that winter half the draught and meat animals in the country. ‘For the first time they are eating all the meat they want,’ commented a Red Army officer. But the promised tractors had not been built, and when they were many did not work – and now there were often no horses to pull the ploughs.

The fate of those left on the land was grim; that of the kulaks was as horrific as the fate of Poland’s Jews under Hitler – ‘Auschwitz without ovens’ as one survivor later put it – the only saving grace being Iagoda’s improvised tactics which left enterprising or lucky kulaks with the hope of escaping death. Iagoda’s letter to his subordinates Stanisław Messing
and Gleb Bokii had a Stalinist logic: ‘The kulak understands splendidly that collectivization of the countryside means that he must perish, he will resist all the more desperately and viciously, which we see in the villages. From planned uprisings to counter-revolutionary kulak organizations and terrorist acts.’
³⁴
The kulak, Iagoda argued, must have ‘his back broken’ by spring. Gleb Bokii was to organize more camps and locate wildernesses, some well above the Arctic Circle, where deported kulaks could be left unguarded to die, out of earshot or sight, of starvation, cold and disease.

There were difficulties in moving over a million peasants. Trains of cattle trucks – each train carrying up to 2,000 deportees and watched over by guards who killed at the slightest provocation – crawled over Russia’s railways, already overloaded in a country virtually without motor roads. The inhabitants of provincial cities were horrified by the spectacle at their railway stations of crowds of starving and louse-ridden kulaks, middle peasants who had been rounded up to meet the targets, and poor peasants classified as ‘subkulaks’ for expressing pity for the kulaks. Urban workers steeled themselves to walk over corpses on the pavements. OGPU was worried only when areas hitherto unscathed were panicked by tales of what was about to happen.

At all times Stalin knew in detail what was happening. Iagoda gathered almost daily for Stalin and Molotov statistics from all over the country on arrests, deportations, executions. Naive young communists wrote letters describing the sickening atrocities on the trains to Siberia and in the Arctic tundra. To counter resistance, more OGPU cadets and frontier guards were rushed in. Food, tools, even barbed wire failed to arrive; there was no funding. Junior OGPU officials, motivated by fear of responsibility rather than pity for their victims, complained about the Commissariat of Trade, which failed to provide food. Even the theoretical rations per adult kulak could not stave off death in unheated barracks in a Russian winter: 300 grams of bread, 195 grams of potatoes, 100 grams of cabbage, 75 grams of salt herring – 1,300 calories.

In the south the liquidation of the kulaks turned into ethnic warfare as Don Cossacks who had survived the 1920 genocide were murdered as kulaks by their impoverished neighbours, Ukrainian peasants. All over the north Caucasus ‘spontaneous’ atrocities, spurred on by OGPU, flared up: Cossacks were burnt alive in cinemas, Chechen shepherds and
bee-keepers were gunned down as ‘bandits’. Frinovsky, head of OGPU’s border guards, arrived to quell national uprisings, allegedly provoked by kulaks. He reported, after putting the risings down, that corpses choked the rivers flowing into the Caspian Sea. A few communities were hard to crack: the million German farmers who had lived for two centuries on the left bank of the Volga rallied behind their church pastors. Not until 1941 were Stalin’s men able to dispossess the Volga Germans. Inspired by their mullahs, the Tatars also withstood attempts to separate out the kulaks, but they could not hold off OGPU, and dreadful retribution was exacted.

The Ukraine suffered worst, for anti-Muscovite feeling fuelled resistance so widespread that it took Stalin two years to devise adequate reprisals. There was more violent resistance in the Ukraine than in the rest of the Soviet Union; of all kulaks deported, a quarter were Ukrainian.

There were now virgin lands in Kazakhstan on which to begin an arable experiment; they were won, like the American west, by exterminating the nomads who had lived on them for centuries. Unlike the American west, however, Kazakhstan received new settlers with no money, clothes, seedcorn or tools, and many would freeze or starve to death. Other Kazakhs fled with their animals into China. Perhaps two million emigrated, even though their fellow Kazakhs in China had no pasture to spare, and half of the refugees died.