Robert Gellately - Stalin's Curse

Obtaining these results and getting what was needed from the countryside was a massive and complex undertaking involving state agencies, the directors of factories and collective farms, workers, and peasants. Stalin expected that some or all of them would try to get around the system, and his inclination was to use force as needed. 17Part of the revolution, therefore, would involve extending state control—which fell off dramatically outside the bigger cities. 18

On the twelfth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1929—celebrated, as customary, on November 7—Stalin published a key article on the “year of the great turn” ( perelom ). Today historians call this the beginning of Stalin’s revolution from above. In typically militarized language, he reminded everyone that Lenin had regarded the NEP as only a tactical “retreat,” after which there would be a run-up and then “a great leap forward.” The party had already launched “a successful offensive against the capitalist elements,” the early results showed; “we are advancing rapidly along the path of industrialization—to socialism, leaving behind the age-old ‘Russian’ backwardness.” 19Notwithstanding this official optimism, out in the countryside the peasantry was resisting the imposition of a system worse than they had known under the tsars. 20In 1929 the government had to resort to mass arrests, and the next year there were “disturbances” involving up to 2.4 million people. Police and brigades from the city clashed with peasants unwilling to surrender their harvests.

Moscow insisted that the resistance was led by kulaks, particularly in Ukraine, where nationalist sentiment was strong. 21In a speech to Marxist students on December 27, Stalin announced the ominous-sounding policy of “ eliminating the kulaks as a class.” “To launch an offensive against the kulaks,” he said, was to prepare and then “to strike so hard as to prevent them from again rising to their feet. That is what we Bolsheviks call a real offensive.” 22

At Stalin’s urging, on January 30 in the new year, a commission led by longtime henchman Vyacheslav Molotov produced a far-reaching decree. It divided the kulaks into three categories, with appropriate punishments. The “first category” included any family of the top 3 to 5 percent of the peasants in each district. An astonishing initial execution target was 60,000 heads of these families. Quotas were also set for “category two” and “category three” kulaks, with instructions about how their land was to be taken and where they were to be sent. The strategy was like a military operation. 23In fact, that was how chief of the secret police (OGPU) Genrikh G. Yagoda spoke of it to his paladins. He worried only about “avoiding losses” of his men. 24

In some places no one was well off enough to be labeled a kulak. Villagers met to decide who would be sacrificed or drew lots. Some avaricious neighbors denounced as “kulaks” people whose goods, lands, or women they coveted. 25

Families branded as kulaks lost everything and were deported to “special settlements” ( spetsposelenie ). Trains rumbled eastward for weeks and often dumped their cargo in completely uninhabitable places, resulting in starvation, disease, even cannibalism. 26In 1930 and 1931, no less than 381,026 families, or 1.8 million people, were forced out. It is difficult to be certain about the death toll, though estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. And the process continued into the next year. 27

The regime knew in 1931 that starvation was occurring, but when asked about the situation, Stanislav Kosior, head of the party in Ukraine, wrote to Stalin on April 26, 1932, and rejected all “rumors of famine.” He said that the help already arriving would eradicate any difficulties. That statement defied the facts on the ground, especially in those parts of the Ukrainian countryside where there was open rebellion. The peasants deserted the collective farms in droves and also used violence to take back grain that had been seized. In Russia’s Ivanovo Province, they did the same, and there were riots when the rations in the cities were reduced. That May, Moscow relented in the face of massive resistance. It reduced planned requisitions and, beginning in January 1933, gave peasants permission to sell surplus grains and meats, once they had met their quota targets. 28

In the summer of 1932, Stalin was away from Moscow, and by chance we have the evidence of his frequent correspondence and instructions to Molotov and Kaganovich. In mid-June the Boss acknowledged that “despite a good harvest,” Ukraine was experiencing “impoverishment and famine,” and that there were problems in the Urals and Nizhny Novgorod region. Like a medieval prince, he was still convinced that the peasants were cheating or that the administrators were not ruthless enough. He called for an immediate conference of party first secretaries, who were to be told to take a more differentiated and decentralized approach, according to which districts with good crops in a region would help those with poor crops, and together they would meet their quota. 29

Moscow sent messages that stated bluntly that no exceptions were to be made for Ukraine or anywhere else. On June 28, Molotov read aloud to party secretaries Stalin’s letter, which insisted that Moscow’s procurement figures had to be fulfilled. In addition, in early July Molotov and Kaganovich attended a Ukrainian Politburo meeting to convey the same demands.

Stalin was adamant that the regional party leaders were disorganized or spineless, and these demands were intended to shake them up to gather the harvest and meet target figures. However, on July 25 he wrote Kaganovich to say the situation would be different after mid-August, when it would be all right to tell the Ukrainians that many of them would get reductions to their quota. Collective farms that had done poorly would be allowed to withhold an average of 50 percent of their expected deliveries, and individual peasants could keep one-third or one-quarter of their quota. 30

On August 7, Stalin introduced a harsh new law to stop food thefts, even of a single ear of corn or a potato. No fewer than 5,338 people were condemned to death for breaking this law in 1932 and 11,463 more the next year, though not all of these sentences were carried out. 31His argument was that unless they made public property sacred and inviolable, as the capitalists had done with private property, the socialists would “not be able to finish off and bury the capitalist elements and individualistic, selfish habits, practices and traditions (that form the basis of theft).” 32

By August 11, it was becoming evident to him that the harvest collection was not as good as expected, and he was especially angered by the appalling state of the Communist Party. Fifty or more district party committees in Ukraine had raised their voice against the grain quotas. Stalin called the Ukrainian party a sham and judged Stanislav Kosior, its first secretary, as not up to the job. He said that unless the Kremlin cleared up the situation there—in the party and the secret police—“we may lose Ukraine.” His goal was to “transform” that republic into a “fortress of the USSR.” 33

Food-procurement brigades sent out to parts of Ukraine in December followed Stalin’s orders for an attack on the “grain front.” Young idealists among the activists told themselves not to give in to “debilitating pity” as they tore apart homes and stables and turned people out in the street. 34They uncovered enough hidden stores to foster official thinking that wily peasants were hiding more. Any regional bosses who warned of the consequences were upbraided as “un-Bolshevik” in forgetting to put the “needs of the state first.” 35