Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (53 page)

While goading on the witch-hunting and building up the paranoia and hysteria, Stalin was contriving his own apotheosis as the heir of the deified Lenin. As early as 1924–5, Yuzovka, Yuzovo and Tsaritsyn became Stalino, Stalinsky, Stalingrad; but it was the fiftieth birthday celebrations at the end of 1929 which marked the real beginning not only of Stalin’s unfettered personal rule but of the Stalin cult in all its nightmare maturity, with names like Stalinabad, Stalin-Aul, Staliniri, Stalinissi, Stalino, Stalinogorsk, Stalinsk, Mount Stalin, sprouting all over the Soviet Empire, and with the first appearance of the Stalinist litanies: Man of Steel, the Granite Bolshevik, the Brass-hard Leninist, the Iron Soldier, the Universal Genius,
²⁹
a form of ruler-worship which went back to the Egyptian pharaohs. While Soviet government became more hieratic and liturgical in its externals, and more terroristic in essentials, Soviet ‘science’ moved into the irrational, with quasi-religious groups of ‘leading thinkers’, known variously as Geneticists, Teleologists, Mechanists and Dialecticians – there were many others – struggling to win Stalin’s approval for their all-embracing theories of physical progress.
³⁰
Some of the experts at Stalin’s court were ready to argue that, with the ‘Man of Steel’ in charge, human will could overcome anything, and what had hitherto been regarded as the laws of nature or of economics could be suspended. As one of his economists, S.G.Shumilin, put it: ‘Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws.’
³¹

It was against this background of irrationality, and thus emancipated from any system of economics or morality, that Stalin carried through his colossal exercise in social engineering, the destruction of the independent Russian peasantry. As we have seen, it was the peasants who had made Lenin’s
putsch
possible; and who had later,
by defying him, forced on him the surrender he had concealed by the euphemism New Economic Planning. It was in the name of the continuity of Leninism and the
NEP
that Stalin had destroyed the Left in the years 1924–8. But now the time had come to exact a dreadful revenge on the rural multitudes who had humbled Soviet power.

There was no theoretical basis in Marxism, or anything else, for what Stalin now did. But it had a certain monstrous logic. There is no point of stability in a state which is socializing itself. It must go either forward or back. If it does not go forward, the power of the market system, which expresses certain basic human instincts of barter and accumulation, is such that it will always reassert itself, and capitalism will make its reappearance. Then the embryo socialist state will collapse. If socialism is to go forward, it must push ahead with large-scale industrialization. That means surplus food for the workers; and surplus food to export to raise money for capital investment. In short the peasants must pay the price for socialist progress. And since they are unwilling to pay this price voluntarily, force must be used, in ever-growing quantities, until their will is broken and they deliver what is required of them. That is the bitter logic of socialist power which Stalin grasped in the 1920s: there was no stable point of rest between a return to capitalism and the use of unlimited force.
³²

This logic formed a sinister counterpoint to the successive stages of Stalin’s destruction of his opponents to Left and Right. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev had always argued that the peasant would never surrender enough food voluntarily, and must be coerced and, if need be, crushed. Stalin removed them, using the argument that they planned to ‘plunder the peasantry’ which was ‘the ally of the working class’, not to be subjected to ‘increased pressure’.
³³
But the harvest of 1927 was poor and that was when the logic of socialism began to operate. The peasants hoarded what food they had; they would not take the government’s paper money, which bought nothing worth having. Thus Lenin’s compromise, based on the theory of backing the 76.7 million ‘middle peasants’ and the 22.4 million ‘poor peasants’ against the 5 million
‘kulaks’
(in fact it was impossible to make these distinctions except on paper: all peasants hated the government), broke down.
³⁴

In January 1928, with no food in the towns, no grain exports and increasingly short of foreign currency, Stalin unleashed his first attack on the peasants, sending 30,000 armed party workers into the countryside, a repetition of the gouging process used in 1918. There were soon reports of atrocities, disguised by such phrases as ‘competition between grain-collective organizations’, ‘regrettable lapses from Soviet legality’, ‘slipping into the methods of War Communism’,
‘administrative mistakes’ and so forth. More sinister was the growing tendency of Stalin’s spokesmen to lump all peasants together. Molotov spoke of forcing ‘the middle peasant to come to heel’; Mikoyan accused the ‘poor peasant’ of being ‘under
kulak
influence’. Some 1,400 ‘terrorist acts’ by peasants (that is, resistance to seizure of food by armed force) were reported in 1928. One
kulak
, caught with a rifle, sneered, ‘This is what the class war is all about.’ The Smolensk region records, captured by the Nazis and later published, give us our only glimpse, through unfiltered official documents, into this seething cauldron of peasant agony. For the first time Stalin used the word ‘liquidate’, referring to ‘the first serious campaign of capitalist elements in the countryside … against the Soviet power’. Anyone, he cynically remarked, who thought the policy could be carried through without unpleasantness, ‘is not a Marxist but a fool’.
³⁵

But stealing the peasants’ food led to them sowing less, and the 1928 harvest was even worse. By the autumn of 1928, Stalin’s need for foreign exchange was desperate, as we know from a quite separate development, the large-scale secret sales of Russian art treasures to the West. It was in November 1928, according to one of the Leningrad Hermitage curators, Tatiana Chernavin, that ‘We were commanded in the shortest possible time to reorganize the whole of the Hermitage collection “on the principles of sociological formations” … and set to work and pulled to pieces a collection which it had taken more than a hundred years to create.’
³⁶
The paintings went to millionaires all over the world. The biggest purchaser was Andrew Mellon, who in 1930–1 bought for $6,654,053 a total of twenty-one paintings, including five Rembrandts, a Van Eyck, two Franz Hals, a Rubens, four Van Dycks, two Raphaels, a Velazquez, a Botticelli, a Veronese, a Chardin, a Titian and a Perugino – probably the finest hoard ever transferred in one swoop and cheap at the price. All went into the Washington National Gallery, which Mellon virtually created. It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America’s most splendid public collections.
³⁷
The dollar value of Mellon’s purchases alone came to a third of all officially recorded Soviet exports to the USA in 1930.

By a further and more fearful irony, it was the example of successful enterprise in America which finally persuaded Stalin to drop his flagging policy of extorting grain from independent peasants
and to herd them all by force into collectives. Hitherto Stalin had always denied that co-operatives and collectives were different, describing the collective farm as merely ‘the most pronounced type of producer co-operative’.
³⁸
As such it was a voluntary institution. But in 1928 Stalin heard of the great Campbell farm in Montana, covering over 30,000 hectares, the biggest single grain-producer in the world.
³⁹
He decided to set up such ‘grain factories’ in Russia, on a gigantic scale. One of 150,000 hectares was cobbled together the same year in the Caucasus. This unit was equipped with 300 tractors, and the tractor (as opposed to the wooden plough, of which 5.5 million were still in use in Russia in October 1927) became for Stalin a symbol of the future, as electricity was for Lenin. He got his men to accuse
kulaks
of an anti-tractor campaign, saying they spread rumours of ‘anti-Christ coming to earth on a steel horse’, of petrol-fumes ‘poisoning’ the soil and Volga sayings: ‘The tractor digs deep, the soil dries up.’ In fact it was the richer peasants who were buying tractors as quickly as they could afford them. Stalin’s forcing of what he called ‘tractor columns’ and ‘tractor stations’ on the collectives led to what one of the few independent observers described as ‘the reckless treatment of machinery in all the socialized lands’ and ‘fleets of disabled tractors’ which ‘dot the Russian landscape’.
⁴⁰
But this was characteristic of Stalin’s ignorance of what actually went on in the Russian countryside – an ignorance, of course, which Lenin had shared. According to Khrushchev, ‘Stalin separated himself from the people and never went anywhere …. The last time he visited a village was in January 1928.’
⁴¹
The whole of the gigantic operation of collectivizing the peasants, involving about 105 million people, was conducted from Stalin’s study in the Kremlin.

Not that there was much deliberative and rational planning about it. Quite the contrary. The case against using force to bring peasants into state farms had always been regarded as unassailable. It was based on Engels’s dictum in his
The Peasant Question in France and Germany
(1894): ‘When we acquire state power we shall not think of appropriating the small peasants by force.’ Lenin often quoted this passage. Even Trotsky had spoken of ‘agreement’, ‘compromise’ and ‘gradual transition’. As late as 2 June 1929
Pravda
insisted: ‘Neither terror nor de-kulakization, but a socialist offensive on the paths of
NEP
.’
⁴²
The decision to collectivize by force was taken suddenly, without any kind of public debate, in the last weeks of 1929. It was typical of the way in which the pursuit of Utopia leads the tiny handful of men in power abruptly to assault a society many centuries in the making, to treat men like ants and stamp on their nest. Without warning, Stalin called for an ‘all-out offensive against the
kulak
…. We must smash the
kulaks
, eliminate them as a class ….
We must strike at the
kulaks
so hard as to prevent them from rising to their feet again …. We must break down the resistance of that class in open battle.’ On 27 December 1929, the Feast of St John the Apostle, he declared war with the slogan ‘Liquidate the
kulaks
as a class!’
⁴³
It was the green light for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution’.

Collectivization was a calamity such as no peasantry had known since the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. The organizing agency was the o
GPU
but any instrument which came to hand was used. The poorer peasants were encouraged to loot the homes of dispossessed
kulaks
and hunt them down across the fields. But soon
kulak
meant any peasant whatever who actively opposed collectivization, and entire peasant communities resisted desperately. They were surrounded by police and military units, using methods which Hitler imitated in detail when rounding up the Jews, and gunned down or forced into trucks for deportation. Deutscher, travelling in Russia, met an
OGPU
colonel who wept, saying, ‘I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the civil war. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no, no!’
⁴⁴
The large-scale violence began at the end of 1929 and continued to the end of February, by which time the number of collectivized households had jumped to about 30 per cent. Disturbed by the scale of the resistance, Stalin suddenly reversed his policy in a
Pravda
article of 2 March 1930: ‘One cannot implant collective farms by violence – that would be stupid and reactionary.’ But half the collectives then voted to denationalize themselves in a few weeks, and by early summer he had resumed his ‘stupid and reactionary’ policy of force, this time carrying it through to the bitter end.
⁴⁵

The result was what the great Marxist scholar Leszek Kolakowski has called ‘probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens’.
⁴⁶
The number of peasants actually shot by the regime is not yet known and may not be discoverable even when, and if, scholars ever get at the Soviet archives. Churchill said that, in Moscow in August 1942, Stalin told him coolly that ‘ten millions’ of peasants had been ‘dealt with’.
⁴⁷
According to one scholarly estimate, in addition to those peasants executed by the
OGPU
or killed in battle, between 10 and 11 million were transported to north European Russia, to Siberia and Central Asia; of these one-third went into concentration camps, a third into internal exile and a third were executed or died in transit.
⁴⁸

The peasants who remained were stripped of their property,
however small, and herded into the ‘grain factories’. To prevent them from fleeing to the towns, a system of internal passports was introduced, and any change of domicile without official permission was punished by imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all. So they were tied to the soil,
glebae adscripti
, as in the final phases of the Roman Empire or during the age of feudal serfdom. The system was more stringent than in the blackest periods of the Tsarist autocracy, and was not relaxed until the 1970s.
⁴⁹