Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Repression was deployed against the slightest signs of resistance or what was called “kulak terror.” Over one thousand such “crimes” were reported for 1929, involving everything from murder to “wrecking.” For the same period “economic” and “counterrevolutionary” crimes resulted in close to thirty thousand arrests.26 Repressing the kulaks was meant to beat them into submission and have a demonstrative effect on the entire countryside.

  From early 1928, there was a sharp crackdown on small traders, those who found ways to take advantage of the NEP. Thousands of “people with sacks” (meshochniki) would search the countryside for food they willingly paid for at higher prices than the state offered. They would then resell these goods for tiny profits in the cities. There were also traders who hired unemployed people to queue for scarce goods, which they later resold for a profit.27 Some of these Nepmen, so called because they took advantage of small freedoms permitted under the policy, came to be despised by the regime, which, like Stalin, regarded them as wreckers. Stalin wanted them stamped out.28

  On his trip to Siberia, he concluded that the main cause of the grain crisis was the peasants’ cultivation of small plots of land. The problem, he said, was that the practice was economically inefficient and as long as it persisted the crisis would recur. As he saw it, to cure the structural problems, farms had to be collectivized so they could afford and use modern machinery. That was Lenin’s plan, he stated, and it would be “decisive for the victory of Socialism in the countryside.”29

  Collectivization of agriculture was not yet government policy, and in 1928 some in the Politburo still believed in the NEP. Bukharin, for example, wanted only to change pricing and taxation and argued that peasants would produce and sell more to the state if they could expect some gain. In the shadow of mounting grain shortages, Stalin came out against Bukharin and labeled his stance a “right opposition” that deviated from the “central line” and favored kulaks and other independent-minded peasants.

  Stalin’s clash with this opposition was bitter but short-lived. By April 1928, Bukharin had been defeated, and in November he was expelled from the Politburo. His fall resulted mainly from his identification with the NEP, a more liberal approach loved by many people but denounced by Party radicals. Those who favored it were now blamed for the shortages and the petty abuses of the system.

  Moscow, Leningrad, and other big cities had to introduce bread rationing in the winter of 1928–29, and on February 15, 1929, the Politburo extended it to the whole country. Procurement of grain was less successful that winter than the year before, and in October 1929 rationing was established for the most important foods (such as bread, meat, butter, tea, and eggs) in some major cities and industrial areas. It was not until the beginning of 1931 that these norms were extended nationwide, but by then famine had already become a real threat.30

  The Five-Year Plan called for a modest changeover from private to collective farming, but the transformation took on a dynamic of its own. As early as the summer of 1929, local authorities were competing with each other to see who could collectivize most. Peasants were cajoled into joining or given false promises of the advantages of belonging to a collective farm. Even so, by the time of Stalin’s speech in November 1929, most of those who were collectivized came from the 30 percent or so of the peasants classified as either poor or farm laborers. The betteroff were not persuaded by the propaganda.31

  The nearly 70 percent of the remaining peasants were “middling” or better off, such as the kulaks. Like Lenin before him, Stalin resorted to terror, but this time on a greater scale than ever.

  “ELIMINATING THE KULAKS AS A CLASS”

  Stalin explained to Marxist students on December 27, 1929, that it was time to begin “eliminating the kulaks as a class.” He claimed that a “new Socialist offensive” was necessary as all other methods of dealing with these capitalist elements had failed. It was a declaration of war on the countryside:

  During the past year we, as a Party, as the Soviet power (a) developed an offensive along the whole front against the capitalist elements in the countryside; (b) this offensive, as you know, has yielded significant, positive results. What does this mean? In a word, we have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. We have acted on, and continue to act on, one of the decisive planks in our whole program….

  An offensive against the kulaks is a serious matter and is not to be confused with declamations against the kulaks…. An offensive equires that we smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class. Less than that would amount to mere declamation, pinpricks, phrase-mongering, certainly not a real Bolshevik offensive. To launch an offensive against the kulaks, we must make preparations and then strike, strike so hard as to prevent them from ever again rising to their feet. That is what we Bolsheviks call a real offensive. Could we have undertaken such an action, say five years or even three years ago, with any hope of success? No, we could not.32

  The drift of the argument was that since the regime had made progress in the countryside, by creating farms and (allegedly) producing enough, the country could now afford to “eliminate the kulaks” and build Socialism. The kulaks were not identified with a specific ethnic group, but could be almost anyone.

  Should kulaks be allowed to join the new kolkhozy? After all, they were known to be industrious and had skills and initiative. For Stalin the answer was a resounding no. He wanted them uprooted and did not care how. As far as he was concerned, the (alleged) production successes of the collective farms meant the Soviet Union could go beyond tinkering with restrictive measures against the kulaks to wiping them out as a class. In his view it was foolish to spend more time talking about kulaks: “When the head is cut off, you do not mourn for the hair.”33

  Fired up by Stalin, a commission led by Molotov produced a far-reaching decree, with implementation instructions, on January 30, 1930. First-category kulaks, guilty of “counterrevolutionary activities,” were to be executed out of hand or sent to concentration camps and their families deported to distant parts and stripped of all property. The second category, “arch-exploiters with an innate tendency to destabilize the regime,” were to be dispossessed and deported far away with their families. Finally, third-category kulaks were thought to be loyal to the regime, but in any case had to be moved out of their homes and away from “collectivized zones” and onto poor land.34

  In keeping with the quota thinking of this era, the commission estimated that “on average” kulaks owned between 3 and 5 percent of all farms and had to be eliminated within six months, and so it set quotas for how many were to be sent to the concentration camps, exiled, and so on.

  Everything was laid out, including the disposition of confiscated property, like a military campaign.35

  The chief of the secret police, Genrikh G. Yagoda, instructed his paladins to mobilize the Chekist ranks, “which once again have a tremendous, difficult job ahead of them…. We are engaging in a new battle, we must wage it with minimal losses on our side. This requires a sudden, devastating strike, the force of which depends solely on our preparation and organization, and discipline.”36

  Politburo members such as Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Molotov went into the countryside, complete with units of the secret police, on armed trains. Their scribbled notes back to the Kremlin told of resistance and, with some relish, of the need to obliterate it. But it was Stalin himself who urged on the whole process, as he pressed regional and local bosses to keep going. His commissars, embracing the murderous activity, told themselves they embodied “Party-mindedness, morality, exactingness, attentiveness, good health, knowing their business well and bull nerves.” These self-aggrandizing images covered over self-indulgence, ruthlessness, and amorality.37

  There developed an atmosphere akin to the days of the civil war. Maxim Gorky, once a voice of conscience, now hailed the cruel campaign against the peasants. He had returned to the Soviet Union in 1928 after a peri
od of exile in the West and apparently wanted to show how Red he was. In leading newspapers and on the radio he stated the matter with brutal simplicity: “We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history, and this gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed.”38

  Each district slated for collectivization was visited by a troika of officials, which usually included the Communist Party’s first secretary, a member of the secret police, and the president of the local Soviet executive committee. The troikas sometimes showed up with “lists” or relied on denunciations.

  Regional authorities saw they could benefit from the large pool of “dekulakized” peasants forced off the land and into the burgeoning labor camp system. The free labor would help them fulfill quotas, and so they used these peasants, now turned into serfs, on various grand projects.39

  Just how savage it became for the victims would take a sorrowful book to tell. “Dekulakization brigades,” sent to the countryside and in collaboration with locals, engaged in excesses every bit as dreadful as anything seen during the civil war. City radicals joined up in brigades known as the “25,000ers”—with individual representatives called “Comrade Thousander” by the peasants.

  These activists were workers and young members of the Komsomol, or Communist Youth, and included many with disdain for the peasants and hatred for anyone deemed a kulak. The brigades, numbering up to 180,000 in 1930 and assisted by assorted others from trade unions, the Red Army, and the secret police, convinced themselves they had “History” on their side in the war against the kulaks, whose identity was as vague as could be. Stalin himself scribbled on a note at one point during all this: “What does kulak mean?”40

  By 1929–30, when most peasants were already impoverished, “rich” kulaks could hardly be found, so it became enough for a family to own two samovars, or have a “status symbol,” to be condemned. These goods served as “signs” of a kulak, and any peasants so identified were robbed of their every possession down to their underclothes and turned out in the streets. Local priests, resented for their religion, connections with the people, or reservations about Communism—whether expressed or not—were attacked and driven from their homes in the dead of winter.41

  The “dekulakers” were supposed to confiscate everything and pass it along to the kolkhoz, the new collective farm, but in fact, the confiscations were little more than state-sanctioned looting. The brigades consumed much of the food and drink they found, and their campaigns involved widespread rape and all kinds of other abuses.42

  Locals took advantage of these brigades to get rid of troublemakers, social outsiders, habitual drunks, or people who did not fit in. Rumor or hearsay that someone was a “harmful element” was sometimes enough to have the peasant deported. The attitude of some spiteful people was: “You’ve had a good coat on your back. Now it’s our turn to wear it!”43

  In some districts there were too few kulaks for the brigades to meet their quotas, so their wrath fell on “middle-income” peasants, who were barely removed from dire poverty. Their “crime” might be that they made “excessive visits to the church.”44

  This was man-made hell and embittered millions, who lost whatever trust they might have had in the Communist regime.

  10

  STALIN SOLIDIFIES HIS GRIP

  The scope of the upheaval in the countryside can be estimated by looking at the numbers affected. In 1930 alone 337,563 families were dekulakized, or well in excess of a half million people. It is not clear whether these figures include those subjected to sentencing by troikas of the OGPU. A separate document for 1930 lists 179,620 individuals who were sentenced by these “courts.” Of these, 10.6 percent (18,966 people) were executed; 55.3 percent (99, 319) sent to a concentration camp; and the rest “exiled” (21.3 percent, or 38, 179) or “banished” (4.3 percent, or 8,869). Exactly 7.9 percent (14, 287) were sentenced “conditionally” and handed over to the Commissariat of Justice or “freed.”1 The data are incomplete, as some areas had not sent in reports.

  In 1930 the dekulakization campaign turned the countryside upside down. Some regions—for example, the North Caucasus—went from less than 10 percent of their farms collectivized in 1929 to over 50 percent by mid-1930. Similar if not quite such dramatic changes affected the other major farming areas.2 Even then, the pursuit of the kulaks and collectivization continued.

  “DIZZY WITH SUCCESS”

  Stalin signaled a temporary halt by publishing a notorious article, “Dizzy with Success,” carried in all newspapers on March 2, 1930. According to this account, the government’s efforts had been unexpectedly easy, with no less than 50 percent of the farms collectivized by February 20. The country had “overfulfilled” the goals of the Five-Year Plan by more than 100 percent. The conclusion was that the “radical turn of the countryside toward Socialism may be considered as already achieved.”

  Stalin admitted in a backhanded way that some Party activists had become “dizzy with success” and foolishly thought they could accomplish anything in the wink of an eye. Acknowledging that some collective farms existed only on paper, he explained that the local officials, all too eager to boast, had apparently been exaggerating their accomplishments. Moreover, some of the overzealous went so far as “to register all the poultry of every household.” That was nonsense, he said, and disrupted collectivization. Just as it was important not to lag behind the Communist movement, no one should run too far ahead.3 Far from accepting responsibility for the dystopia in the countryside, Stalin was proud that the collective-farm movement was supposedly working out so well and that it was “voluntary.”

  The message was to slow down the collectivization drive—at least for the time being. The peasants had seen enough of the kolkhoz and did not relish being robbed of every possession and forced to join one. They had protested what was happening all along. Stalin now said frankly that some places were not yet ready for collective farms.

  After March 1930, the volume of protests fell off, but for all of that year an estimated 2.5 million peasants participated in approximately fourteen thousand protests, revolts, riots, or demonstrations. There was resistance on all kinds of grounds, especially based on hatred of collectivization and the rejection of dekulakization. These protests were linked to others, like those against church closings, taxes, and food problems. The massive opposition, often overlooked by historians, reached a scale not seen since the civil war.4

  Most affected were the better-off areas such as the Black Earth region, the North Caucasus, and western Ukraine. Some of the borderlands temporarily eluded the control of the central Soviet authorities. “Primitive rebels,” often led by women, used traditional weapons to attack and kill officials and to demand the return of their property and the dissolution of the kolkhoz. Against them the authorities used the harshest forms of terror. The protests never solidified into a united mass movement, but fell prey to the concerted actions of secret police. Beaten but not broken, the peasantry persisted in trying to preserve the little autonomy that remained as Stalinism encroached ever more on their lives.5

  GULAG

  Forced-labor and concentration camps were an established part of the Soviet system under Lenin. The camps did not fade away once the civil war ended and a tenuous peace returned.

  In the context of the Five-Year Plan, great new building projects, and collectivization, the camps took on a new function. Once primarily a prison system, they now also became a provider of slave labor. The almighty plan and the ambitious projects drawn up without regard to human suffering created an insatiable need for workers. Whereas earlier the Soviets had preached the idea of rehabilitation of criminals by way of forced labor, under the new schemes prisoners were driven until they dropped dead.

  Resistance to collectivization produced an enormous number of prisoners, and the Politburo set up commissions, beginning in 1928, to study what should be do
ne.

  The OGPU—the newest name given the secret police—was formally adopted in the context of the new constitution of the USSR on July 6, 1923. What was important was that the OGPU was linked directly to Sovnarkom and given all-union status. Felix Dzerzhinsky was named first chairman on September 18, 1923, with Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Yagoda as first and second deputy chairmen.6

  In early 1929, at one of the meetings of a commission on the future of labor and the camps, Yagoda said larger ones would take advantage of the windfall of new workers and that camps would be used as developmental tools in the north. He said it was difficult to attract workers to those areas, and putting camps there would make it possible to exploit the region’s natural resources. Using administrative and other techniques, he thought it would be possible to “force the freed prisoners to stay in the North, thereby populating our outer regions.”7

  The creation and control of the camp system emerged over several months in a haphazard fashion, and there were some turf wars within the commission over which commissariat should control the camps. On April 13, 1929, the recommendation was to create a system in which the old distinction between “ordinary” and “special” camps no longer held. The Politburo adopted a resolution titled “On the Utilization of the Labor of Criminal Prisoners.” It called for a network of camps to supplement the already-established Solovki camps. Accordingly, on June 27, 1929, the Politburo decided to transfer all “criminal prisoners” serving three years or more to the OGPU, whose concentration camps were to be expanded. The secret police already ruled the lives of untold thousands who were swept up in the collectivization of agriculture, so that it became one of the largest employers in the country—not to mention the cruelest.