Stalin's Genocides (10 page)

chapter 4

languished in camps, prisons, and special settlements, then the Ukrainian famine becomes only a part of a larger framework of criminal, if not genocidal, actions carried out by Stalin and his ruling circle.

A further problem in analyzing the Ukrainian famine as a case of genocide is the complete indifference to human suffering that permeated the Soviet ruling circles in Stalin’s time. If Ukrainian peasants starved to death in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, does the lack of any effort whatsoever to relieve their suffering indicate genocide? Probably not. But in the Ukrainian case, even more convincingly than in that of the Kazakhs, there are good reasons to believe that the famine itself was intensified, if not intentionally precipitated, by the same Stalinist leadership that not only refused to undertake any efforts to help, but did not allow the victims themselves to seek sustenance or escape. If Stalin and his ruling circle created these circumstances because they distrusted peasants and were indifferent to their suffering and dying during collectivization and dekulakization, then, in a strict sense, the 1948 definition of genocide does not apply to the case.

If the victims were allowed to perish because they were Ukrainians, then the indictment of genocide under the 1948 definition makes perfect sense. Of course, Stalin did not want to kill all the Ukrainians or deport them all to Siberia, the Far North, and Central Asia. But he did want to destroy them as the enemy nation he perceived them to be and to transform them into a Soviet nation that would be completely reliable, trustworthy, and denationalized in all but superficial ways. The bottom line is that Stalin, the holodomor 79

Molotov, Kaganovich and their ilk were convinced that the Ukrainian peasants as a group were “enemies of the people” who deserved to die. That was enough for the Soviet leadership; that should be enough to conclude that the Ukrainian famine was genocide.

5 Removing

Nations

Stalin helped to forge Soviet nationality policy when he was Commissar of the Nationalities from 1917 to 1924.

Already on the eve of the revolution, he had written his famous essay “On the National Question,” which argued that national self-determination and regional autonomy should be part and parcel of the revolutionary program of the Bolsheviks in the periphery. During the 1920s he—

along with other Bolsheviks—supported the policies of
korenizatsiia
, which essentially allowed, indeed encouraged a level of autonomy and particularistic cultural development to all national groups in the Soviet Union, no matter how big or small. There is good reason to believe that Stalin was less enthusiastic than others about the increasing willingness of national groups not only to express their cultural and linguistic differences and to make their own educational and economic policies, but to ask for formal independence. Stalin’s role in the “Georgian Affair”

(1923), in which he was known to have bossed around and abused Georgian communists, gave Lenin reason to think about Stalin, despite his Georgian background, as a Great Russian chauvinist.

removing nations 81

Inevitably, the Bolsheviks would have to rescind their promises in the Decree on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, November 15, 1917, which guaranteed not just autonomy but even the right of secession to nations that wanted it. But more shocking to communists among many of the nationalities was the backtracking on some aspects of
korenizatsiia
and the overall reassertion of control by Moscow and Russians over the national units that occurred in the early 1930s. The Ukrainian famine was just one piece—though an important piece—of a broader program to crush potential opposition among national groups, large and small. The Second Revolution included not just draconian measures to promote industrialization, collectivization, and dekulakization, as well as deft political machinations to ensure Stalin’s dictatorship. It also decisively ended the dream of a true union of socialist republics, each with its own national character and autonomous government. Stalin transformed the Soviet government from one that fostered the development of the nationalities, indeed creating nationalities in the process, to one that treated them differentially according to Moscow’s perception of their political reliability, while eliminating some of them in administrative and even genocidal actions.1

Like the attack on the kulaks, the assault on selected nationalities took place in waves, some more extreme in their scale and violence, some less so. The initial victims of these attacks were the peoples who could be considered diaspora populations of states beyond the borders of the Soviet Union: Germans, Poles, and Koreans. Under 82

chapter 5

Stalin, the regime began to draw sharp distinctions between “Soviet” nations and “foreign” nations, designat-ing the latter as “unreliable elements.”2 Members of these nationalities were considered particularly dangerous in the 1930s with fears of an approaching war: the Soviet Germans were a potential fifth column for Nazi Germany; the Soviet Koreans would support Japanese imperialism in eastern Siberia, where they lived; and the Soviet Poles were instruments of the intrigues of Pilsudski’s Poland against the Soviets. But it would miss the essence of the attacks on these peoples to exaggerate the real threats that they posed to Stalin and Soviet power. Not only were the number of spies among these peoples very limited, but there was no reason to think they would be any less loyal during a war than the Russians, Uzbeks, or Belorussians, who were not attacked at all in the same way.

The vulnerability of the Soviet borders is a matter of historical dispute. But one might suggest that in an environment in which railway accidents, shortfalls in mining production, and grain spoilage were routinely attributed to Trotskyite subversion and Japanese-German spies, resulting in tens of thousands of arrests, torture and forced confessions, and thousands of executions, the war scares and spy mania in the borderlands were part of the same process of inventing enemies and destroying people ultimately for no other reason except to maintain the suspicious and vengeful dictator in power. Of course, the dictator could not separate his own interests from those of the party and state, and highly exaggerated foreign threats became an essential part of both the rhetoric and content removing nations 83

of Soviet policy making. As we have seen, the threat of war and invasion had been used to justify the First Five-Year Plan, collectivization, and dekulakization at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, even before Hitler had come to power and the Japanese had invaded Man-chukuo. Moreover, the campaign against the nationalities was suspended precisely in 1938–39, when the war was indeed imminent! Much like Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology itself, the threat of foreign invasion became an aspect of the lenses through which Stalin and his lieutenants viewed the world around them. It both justified and motivated their actions independent of the social reality faced by them or of the actual threat of war from abroad.

Certainly there were signs of the coming of European war on the continent, and Japanese aggression was a fact in East Asia at the end of the 1930s. The events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) heightened Stalin’s paranoia about subversion and hidden enemies. The Polish intelligence services did indeed send spies to infiltrate the borderlands and Soviet interior, as did the Japanese and the Third Reich. However, it was hardly the case, as Kaganovich asserted at the February 28, 1937, plenum of the Central Committee (in connection with the issue of the alleged “Japanization” of the Soviet railway system), that

“Japanese-German-Trotskyite agents” had engaged in widespread “wrecking, diversion, spying” on the railways and that they were in cahoots with Soviet bureaucrats and workers at all levels of the state railway administration.

It also made no sense that, as Stalin asserted, these spies were ready to jump at the throat of Soviet power once the 84

chapter 5

war began.3 It should come as no surprise that the railway administration was purged at every level, perhaps more than any other single state institution. The gutting of the railways and the marked increase in accidents in 1938

and 1939 made it something of a miracle that the Soviets were able to transport their industries in Ukraine to the east so rapidly after the initial German advances in June 1941.

In sum, the forced deportation and persecution of national groups resulted primarily not from the real threats of war and infiltration, but from Stalin’s generalized xenophobia and his pathological fear of losing power through subversion, whether of the Fourth International or by hostile powers beyond his borders.

The first major actions against the nationalities took place in 1932–33, when the borderlands of the West were

“cleansed”—the Soviets’ word—of allegedly dangerous and traitorous Poles and Germans. Some 150,000 Polish and German families—meaning roughly 500,000

people—were arrested and deported to the special settlements, joining the kulaks and “asocials” who already inhabited large stretches of the same territory. The same terrible conditions existed, and many of the deported perished in exile. The Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 also hit the nationalities disproportionately hard. The “rate of extermination” (the percentage of death sentences) was significantly higher in cases against “national” versus social and political enemies.4 As Old Bolsheviks and members of the
nomenklatura
were accused in the hundreds of thousands of being spies and agents of foreign powers, those removing nations 85

foreigners who resided on Soviet territory were assumed to be in the pay of their respective “home” country’s secret services: Germans of Nazi Germany, Poles of sanacja Poland, French of France, the British of Great Britain, and so on. Those Soviet citizens who had contacts with foreigners, worked for foreign firms, or had lived abroad were also immediately suspect and were often arrested, purged, and exiled. Many were shot.

The “German operation,” for example, included German citizens in the USSR, Soviet citizens of German origin, former personnel of German companies of all backgrounds, political emigres, deserters, and so on. Many non-Germans who were associated with Germans in any way were also arrested in the operation. Some 65,000 to 68,000 people were arrested; 43,000 of them were condemned to death.5

While some Germans—those from the Volga German

autonomous republic, for example—were not the subject of special “repressions,” the Poles, in the words of one NKVD official, were to be “completely destroyed.” Stalin was pleased with Yezhov’s fierce campaign against the Poles. “Very good!” he wrote on Yezhov’s report about its initial stages. “Dry up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR.” This genocidal language complemented NKVD

orders to arrest entire Polish families as well, sending the women to the Gulag and the children under fifteen to NKVD orphanages. In the end, some 144,000 people were arrested in the Polish operation, 111,000 of whom were shot. Whatever the real danger to the Soviet Union of 86

chapter 5

Poland and Polish spies, the NKVD imbibed Stalin’s Po-lonophobia,6 supporting the campaign against the Poles by distorting evidence from its own Soviet spies in Poland that indicated the danger was less than that trumpeted by the authorities and encouraging stereotypical images of the “Polish threat.”7

Even foreign communists in the Soviet Union and in Europe were suspected of spying, wrecking, and treason.

Those out of the reach of the NKVD were called home to Moscow and eventually arrested. Stalin completely disbanded the Polish communist party in 1938; its leaders were executed or exiled; and its members were sent to the Gulag as agents of the Warsaw government and simulta-neously of Trotsky! The large number of Soviet Poles in the NKVD—many were originally recruited by the Polish Bolshevik and Cheka founder Feliks Dzerzhinskii—were also purged during this period. Many were shot as agents of the Polish government.

German communists faced a similar fate, though the party itself was kept intact. In February 1940 some 570

German communists were handed over to Stalin’s Nazi allies in an exchange of prisoners at Brest-Litovsk. Many of those lost their lives in the gaols and concentration camps of the Third Reich. In all of the national operations, justified uniformly as efforts to deprive the enemy of a potential fifth column during a potential war, 350,000 people were arrested, 247,000 of them executed.8

The Great Terror marked a general transition in state repression from social to national groups. After 1937, for the first time in Soviet rhetoric, the “Great Russian na-removing nations 87

tion” was elevated above the others. At the same time, the government disbanded as reactionary and unnecessary many smaller national units and subunits that had existed since the early 1920s as distinct administrative entities.9 In the second half of the 1930s, Poles, Germans, Koreans, and Iranians who lived in border regions met the bitter fate of executions, forced deportations, and scratch-ing out new lives in special settlements and the Gulag. On the eve of the war, Ukrainians, Finns, and Estonians were

“cleansed” from their homelands en masse and in a similarly brutal fashion.

In 1937 the first “total” forced deportation of a people took place when Stalin ordered the resettlement of the Koreans, some 175,000 people altogether, from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Koreans suffered extreme privations during this large-scale transfer. It took them more than a month to reach their destinations.

Like the kulaks, they showed up at settlements that had none of the building materials, supplies, food, and heating materials that had been assured by government orders.

Some four thousand Koreans who arrived in the town of Kustanai spent at least a week in their train cars before the local authorities did anything to help them.10 The real threat of Japanese subversion of the Korean population was in no way proportionate to the harsh fate of the Koreans. In this case, Stalin struck at the Koreans for no other reason than that there was a Japanese threat in the East, not because the Japanese could and did use the Koreans, nor because there was evidence the threat of Korean collaboration would turn into an actuality at any time soon.