Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  He ran out of time and resigned on January 28. He informed the president that there were then only three options: a majority Hitler cabinet; a minority Hitler cabinet; or for him to carry on. Hindenburg turned for advice to Papen.

  Papen and Oskar von Hindenburg, along with other close advisers, had been seriously negotiating with Hitler since January 18, but he kept insisting he would accept nothing short of the chancellorship. Hindenburg proved to be almost as stubborn. Ultimately, Papen recommended Hitler, on condition that he himself would be named the vice-chancellor. Hitler agreed with the arrangement and was willing to have only a limited number of Nazi ministers. The president decided after all to appoint the “Bohemian corporal” the new head of government.34

  The Hitler cabinet was, except for two posts, dominated by conservatives. One of these, Alfred Hugenberg, almost brought the negotiations to a standstill by refusing to accept Hitler’s one remaining condition, namely new federal elections. He argued until moments before 11: 00 a.m. on January 30, when they were received by Hindenburg for Hitler’s official appointment. Hitler was still willing to go to the brink, and at the last minute Hugenberg relented. Hitler got the chancellorship and new elections as well. After swearing in the cabinet, Hindenburg closed the brief ceremony with the words “And now, gentlemen, forward with God!”35

  The legality principle that got Hitler into power would also make resistance to him difficult. The feeble last-minute efforts of the KPD and SPD to work out a united front came to nothing. There would be no general strike or any real resistance. The left did not want to give the Nazis an excuse to use the police or the army, and waited in vain for them to do something patently illegal to mobilize opposition.

  Just over a week before his appointment, Hitler spoke to a typically large audience of twenty thousand in Berlin. He claimed he already had 50 percent of the people behind him. What he wanted was to gain the participation “in a few years of 60, 70, 80, and finally 100 percent of the nation.” As he never failed to repeat, the lessons of 1918—the German revolution and defeat in the war—showed what happened when the people were not really behind the state.36

  Whereas Hitler was emphasizing popular support, Franz von Papen, with little understanding of the dynamics of the Hitler revolution, was convinced that he and other experienced politicians would have an easy time of it with the corporal. He exclaimed to Minister of Finance Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, “We have hired him!” He asked a doubting acquaintance, “What do you want? I have Hindenburg’s confidence. Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.”37

  On the night of Hitler’s appointment, Hermann Göring sounded a bold note: “We are closing the darkest era of Germany’s history and are beginning a new chapter.”38 At almost the same time Goebbels recorded his impressions of the Nazi “Revolution”:

  It seems like a dream. The Wilhelmstrasse belongs to us. The führer is already working in the Reich chancellery. We stand in the window upstairs, watching hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people march past the aged Reich president and the young chancellor in the flaming torchlight, shouting their joy and gratitude…. Germany is at a turning point in its history…. Outside the Kaiserhof the masses are in wild uproar. In the meantime Hitler’s appointment had become public. The thousands soon become tens of thousands. An endless stream of people floods the Wilhelmstrasse…. The struggle for power now lies behind us, but we must go on working to retain it…. Indescribable enthusiasm fills the streets…. Hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands march past our windows in never-ending, uniform rhythm. The rising of a nation! Germany has awakened! In a spontaneous explosion of joy the people espouse the German Revolution…. The new Reich has risen, sanctified with blood. Fourteen years of work have been crowned by victory. We have reached our goal. The German Revolution begins!39

  Papen, initially so distant and pompous, soon became swept up in the revolutionary enthusiasm. Later he recalled that on the evening of Hitler’s appointment he was in the room with the chancellor as the crowds streamed by in the streets below:

  We watched an endless procession of hundreds of thousands of delirious people, from every level of society, parading with lighted torches before Hindenburg and the Chancellor. It was a clear, starlit night, and the long columns of uniformed Brownshirts, SS and Stahlhelm, with their brass bands, provided an unforgettable picture. As they approached the window at which the old Reich President appeared to the crowd there were respectful shouts. But about a hundred yards further on, Hitler stood on the little balcony of the new Reich Chancellery. As soon as they saw him, the marchers burst into frantic applause. The contrast was most marked and seemed to emphasize the transition from a moribund regime to the new revolutionary forces.

  I had preferred not to put myself forward and was sitting quietly in the room behind the balcony, leaving Hitler and Goering to take the salute. But every now and then Hitler turned round and beckoned me to join him. The fantastic ovation had put even these hardened party chiefs into a state of ecstasy. It was an extraordinary experience, and the endless repetition of the triumphal cry “Heil, Heil, Sieg Heil!” rang in my ears like a tocsin. When Hitler turned round to speak to me, his voice seemed choked with sobs. “What an immense task we have set ourselves, Herr von Papen—we must never part until our work is accomplished.” I was happy to agree.40

  “LEGAL REVOLUTION”

  “Revolution” is usually defined as “a complete and forcible overthrow of an established government or political system,” and therefore illegal. However, Karl Dietrich Bracher suggests that we think about Hitler’s actions after his appointment as a “legal revolution.” Hitler avoided Lenin’s methods because of “the German people’s deeply rooted aversion to and mistrust of overt revolution.” For Bracher, this legality tactic “played a decisive role” in what would become a new type of dictatorship.41

  The aim of Hitler’s revolution was a dictatorship by popular consent, whence he could achieve legal recognition for his relentless war on democracy, Communists, and Jews. Lenin and Stalin, schooled in Russian terrorism, saw revolution as justified insurgence against tyranny. Confident as they were in the vanguard of world revolution, guided by the Marxist idea of the class struggle, anticipating some kind of final and bloody showdown, and already used to the illegal methods of the underground, they took it for granted that something akin to civil war would be needed to secure the revolution. They had no interest in waiting on ordinary people or wooing popular opinion. The Soviet peoples would, in all their diversity and economic backwardness, be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

  PART FIVE

  STALIN’S REIGN OF TERROR

  14

  FIGHT AGAINST THE COUNTRYSIDE

  In 1930–31 Stalin’s regime carried out a dekulakization program in two waves, which together deported 1.8 million people accused of being kulak or “kulak-like” (podkulachnik). As we have seen, many were sent to the Gulag system or exiled to “special settlements” in distant parts of the country. By January 1932, the OGPU estimated that close to 500,000, or nearly 30 percent of these people, were dead or had run away.1 Two million more who had been slated for deportation within their region (category-three kulaks) joined the exodus to the cities involving a total of twelve million people.2 This disruption of normal life had fatal consequences for vast numbers of innocents.

  The peasantry was resilient and resisted collectivization away from the glare of the police and in surreptitious ways. According to available statistics for 1930, 55 percent of all peasant households may have been on collective farms in March, but the percentage had fallen by more than half by June. In some areas (like the central Black Earth region), over 80 percent of those collectivized in March fell to just over 15 percent in June. Thus, when they had a chance and a choice, all but the poorest—who might benefit by joining such a venture—left collective farms in droves.3

  RENEWED ASSAULTS ON THE PEASANTRY
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br />   Shortages began to spread, and on January 13, 1931, the state introduced a rationing system for essential food and commodities. The exclusion from the provisioning system of the peasantry and those considered disenfranchised meant that 80 percent of the country had to fend for themselves.4

  Given population growth and the move to the cities by millions, the state needed to collect more grain for 1931 than it had the previous year, and still more in 1932. This was a futile task and led to desperate protests from the peasants. They stole or slaughtered livestock and ate the meat before it could be taken from them. Rumor was that no one on the collective farms would get any. This turn of events was an economic disaster, since farms could not operate without farm animals in an era when most had no tractors.

  The regime renewed the collectivization drive to force peasants onto industrial-scale operations and increase production, and in 1932, with famine already in the air, just over 60 percent of all peasant households were back on the collective farms. That figure would grow to 89.6 percent by 1936 and include virtually all peasant households in the main agricultural regions.5

  On June 16, 1932, the Politburo discussed calls for help from Communist leaders in Ukraine and agreed to send them unused oat seed, corn, and grain.6 Two days later, in a letter to Kaganovich and Molotov on behalf of the Politburo, Stalin acknowledged reports of “impoverishment and famine” but took no responsibility, nor did he admit that quotas were too high. He blamed the famine on the personal failings of those directly in charge, particularly the first secretaries of the Party in Ukraine and the Urals, who had supposedly divided the total quota among all localities and collective farms in a “mechanical equalizing” way, instead of demanding more from better-producing areas to compensate for poorer ones. He castigated officials for being too preoccupied with new industry, when they should have been keener to secure a prosperous agriculture, which was needed to support industrial development.

  Stalin wanted the Five-Year Plan fulfilled “at any cost,” and he suggested having a meeting with regional authorities and instructing them on how to improve. They were to be held personally responsible for any shortcomings.7

  Some food assistance was offered to the starving. By July, Stalin was willing to reduce the demands for grain from Ukraine, but only for collective farms and individual peasants who had “especially suffered.” In a follow-up note on August 5, he blamed “the main shortcoming” on the “organizational lapses” of the Commissariat of Agriculture and outlined needed changes.8

  He also ordered an end to “sabotage.” On July 20, 1932, he wrote to Lazar Kaganovich, by then the third most important man in the Party after Stalin and Molotov, and complained about thefts in the countryside by “dekulakized persons and other antisocial elements.” He believed there had to be a new law that treated certain thefts as “counterrevolutionary.” He was incensed about robberies from freight cars, collective farms, and cooperatives and demanded they be punished by “a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment, and as a rule, by death.” He also wanted the OGPU to introduce stricter surveillance. As for profiteers, he said bluntly: “We must eradicate this scum” and send “active agitators” to concentration camps.9

  The note to Kaganovich led to the notorious law “On the Protection of the Property of the State Enterprises, Collective Farms, and Cooperatives and the Strengthening of Public (Socialist) Ownership,” which went into force with its publication in Pravda on August 7. This law, designed to be used against hungry peasants who stole grain from the fields, was known as the “law on the five ears of corn.” In the first months alone, tens of thousands of starving people were found guilty of the crime of “counterrevolutionary” theft. Of that number, an estimated five thousand were sentenced to death, and many thousands more were given ten-year prison sentences.10

  On August 11, Stalin suggested softening the law. Those executed should be guilty of systematic thefts, not petty ones, but the repressive process had a momentum of its own. District-level officials continued to be more radical than Stalin and fired judges who would not prosecute to the full measure of the law. Mass repression, beatings, and vigilante acts continued in many parts of the country.

  Stalin admitted to Kaganovich that the crisis in Ukraine was the “most important issue” facing the country. He said they might lose the great grain-growing region “unless we begin to straighten out the situation.”

  He was reminded by some fifty district committees from the area that the grain procurement plan was “unrealistic.” He refused to budge and, determined to move ahead on the backs of the peasants, stubbornly held to the idea that the problem was poor leadership combined with resistance by “counterrevolutionaries.” His solution was to make organizational-administrative changes and to install new leaders in Ukraine who would turn it “into a real fortress of the USSR, into a genuinely exemplary republic.”11

  Stalin was by no means alone in his unbending attitude. The Politburo sent Kaganovich and Molotov to lead commissions to the North Caucasus and Ukraine on October 22, 1932, and like Stalin, they blamed the problems on sabotage organized by “kulaks,” “counterrevolutionaries,” “saboteurs,” or “foreign elements.”

  Raids were used to search for kulak grain—but in fact most such people had long since been deported. The assault was actually on collective farms not meeting quotas and thought to be holding back. Even regional and local Party leaders felt the men in the Kremlin were demanding too much. Moscow’s response in the North Caucasus was to arrest five thousand “criminally complacent” functionaries, along with fifteen thousand collective-farm workers. The Cossacks still in the area were again victimized. Molotov followed a similar pattern of repression in Ukraine, and other grain-producing areas soon did so as well. In 1932, tens of thousands were deported to the Gulag, and more followed the next year.12

  CAUGHT BETWEEN VILLAGE AND CITY

  In November 1932 the Politburo ordered local authorities who had not fulfilled their quotas to carry out new raids. They sent activists, like the infamous 25,000ers they had used earlier against the kulaks, to get grain from peasants “at any cost.” These “thousanders” used all forms of terror to achieve their goals. Stalin told the Politburo that “certain groups” of collective farmers and peasants had to be dealt a “devastating blow.” Communists suspected of being in cahoots or sympathizing with them were condemned; in some places, such as the North Caucasus, half the Party secretaries were expelled on Kaganovich’s orders.13

  There is extensive evidence on the deteriorating situation in the countryside. Lev Kopelev, a young and enthusiastic Communist and a “thousander” who took part in these raids, left a memoir. He accepted Stalin’s views and recalled how he “was convinced that we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting against kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the five-year plan.” He thought he had a mission to save “the souls of these peasants who were mired in unconscientiousness, in ignorance, who succumbed to enemy agitation, who did not understand the great truth of communism.”14

  The “thousanders” believed the peasants had plenty of grain stashed away. To get at these “private reserves,” the raiders used what they called “undisputed confiscation,” which is to say, they took everything else from a household, including clothing, religious objects, and even family pictures. Kopelev says it was “excruciating” to hear the screams of protest, but he had persuaded himself not to give in “to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland.”15

  Kopelev’s commitment to Communism and Stalin was coupled with disdain for peasants, an attitude common already in Lenin’s time. Kopelev persisted in the ritual of praising Stalin as

  the most perspicacious, the most wise (at that time they hadn’t yet started calling him “great” and “brilliant”). He said: “The Struggle for grain is the struggle for socialism.” And we believed him unconditionally. And later w
e believed that unconditional collectivization was unavoidable if we were to overcome the capriciousness and uncertainty of the market and the backwardness of individual farming, to guarantee a steady supply of grain, milk and meat to the cities. And also if we were to reeducate millions of peasants, those petty landowners and hence potential bourgeoisie, potential kulaks, to transform them into laborers with a social conscience, to liberate them from “the idiocy of rural life,” from ignorance and prejudice, and to accustom them to culture, to all the boons of socialism.16

  Victor Kravchenko, another activist for a time enthralled by Stalin, remembered on his rounds that “despite harsh police measures to keep the victims at home, Dniepropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants. Many of them lay listless, too weak even to beg, around railroad stations. Their children were little more than skeletons with swollen bellies.

  In the past, friends and relatives in the country sent food packages to the urban districts. Now the process was reversed. But our own rations were so small and uncertain that few dared to part with their provisions.”17

  In Ukraine, which was the worst affected in the USSR, the level of urban mortality was 50 percent higher in 1933 than in 1932, but in rural areas it was nearly three times as high. By contrast, mortality rates in the areas around Moscow and Leningrad were largely unchanged in 1932–33. Outside Ukraine, there were areas like the lower Volga where mortality rates also jumped, indicating that more than one nationality suffered in the famine and that epidemic illnesses also played a role.18