Stalin's Genocides (8 page)

Third, kulaks were subjected to the kind of dehumanization and stereotyping that was common for victims of genocide throughout the twentieth century. They were

“enemies of the people,” to be sure, but also “swine,”

“dogs,” and “cockroaches”; they were “scum,” “vermin,”

“filth,” and “garbage,” to be cleansed, crushed, and eliminated. Gorky described them as “half animals,” while Soviet press and propaganda materials sometimes depicted them as apes.12 Kulaks in this sense were dehumanized and racialized into beings inherently inferior to others—

and they were treated as such.

Fourth, kulaks were eliminated in large numbers. In the process of collectivization, some thirty thousand kulaks were killed, most condemned to death by quickly appointed judicial troikas and shot on the spot. The lucky ones were beaten, abused, arrested, and then sent into exile, their homes burned to the ground. Large numbers of kulaks—estimates range around the two million mark—

were forcibly deported to the Far North and Siberia. Most of these were sent to so-called special settlements, which were scattered over the harsh landscape and in theory provisioned by the OGPU to hold the huge number of deportees.

The special settlements were an important dimension of the Archipelago Gulag, so poignantly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. However, Solzhenitsyn had little in-60

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formation about the special settlements, which swallowed up countless Soviet citizens in the 1930s and could be as lethal for their inhabitants as the better-known labor camps such as Vorkuta, Kolyma, and other similarly forbidding and fearsome imitations of hell. On paper, writes Lynne Viola, the special settlements were “a penal Utopia for isolating and reforging social enemies.” In fact, they

“became little more than a shoddily constructed institution of forced labor.”13

In January 1932 the OGPU estimated that close to 500,000 kulaks, roughly 30 percent of the total number of kulak deportees at that time, had already died in the camps or had run away.14 Leaving the deadly labor camps of the Gulag penal system aside, there is a real problem in thinking about the issue of genocide when it comes to the special settlements. Ostensibly, these settlements were designed to remove the kulaks from society—and later national groups and so-called asocials (“socially harmful elements”)—and put them to supposedly productive work clearing forests, building canals, and plowing hith-erto virgin farmland. They would labor in mines and settle regions inhabited by native peoples who were deemed by Soviet administrators as unfit for disciplined work. There was even the mantra that the kulaks, engaged in productive labor, might become respectable Soviet citizens again, despite their inherently rapacious character.

At the same time, the reality of the special settlements, which did not change much over the course of the 1930s and early 1940s, was that very few of the minimal re-dekulakization 61

quirements for existence, called for in the directives setting them up, were present on the ground. We know this from the numerous reports of shocked OGPU doctors and settlement administrators, who describe hunger, disease, filth, privation, fierce cold, and inadequate shelter and food in virtually all of the special settlements. The timber for building barracks never appeared; the machinery for clearing land was absent; food rations, minimal to begin with, were misdirected, stolen, or never sent in the first place. The January 1932 report of one frustrated and angry lower-level official in western Siberia by the name of Shpek tells a familiar story about the general indifference to the suffering of the exiles.

I was made responsible for setting up this camp. I set out in search of clothing and footwear for these elements, who lacked everything. I made the rounds of all the economic organs, obtained the necessary information, and then went to the District Committee of the Party to inform Comrade Perepelitsin.

Furious, he told me: “Comrade Shpek, you don’t

understand anything about the policies of our government! Do you really think that these elements have been sent here to be reeducated? No, Comrade, we have to see to it that by spring they’re all dead, even if we have to be clever about it: dress them in such a way that they’ll at least cut down a little wood before they die. You can see for yourself in what condition they send them to us here, disembarking them 62

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on the riverbank in rags, naked—if the government really want to reeducate them, it would clothe them without our help!”

. . . After this conversation, I refused to organize the camp, for I had understood that they were going to send people out there and that I was supposed to see to it that they all died.15

In his appropriately entitled
Cannibal Island,
Nicolas Werth describes the makeshift construction of one of these special settlements for contingents of so-called asocials or socially harmful elements. Transported from Tomsk to Nazino Island in the middle of the Ob River, some 6,600

to 6,800 people determined by the authorities to be “de-classe” and “socially harmful” sought to stay alive in a frozen landscape without food, supplies, or decent shelter. The case was a particularly harsh one since the prisoners had no opportunity to escape, given the location, and no chance to seek help from neighboring settlements.

Typically, the local authorities were completely unprepared to house and feed them. Barely 2,200 survived in these circumstances, but not before dozens of the exiles turned to cannibalism and necrophagy. Here and elsewhere in the Gulag and special settlements, the process of “decivilization” was noteworthy. Men and women were turned into animals by the Soviet state, represented by its warders, police, and settlement administration, but with full cognizance of its chief administrators in Moscow. This made it easier to shoot the prisoners—even hunt them as animals—and see them die. As was so often the dekulakization 63

case, the NKVD wrote a thorough report on the horrors of the Nazino camp’s history, known to Stalin, and which Werth found more than seven decades later in the Russian archives.16

Certainly at the middle level of Soviet officialdom, conscientious observers understood that something was seriously wrong. Kulaks—including their families—were dying by the tens of thousands from hunger, typhus, and a variety of diseases induced by inhuman living standards and widespread famine. With their parents dead or dying, kulak orphans scavenged and begged throughout the Gulag system, looking for any way to stay alive. Cannibalism was rife and was widely reported by camp administrators and OGPU officials throughout the settlements and surrounding villages.

Stalin surely knew and understood that these conditions were ubiquitous and that the kulak population of the special settlements was being decimated month after month by the horrid conditions in which they lived. He was also responsible in many instances for reducing state funding for resettlement, which in turn made these conditions even more difficult for the kulaks to survive.17 His indifference to this suffering and dying was certainly murderous, if not genocidal. Indeed, a good argument can be made that Stalin intended to wipe out the kulaks physically as a group of people—not just metaphorically as a class—and that therefore the result can be considered genocide.

The attack on the kulaks, not unlike the Turkish assault on the Armenians or the Nazi elimination of the Jews, came in waves. This first attack in 1929–30 was the most seri-64

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ous. After Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success,” reported in
Pravda
, March 2, 1930, which with typical devious-ness transferred blame for the excesses of collectivization from himself to overzealous local officials, the campaign was relaxed. But in the fall of 1930 and the beginning of 1931, the machinery for forcing peasants into the collective farms was again ramped up and few so-called kulaks were to remain in the countryside. These measures were complemented by draconian legislation against stealing state or collective property (August 1932), which made the theft of a small amount of grain or animal products punishable by death or exile. Especially during the onset of the famine years, this decree was discharged with particular frequency and harshness.

In typically cyclical fashion, the waves of attacks on the kulaks between 1929 and 1932 were followed by the relaxation of surveillance of the special settlements and the release of some kulaks from their terms of exile in 1932–

33. Instead of returning to the countryside, hundreds of thousands of kulaks found their way out of the Gulag into major cities and industrial centers, where the severe shortage of industrial labor gave factory officials an incentive to ignore their background as “enemies of the people.” In the deceptively calm political atmosphere of the mid-1930s, kulaks were able to establish themselves in jobs and positions around the country. Some were able to return again to their home villages and engage in agriculture. A few even made claims for the return of their property.

But this respite was only the lull before the storm. In connection with the election campaign to the Supreme dekulakization 65

Soviet in December 1937, which was intended to ratify the new Soviet constitution of 1936, Stalin and his lieutenants were determined to eliminate any possible dis-sonance in the country during the highly publicized and well-attended speeches and electoral events. The constitution trumpeted the victory of socialism, the end of the class struggle, and the creation of the new Soviet man and woman. In this context, there was no room for the outli-ers of Soviet society—the so-called
lishentsy
(disenfranchised) and
byvshie
(former people). The police targeted especially kulaks and dekulakized peasants, but also vagrants of all sorts, prostitutes, ex-noblemen, ex-landowners, former tsarist officials, and the like. Once considered a “class” to be eliminated, the remaining ex-kulaks were lumped together with the “socially harmful elements,”

who were to be cut off from society and quarantined as a lethal danger to the state.

The campaign against these people who did not fit neatly into the Soviet social order had started already in the early 1930s, with the cleansing of “parasitic” elements, and was accelerated by the passportization campaign of 1932–33, which, at the same time, denied passports to peasants and to those urban dwellers who could not demonstrate their social usefulness to the regime. The passport became the way to distinguish between those who legitimately belonged to the accepted Soviet social world and those who did not and, moreover, threatened its integrity—at least in the distorted view of Stalin and the Soviet leadership—

with their nefarious class views. The great Soviet Utopian project required social engineering of the sort that excised 66

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(their word!) millions of people from healthy society and transplanted them to areas of Siberia, the Far North, and Central Asia where they would be used as raw material for colonizing undeveloped territory. (The great imperial Russian historian Vasilii Kliuchevsky talked about the history of Russia as one of a country colonizing itself.) The only problem was that under the Soviet regime the colonists were deprived of their rights and often of their ability to survive.

This process of transforming the social composition of the Soviet socialist polity was entrusted to the NKVD, which was set up in 1934 to consolidate the police func-tions for the regime, including those of the OGPU. Campaigns for “social defense” were organized to rid the cities of supposedly harmful and marginal people. The NKVD

routinely was able to suspend whatever civil rights that were available to Soviet citizens with the justification that the asocials, from the mid-1930s on known often as

“socio-harmfuls” (
sotsvrednik
i)—whether kulaks, indi-gents, vagrants, prostitutes, homeless, or others—were dangerous to state security. Those who experienced social problems and lived on the margins of society were conflated in the minds of Stalin and his police chiefs with counterrevolution writ large. In 1935 and 1936 alone, the authorities removed as many as 800,000 of these “harmful elements” from the most important Soviet cities and sent them off into exile.18

The cleansing of the cities had already begun in the 1920s and was accelerated in the early 1930s by the OGPU’s grandiose plans to deport millions of people to dekulakization 67

colonize western Siberia and the North. Yagoda’s successor, Nikolai Yezhov, sought with Stalin’s connivance to complete this process by introducing the infamous Order 00447 in July 1937, which authorized the rounding up of any remaining “extraneous” outsiders in Soviet towns and cities and “socially harmful elements,” meaning “former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements,” and exiling them to the Gulag. The orders from the top included the setting of quotas for arrests in the various regions and the sending of NKVD and party officials to the provinces to ensure that the arrests and deportations were carried out without delay. According to the initial order, 268,950

people were to be arrested, of whom 75,950 were to be shot and 193,000 sent to camps. But as a consequence of a series of rolling orders (including Order 00485 involving Polish nationals and Order 00486, which authorized the arrest of wives of alleged counterrevolutionaries) the time frame for the campaign and the number of arrestees were both extended. The official final tally for Order 00447 was 767,397 tried by the troikas, of whom 386,798 were condemned to death and executed.19 This is a shocking example of what Paul Gregory has called “Terror by Quota,”

a purposeful, planned, and murderous assault on “outsiders” in a society for no other reason than the perception that they were its potential enemies.20

Recent archival research has demonstrated the linkages between the promulgation of the new Soviet constitution in 1936, the election campaign to the Supreme Soviet in December 1937, and Order 00447 and its attack on “an-tisocial” elements and purported class enemies in the pop-68

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ulation. Since the constitution affirmed the voting rights of the entire adult population, the argument goes, Stalin and Soviet government officials worried that counterrevolutionaries would use the campaign and the secret ballot mandated by the constitution to undermine the Soviet state. Andrei Zhdanov, among others, claimed at the time that “our enemies are active and preparing concertedly for the elections.” “The Constitution [of 1936] wasn’t written for swindlers,” stated the Moscow police to an “asocial”