Stalin and His Hangmen (33 page)

The information dam erected around the country by OGPU still leaked. Until 1935, when rural post offices stopped accepting letters for abroad, Cossacks wrote to their relatives scattered from Uruguay to China. But Westerners in general were too gullible or indifferent to protest about the holocaust among the Russian peasantry and Cossacks. As one Kuban Cossack wrote to his relatives abroad: ‘Various delegations come from abroad, all communists of course. They are fed well and told stories. If they see people queueing and ask why, “our” lot explain that these are poor people come for a free meal. And the foreigners go home and probably talk about miracles in the land of the Soviets.’

In 1930 a Terek Cossack woman described to an émigré cousin her life over the last ten years:

You reproach us for not writing to you, but we’d be glad to have a correspondence, except it’s impossible. You probably heard we were deported in 1922… We were scattered over the wide world, each going where he could, to the Ingush, the Chechens, Osetians, Georgians – so that we relatives don’t see each other… Your family was chased out in 1923 and on the night of 10 December outside Grozny all six were shot, but S. was killed right on the street. The next morning all your farm was looted – the house was blown up, the sheds, barns and gates went to the Chechens… When we were expelled we wrote to you that many had died, they were all shot.

Our Cossack station has been divided into three categories. ‘Whites’ – the males have been shot and the women and children scattered wherever they could save themselves. The second category is ‘reds’ – they were deported, but not harmed. And the third, ‘communists’. Nobody in the first category was given anything, reds were allotted one cart per family to take everything they wanted, while communists had the right to take over all their movable property… Don’t send any money, because the collective farm gets it and we just sign for it. Our deported men are in the infantry and very few come home – everyone says they’ve died.
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Ordinary peasants could write only to party bosses or the newspapers, and Soviet newspapers referred letters they did not print to OGPU. Kulaks had nothing to lose – they wrote to Stalin. For instance:

Dekulakization happens like this: 15 people come at night and take everything. They stole pickled berries, salted gherkins and even the meat from the saucepan. They ripped my only fur coat off me, I resisted and was arrested on the spot… Many people perished when the kulaks were deported, at – 40° they took families by horse-drawn cart to Tiumen and Tobolsk. In Tobolsk alone about 3,000 are buried, these are completely innocent victims, it is like the order that King Herod once gave to slaughter babies under 6 months… Comrades Bukharin, Rykov, Frumkin and Tomsky are right, they know peasant life and peasant thinking better than you.
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Molotov was well pleased with the campaign of 1929 – 30. All targets were exceeded, many by well over 100 per cent: 140,000 had been arrested, twice the figure suggested by the Central Committee at the end of January; the far north had received 70,000 deportees for slave labour
in mines and forests, twice the number budgeted for. Twice as much grain as targeted had been requisitioned, leaving even the remaining poor and middle peasants with too little to eat, let alone to sow in spring. The monetary supply was under control, by annulling kulaks’ savings and confiscating their silver.

Iagoda’s final report on liquidating the kulak, circulated to the Politbiuro on 15 March 1931, is a proud compilation of disgraceful figures.
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The party and police had nearly lost control: in 1929 and 1930 thousands of anti-Soviet leaflets and posters had circulated, some 14,000 mass demonstrations and 20,000 acts of ‘terrorist violence’ had occurred, and there had been 3,000 incidents of grain being burnt rather than handed over. Resistance reached its peak in March 1930. The figures reported by Iagoda omit atrocities in the north Caucasus, the Urals and Siberia, and OGPU’s 20,000 executions omit the slaughter of women and children in villages which offered armed resistance. In 1929 the Buriat Mongols, despite their Buddhist faith, rose up. Their own historians agree on a figure of 35,000 Buriats shot in the course of ‘pacification’. Figures for Bashkirs, Chechens and Cossacks are still guesswork. To judge by OGPU’s informants, the peasantry were bewildered about what political course to take. Some shouted their support for Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, acclaim which helped to doom the right in Stalin’s eyes; some called for the Industrial Party (an invention of Stalin and Menzhinsky) to assume power. In remote areas, kulaks resorted to partisan warfare against OGPU and the collective farms.

No wonder that Stalin later told Churchill in 1945 that collectivization had caused him more anxiety than the Second World War. To stem the chaos, Stalin blamed his subordinates for misleading him. Russian Tsars had defused popular resentment by accusing their ministers of pulling the wool over their eyes. A desperate peasantry, unable to conceive of a mind so evil that it would deliberately inflict so much suffering, believed a god who blamed his fallen angels. There was no longer a left or right ‘deviation’ to blame, although they would be resurrected as bogeymen and scapegoats, so Stalin blamed his overenthusiastic subordinates. His article ‘Giddiness from Success’ in
Pravda
on 2 March 1930 signalled that the worst was over. ‘Collective farms cannot be imposed by force… Who needs these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of a collective movement, these unworthy threats against the peasants? Nobody but our
enemies.’ Then came an equally hypocritical decree from the Politbiuro, ‘On the struggle against distortions of the party line in the collectivization movement’. The peasantry were so encouraged by these texts that they deserted the collective farms. By summer 1930 the country was only 20 per cent collectivized. Peasants left the collectives, even though they lost the animals and tools they had brought with them and were then allotted the worst land to farm.

The activists who had followed instructions from Stalin, Molotov and Iagoda did not understand the shift in tactics and were nonplussed by this ungrateful disavowal. They were reluctant to apologize to the peasantry but Stalin judged that party discipline required testing the obedience of his subordinates.

There could be no real going back. Land had been redistributed (and often left fallow), houses burnt, horses slaughtered, families split up and heads of households killed. At least half a million people were facing malnutrition in camps or ‘special settlements’, and a million dispossessed kulaks begged for food, bribed officials for new papers or sought work in the towns. OGPU’s own reports stressed the hopelessness in barracks in Astrakhan and Vologda, where 20,000 former kulaks were dying of typhus and hunger. Tens of thousands of victims, particularly middle peasants caught up in the waves of arrests, appealed to the judiciary. A few thousand were freed from the camps and sought work in the enormous building sites springing up in the Urals and on European Russia’s rivers.

OGPU recorded executions that followed a written sentence but left uncounted deaths with no paper trail. For want of censuses in the early 1930s, the mortality of the first collectivization campaign has to be guessed. The figures point to a catastrophe even before the terrible famine of 1932 – 3: a drop in the birth rate from 45 to 32 per thousand between 1928 and 1932, and a climb in the death rate with 620,000 more deaths in 1931 than in 1928. The groundwork for the famine, the greatest demographic catastrophe to hit the peasantry in Europe since the Middle Ages, was laid by Stalin in 1929, for the survivors were so weakened, physically, morally, economically, that they were doomed to die. For want of horses, women pulled ploughs; there was precious little grain and, with half the livestock slaughtered, no meat.

But Stalin had stepped back simply in order to advance much further.
In September 1930 he told Mikoyan to force the tempo of grain exports to ‘establish our position on the international market’ and instructed his faithful acolyte Poskriobyshev, the secretary of the secret section of the Central Committee, to receive warmly the American engineer Hugh L. Cooper, who would accept increased grain exports from the USSR in exchange for help with producing tractors. By 1931, from a starving countryside, over five million tonnes of grain was being exported to pay for turbines, assembly lines, mining machinery and the funding of communist parties all over Europe, Asia and America.

The silence of the West, which emerged from its economic depression at least partly as a result of orders from the Soviet Union paid for by the blood of millions of peasants, is a blot on our civilization. Diplomats and journalists may well have shared Stalin’s view that the Russian peasant was a subhuman brute; Western businessmen were eager for the contracts that Soviet industrialization was bringing their way. As the late British historian Christopher Hill said seventy years later of the Ukraine in 193 3: ‘I saw no famine.’

The silence of the Russian intelligentsia, bludgeoned and cajoled by OGPU and the party, is more excusable. When writing about the civil war, Soviet novelists and poets could talk of atrocities on both sides and mourn the waste, but on this second civil war there was no leeway. Nevertheless, a handful of Russian poets could not blind themselves to what everyone knew was happening. The young poet Nikolai Zabolotsky lost his freedom and his health for speaking of the horrors in his ironically entitled ‘Triumph of Agriculture’: he let the Russian peasant protest through the mouth of a horse:

People! You are wrong to believe that I cannot cogitate, if you thrash me with a stick, after putting a breast band on my neck. A peasant, his legs gripping me, gallops, lashing horribly with the
knut,
and I gallop, though ugly, my hungry mouth gasping for air. All around nature is dying, the world is rocking, impoverished, flowers are dying, weeping, swept away by a blow of the legs.

The Peasantry: the Final Solution

In February 1933 Stalin told a congress of hand-picked peasants that the collective farms had snatched at least twenty million of them from the clutches of the kulak and pauperdom. Each household, Stalin promised, would have one cow, once the kulaks were finished off. Stalin’s final words ring true, read with or without irony: ‘This is an achievement such as the world has never known before and which no other state in the world has tried to achieve.’

Stalin told Churchill that collectivization cost ten million lives. OGPU counted the deaths by starvation and disease only for a few months; they kept records only of peasants shot, arrested or deported as kulaks, their mortality rates, their escapes, their recapture. A few registry offices in the worst-affected areas along the Volga kept track of who died from what. In some villages and Cossack stations, abashed officials and a few courageous peasants tried to keep a toll. Today’s statisticians can estimate the losses from the age and sex structure of the generation that lived through this catastrophe. Another basis for calculation is the difference between the population predicted in 1926 for 1937 and the real figures (some twenty million less) obtained in 1937 by the census takers – they were shot for their honesty. Allowing for famine, violence, hypothermia and epidemics caused by the disruption, the number of excess deaths between 1930 and 1933 attributable to collectivization lies between a conservative 7.2 and a plausible 10.8 million.

The surviving peasants were enslaved for two generations. On 27 December 1932 the Soviet state issued internal passports to its citizens, but not to the peasants, who were left unable to leave their collective farms. For them the civil war had come back, but with no Whites or Greens to defend them. Provincial towns suffered too: refugees brought epidemics of typhus – there were nearly a million cases in 1932. Food shortages in many cities made ration cards meaningless. Rickets, scurvy and dysentery killed children; in many areas more than half the infants under one year old died.

The kulaks began dying the moment they were dispossessed: in trains that took them north and east, over 3 per cent died of disease and
privation. Despite the annual influx of deportees, the population of the ‘labour settlements’ actually fell from 1932 to 1935. Of 1,518,524 kulaks in exile in 1932, nearly 90,000 died.
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The following year was worse: 150,000 – 13 per cent of deportees – died and a quarter of the escapees were recaptured. Only in 1934 did mortality drop below 10 per cent. The death rate in Iagoda’s labour camps gave prisoners a one-in-three chance of surviving a ten-year sentence. Not counting the victims of the Great Terror, in the 1930s over two million persons were deported to labour settlements in hitherto uninhabited areas of the north and Siberia. Kulaks were followed by the inhabitants of frontier zones and other undesirables. Of the two million, well over 400,000 died including 50,000 ‘repressed’ by OGPU and the NKVD, and over 600,000 fled into anonymity or to the building sites of the Urals and Siberia (a third of these were recaptured). To the casualties of the subsequent famine, we have to add half a million kulaks who died outside the grain-producing regions.

Stalin had full reports from commissariats, party and OGPU. All June, July and August in 1930, 1931 and 1932 he spent recuperating on the Black Sea coast, supervising Kaganovich and Molotov by courier and telegram. In August 1933 he went south again for a two-month break, travelling slowly by train, river boat and car, taking a week to pass through the worst-affected regions. Stalin saw abandoned villages, victims of famine and of typhus epidemics. ‘Koba,’ Voroshilov wrote to Abel Enukidze, ‘like a sponge, kept soaking it all up and there and then, after a little reflection, sketched out a series of measures.’
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