Stalin's Genocides (7 page)

Stories abound about Stalin’s evasiveness when it came to his person. Later in his life he would point to stylized, imposing portraits of himself and tell his interlocutors that the image in the picture frame was Stalin, not the small, unimpressive figure with sallow skin and a pockmarked face that stood before them. When the actor Aleksei Dikii was cast as Stalin in a movie, Stalin asked him how he planned to play the role. The actor answered, “As the people see him.” Stalin supposedly said “Right answer” and gave him a bottle of brandy.24 At the height of his power, 50

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Stalin reportedly once yelled at his son Vasilii about exploiting his father’s surname: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin! Stalin is Soviet power!”25

The real Stalin—suspicious, vindictive, capable, cold, brutal, angry, self-possessed, and small, both physically and morally—eventually created the image of the imperial and grand Stalin. He lived within the magnanimous version of himself, while convincing those around him that it was real. By bullying, force, and manipulation, he attained enormous powers. Those who doubted or resisted the alchemy of Stalin’s power and vainglory were demoted, stripped of their party credentials, and shunted off to the side. By the end of the 1930s they were sent to labor camps or shot.

3 Dekulakization

The Achilles heel of Soviet power, the problem to which the Bolsheviks returned repeatedly with little success, was the relative backwardness of the peasantry, which comprised the vast majority of the population of the Soviet Union. Everything about the peasants irritated the Bolsheviks: their religiosity and their attachment to cus-tomary law, their supposed primitiveness and inherently petit-bourgeois mentality. Throughout the late nineteenth century, European Marxists spoke of “the idiocy of rural life,” full of the prejudices of urban elites and beliefs in the progressive qualities of the factory proletariat. Lenin at least understood that the Russian peasantry had some revolutionary qualities, and that poor and middle peasants could serve as the allies of the working class in a revolutionary situation. Indeed, in the revolution of 1917

the Russian peasantry served as an important combus-tible force—in the army as raw recruits, in the factories as newly recruited peasant-workers, and in the villages as landless and land-hungry farmers—that helped bring down the autocracy in February 1917 and chased the Provisional Government from power in October.

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Many historians note that peasants are often the first to rise in revolution and the first to suffer at its hands, and the revolution of 1917 is no exception. True, the Bolsheviks’ “Decree on Land” of November 8, 1917, granted the peasants’ demand for ownership of the land, fulfilling the dreams of rural Russia since the peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century. But already in 1918, as the Bolsheviks desperately needed to collect grain for securing their power and fighting the Civil War, the peasants’ rights to the land were quickly rescinded, and forced grain collection by armed groups of Red Army soldiers and hastily armed workers’ detachments alienated the same peasant producers who had helped to bring down the old order with their violent rebelliousness (
buntarstvo
).

The Civil War in the countryside was brutal and lethal.

Millions of peasants died in the conflict, some fighting on one side or the other, many simply caught in between the back and forth of the competing White and Red armies, Anarchists, Ukrainian factions, Cossacks, and the plethora of nationalist fighters. The forced expropriation of grain and attempts to collectivize the countryside led to pitched battles between peasants and the new representatives of Soviet power. Peasant uprisings broke out in the Tambov region and along the Volga. A terrible famine raged in the same regions and across Russia and Ukraine, as the policies of the Soviet government destroyed the productive capabilities of rural Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no choice but to exercise a retreat in the countryside, a so-called peasant Brest, a temporary compromise with the economic realities of the Soviet countryside. In 1921

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the Bolsheviks introduced what was called the New Economic Policy, which called for a halt to forced grain requisitioning, allowed the peasants to accumulate and trade in grain products, and trumpeted the
smychka
, the alliance between workers and peasants. Many historians consider this simply a pause between the first major Bolshevik war against the peasantry (1919–22) and the second and final one to follow (1928–33).1

Certainly the NEP had economic and political costs that were unacceptable to Stalin and his allies in the Politburo.

What is often called the “Second Revolution” in studies of the Soviet Union was really the breakneck and widely violent attempt by Stalin to steer the economy in a different direction and to save the Bolshevik Revolution—and his leadership of it—from what he feared was its potential disintegration. Therefore, in 1928 he introduced the First Five-Year Plan, which was intended to rapidly industrial-ize the country by pursuing improbably high growth rates.

According to Soviet economists of the period, industrialization could be financed by “forced savings,” meaning that the peasants would be required to sell their grain at low prices, paying higher prices for necessary industrial goods and consuming much less of their own production.

The state would procure the grain and sell it abroad for the purposes of investing in industry.

Stalin regularly used the genuine fear of war and foreign invasion as the justification for his extraordinary measures in both industry and agriculture during the Second Revolution. “We have fallen fifty to one hundred years behind the developed countries,” he lamented in a speech 54

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to leading industrial workers in February 1931. “We must make up this distance in ten years. If we fail we will be crushed.”2 Of course, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology predicted war and intervention; capitalism and imperialism would inevitably strike at the socialist usurper. Therefore the Soviet Union was to be placed on a constant war footing. But under Stalin, the war craze reached a new height, in part because of his own xenophobia and belief in the threats of invasion and in part because it provided a marvelously handy justification for ignoring common sense in economic matters and eliminating alleged political enemies, including the kulaks. During the Central Committee plenum in November 1929, at the outset of the collectivization campaign, Molotov returned to the theme of imminent foreign invasion as the motivation for Soviet policies. “We still have November, December, January, February, and March, four and a half months in which, if the imperialists attack us head-on, we can make a decisive breakthrough in the economy and collectivization.”3

Given the peasants’ unwillingness to part with their agricultural goods at lower prices—they would rather consume what they had or destroy it—Stalin embarked in 1929 on an accelerated program to collectivize the countryside. In the first two months of 1930, half of the Soviet peasantry, some sixty million people in over 100,000

villages, was forced into the hastily assembled collective farms.4 No one should be mistaken about the essentially political goal of this program: to break the back of the independent peasantry. Never again would the “accursed peasants” be allowed to blackmail Soviet policy by with-dekulakization 55

holding grain from the market. But through collectivization, Stalin would also implement the Bolshevik vision of a Soviet socialist countryside that had animated party veterans since the time of the revolution.

The vicious attack on traditional peasant agriculture was accompanied by Stalin’s complete break with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, who opposed such irresponsibly violent “economic” measures, and by the introduction of Stalin’s dictatorship. But we also need to recognize that Stalin was not alone in his maniacal disdain for the Russian peasantry and advocacy of collectivized agriculture: many Bolsheviks were nervous about NEP and unwilling to compromise with the countryside. They harbored a deep disdain for the so-called Nepmen, small-scale traders and entrepreneurs, who emerged during this period, as well as for the peasants who were able to hire labor and develop markets for their agricultural production. Many members of the Central Committee and Politburo supported Stalin’s policies and found his arguments compelling.

The primary means by which the countryside would be transformed into collective farms was a radical—one could maintain—genocidal attack on the so-called kulaks, the supposed rich farmers who impeded the socialization of the land and exploited the poor and middle peasants, forcing them to work for little gain and depriving them of the land. (Kulak means fist; these peasants ostensibly were tightfisted and cheap with their supposed stashes of money gained at the expense of poor and landless peasants.) Historians of the Soviet countryside have concluded that the images of a socially diverse Russian peasantry, 56

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riven by class struggle and economic inequality, does not at all fit the real picture of rural life. Instead, there was considerable solidarity among peasants, richer and poorer, especially when facing the incursions of urban communists. Nevertheless, the kulaks became an imagined social enemy, a group that in practice was often defined by own-ing a few head of cattle and oxen or having a tin roof over their huts, but also by real and alleged opposition to collectivization and to communism, and sometimes merely by their religiosity or adherence to Old Believer communities. “From the first days of the Civil War,” wrote
Izvestiia
in February 1930, at the outset of the dekulakization campaign, “the kulak stood on the opposite side of the barricades from us.” The image of the kulak was abolutely consistent in Soviet rhetoric, remembered the later Soviet dissident Piotr Grigorenko; “this was a bloodsucker, an oppressor, and parasite.”5

Village priests and their families were included in the kulak category, as were many former landowners. Some villages were simply identified as kulak villages and destroyed in toto by deporting their entire populations, richer and poorer alike. Like the peasants whom Lenin wanted to hang on every hillock in the Tambov region as a warning to the others to cease their rebellions, the kulaks became an imagined class of opponents to be destroyed, so that the rest of the peasantry would at best take up cudgels against them in class hatred and, at worst, silently and obediently join the world of the collective farm.

On March 15, 1931, the OGPU (security police) issued a memorandum on the kulak problem, which stated that the dekulakization 57

goal of deporting the kulaks from all agricultural regions was “to totally cleanse [them] of kulaks.” There were essentially two categories of kulaks to be dealt with: the most dangerous would be “immediately eliminated,” while the second would be exiled, a simple formula for punishment of alleged “enemies of the people” that was to be repeated throughout the 1930s. Meanwhile, Soviet activists in the countryside repeated slogans: “We will exile the kulak by the thousands and when necessary—shoot the kulak breed.” “We will make soap of kulaks.” “Our class enemy must be wiped off the face of the earth.”6 These were no mere slogans; the violence perpetrated by the dekulakization gangs, which sometimes included criminals among the rural poor and landless, was horrific. “These people,”

noted one OGPU report, “drove the dekulakized naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking-bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.”7 Even if directed and monitored from the Kremlin, there was much more spontaneous violence involved in the dekulakization campaign than in the later highly focused police actions against national, “asocial,”

and political victims of Stalinism.8 In any case, between late 1929 and 1932, some ten million kulaks were forced from their homes.9

The combination of dekulakization and collectivization wreaked havoc in the countryside, prompting what some historians have suggested was a second civil war, as peasants burned their crops, slaughtered their cattle, and attacked the teams of communists and OGPU detachments 58

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sent from the cities and provincial capitals to ensure that Stalin’s policies were carried out. The talk of class war in the countryside quickly faded, as it became clear that this was really a war of the city against the village, communists against the peasantry as a whole. There were more than thirteen thousand “mass actions” by peasants in 1930

alone, involving more than three million people. Many thousands of peasants died in these pitched battles, as did loyal Stalinists and OGPU members. In 1930 the Soviet regime passed 20,201 death sentences in the villages for political crimes, ten times more than in 1929. Most were associated with quelling rebellions in the countryside and enforcing compliance with collectivization programs.10

There were several characteristics of the dekulakization campaigns that should lead us to think about their genocidal qualities. First, Stalin ordered the attack on the countryside and entrusted its realization to his immediate deputies, including Genrikh Yagoda, head of the OGPU. Stalin oversaw the operations, eagerly read reports of their successes and problems, and made it clear from the beginning that no resistance was to be tolerated and that the kulaks were “to be eliminated as a class”: killed, displaced, deported, and scattered in special settlements throughout the Far North, Central Asia, and Siberia.

Second, kulaks were defined in terms of families, not as individuals. Thus not only the head of the household and his wife were considered kulaks, but all of their relatives, young and old. The peasants who were labeled kulaks were deported as families and, indeed, sometimes even shot as families. Children of kulaks carried the mark of Cain dekulakization 59

throughout their lives, whatever their eventual jobs or professions. Kulakdom—if you will—was hereditary. This was, wrote Solzhenitsyn, “the nub of the plan: the peasants’ seed must perish together with the adults.”11