Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (8 page)

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization. The state had a near monopoly on firepower and logistics. Peasants’ actions were recorded by a powerful state police apparatus, one that perhaps did not understand their motives but grasped their general direction. The OGPU noted almost one million acts of individual resistance in Ukraine in 1930. Of the mass peasant revolts in the Soviet Union that March, almost half took place in Soviet Ukraine. Some Ukrainian peasants voted with their feet, walking westward, across the frontier into neighboring Poland. Whole villages followed their example, taking up church banners, or crosses, or sometimes just black flags tied to sticks, and marching westward toward the border. Thousands of them reached Poland, where knowledge of famine conditions in the Soviet Union spread.
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The flight of peasants to Poland was an international embarrassment and perhaps a source of real concern for Stalin and the politburo. It meant that Polish authorities, who at the time were trying to stage a political rapprochement with their own large Ukrainian national minority, learned about the course and consequences of collectivization. Polish border guards patiently interviewed the refugees, gaining knowledge of the course and the failure of collectivization. Some of the peasants begged for a Polish invasion to halt their misery. The refugee crisis also provided Poland with a major propaganda weapon to use against the Soviet Union. Under Józef Piłsudski, Poland never planned an aggressive war against the Soviet Union, but it did prepare contingency plans for the disintegration of the Soviet Union along national lines, and did take some steps designed to hasten such a course of events. Even as Ukrainians were fleeing Soviet Ukraine, Poland was dispatching its own spies in the opposite direction, to encourage the Ukrainians to revolt. Their propaganda posters called Stalin a “Hunger Tsar” who exported grain while starving his own people. In March 1930, politburo members feared that “the Polish government might intervene.”
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Collectivization was a general policy, the Soviet Union was a vast state, and instability in one borderland had to be considered in light of general scenarios for war.

Stalin and the Soviet leaders regarded Poland as the western part of an international capitalist encirclement, and Japan as the eastern. Polish-Japanese relations were rather good; and in spring 1930, Stalin seemed most troubled by the specter of a joint Polish-Japanese invasion. The Soviet Union, by far the largest country in the world, extended from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and Stalin had to attend not only to European powers but also to the Asian ambitions of Japan.

Tokyo had made its military reputation at the expense of Russians. Japan had emerged as a world power by defeating the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, seizing the railways built by the Russians to reach Pacific ports. As Stalin well knew, both Poland and Japan took an interest in Soviet Ukraine, and in the national question in the Soviet Union. Stalin seemed to feel the history of Russian humiliation in Asia quite deeply. He was fond of the song “On the Hills of Manchuria,” which promised bloody vengeance upon the Japanese.
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So just as chaos brought by collectivization in the western Soviet Union gave rise to fears of a Polish intervention, disorder in the eastern Soviet Union seemed to favor Japan. In Soviet Central Asia, especially in largely Muslim Soviet Kazakhstan, collectivization brought even greater chaos than in Soviet Ukraine. It required an even more drastic social transformation. The peoples of Kazakhstan were not peasants but nomads, and the first step in Soviet modernization was to make them settle down. Before collectivization could even begin, the nomadic populations had to become farmers. The policy of “sedentarization” deprived the herdsmen of their animals and thus of their means of supporting themselves. People rode their camels or horses across the border into the Muslim Xinjiang (or Turkestan) region of China, which suggested to Stalin that they might be agents of the Japanese, the dominant foreign power amidst Chinese internal conflicts.
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All was not going as planned. Collectivization, which was supposed to secure the Soviet order, seemed instead to destabilize the borderlands. In Soviet Asia as in Soviet Europe, a Five-Year Plan that was supposed to bring socialism had brought instead enormous suffering, and a state that was supposed to represent justice responded with very traditional security measures. Soviet Poles were deported from western border zones, and the border guard was strengthened everywhere. The world revolution would have to take place behind closed borders, and Stalin would have to take steps to protect what he called “socialism in one country.”
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Stalin had to delay foreign adversaries and rethink domestic plans. He asked Soviet diplomats to initiate discussions with Poland and Japan on nonaggression pacts. He saw to it that the Red Army was ordered to full battle readiness in the western Soviet Union. Most tellingly, Stalin suspended collectivization. In an article dated 2 March 1930 under the brilliant title “Dizzy with Success,” Stalin maintained that the problem with collectivization was that it had been implemented with just a little too much enthusiasm. It had been a mistake, he now asserted, to force the peasants to join the collective farms. The latter now disappeared just as quickly as they had been created. In spring 1930, peasants in Ukraine harvested the winter wheat, and sowed the seeds for the autumn crops, just as if the land belonged to them. They could be forgiven for thinking that they had won.
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Stalin’s withdrawal was tactical.

Given time to think, Stalin and the politburo found more effective means to subordinate the peasantry to the state. In the countryside the following year, Soviet policy preceded with much greater deftness. In 1931, collectivization would come because peasants would no longer see a choice. The lower cadres of the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet communist party were purged, to ensure that those working within the villages would be true to their purpose, and understand what would await them if they were not. The independent farmer was taxed until the collective farm became the only refuge. As the collective farms slowly regrouped, they were granted indirect coercive power over neighboring independent farmers. They were allowed, for example, to vote to take the seed grain away from independent farmers. The seed grain, what is kept from one crop to plant the next, is indispensible to any working farm. The selection and preservation of the seed grain is the basis of agriculture. For most of human history, eating the seed grain has been synonymous with utter desperation. An individual who lost control of the seed grain to the collective lost the ability to live from his or her own labor.
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Deportations resumed, and collectivization proceeded. In late 1930 and early 1931, some 32,127 more households were deported from Soviet Ukraine, about the same number of people as had been removed during the first wave of deportations a year before. Peasants thought that they would die either of exhaustion in the Gulag or of hunger close to home, and preferred the latter. Letters from exiled friends and family occasionally escaped the censor; one included the following advice: “No matter what, don’t come. We are dying here. Better to hide, better to die there, but no matter what, don’t come here.” Ukrainian peasants who yielded to collectivization chose, as one party activist understood, “to face starvation at home rather than banishment to the unknown.” Because collectivization came more slowly in 1931, family by family rather than whole villages at once, it was harder to resist. There was no sudden attack to provoke a desperate defense. By the end of the year, the new approach had succeeded. About seventy percent of the farmland in Soviet Ukraine was now collectivized. The levels of March 1930 had been reached again, and this time durably.
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After the false start of 1930, Stalin had won the political victory in 1931. Yet the triumph in politics did not extend to economics. Something was wrong with the grain yields. The harvest of 1930 had been wonderfully bountiful. Farmers deported in early 1930 had sown their winter wheat already, and that crop could be harvested by someone else that spring. The months of January and February, when most of the country had been collectivized on paper in 1930, is a time when farmers are idle in any case. After March 1930, when the collectives were dissolved, peasants had the time to put down their spring crops as free men and women. The weather was unusually fine that summer. The crop of 1930 in Ukraine set a standard that could not be met in 1931, even if collectivized agriculture were as efficient as individual farming, which it was not. The bumper crop of 1930 provided the baseline number that the party used to plan requisitions for 1931. Moscow expected far more from Ukraine than Ukraine could possibly give.
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By autumn 1931 the failure of the first collectivized harvest was obvious. The reasons were many: the weather was poor; pests were a problem; animal power was limited because peasants had sold or slaughtered livestock; the production of tractors was far less than anticipated; the best farmers had been deported; sowing and reaping were disrupted by collectivization; and peasants who had lost their land saw no reason to work very hard. The Ukrainian party leader, Stanisław Kosior, had reported in August 1931 that requisition plans were unrealistic given low yields. Lazar Kaganovich told him that the real problem was theft and concealment. Kosior, though he knew better, enforced this line on his subordinates.
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More than half of the (nonspoiled) harvest was removed from Soviet Ukraine in 1931. Many collective farms met their requisition targets only by handing over their seed grain. Stalin ordered on 5 December that collective farms that had not yet fulfilled their annual requirements must surrender their seed grain. Stalin perhaps believed that peasants were hiding food, and thought that the threat of taking the seed grain would motivate them to hand over what they had. But by this time many of them truly had nothing. By the end of 1931, many peasants were already going hungry. With no land of their own and with little ability to resist requisitions, they simply had no way to ensure that a sufficient number of calories reached their households. Then in early 1932 they had no seed grain with which to plant the fall crop. The Ukrainian party leadership asked for seed grain in March 1932, but by that time the planting was already delayed, meaning that the harvest that fall would be poor.
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In early 1932 people asked for help. Ukrainian communists requested that their superiors in the Ukrainian party ask Stalin to call in the Red Cross. Members of collective farms tried writing letters to state and party authorities. One of these, after several paragraphs of formal administrative prose, closed with the plaintive “Give us bread! Give us bread! Give us bread!” Ukrainian party members bypassed Kosior and wrote directly to Stalin, taking an angry tone: “How can we construct the socialist economy when we are all doomed to death by hunger?”
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The threat of mass starvation was utterly clear to Soviet Ukrainian authorities, and it became so to Stalin. Party activists and secret police officers filed countless reports of death by starvation. In June 1932 the head of the party in the Kharkiv region wrote to Kosior that starvation had been reported in every single district of his region. Kosior received a letter from a member of the Young Communists dated 18 June 1932, with a graphic description that was probably, by then, all too familiar: “Collective farm members go into the fields and disappear. After a few days their corpses are found and, entirely without emotion, as though this were normal, buried in graves. The next day one can already find the body of someone who had just been digging graves for others.” That same day, 18 June 1932, Stalin himself admitted, privately, that there was “famine” in Soviet Ukraine. The previous day the Ukrainian party leadership had requested food aid. He did not grant it. His response was that all grain in Soviet Ukraine must be collected as planned. He and Kaganovich agreed that “it is imperative to export without fail immediately.”
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Stalin knew perfectly well, and from personal observation, what would follow. He knew that famine under Soviet rule was possible. Famine had raged throughout Russia and Ukraine during and after the civil wars. A combination of poor harvests and requisitions had brought starvation to hundreds of thousands of peasants in Ukraine, especially in 1921. Scarcity of food was one of the reasons Lenin had made his compromise with peasants in the first place. Stalin was well aware of that history, in which he had taken part. That Stalin’s own policy of collectivization could cause mass starvation was also clear. By summer 1932, as Stalin knew, more than a million people had already starved to death in Soviet Kazakhstan. Stalin blamed the local party leader Filip Goloshchekin, but he must have understood some of the structural issues.
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