Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Hundreds of thousands tried to escape to the cities to look for food or get on ration lists. To cut off the exodus, the government introduced internal passports on December 27, 1932. The passports, a despised feature of tsarist Russia, were issued to most townspeople over the age of sixteen—with the exception of the thirty or more groups officially “without rights,” the lishentsy. But no passports were given to peasants. The stamp in the passport (propiska) became a matter of life and death, a novel form of persecution.19

  Furthermore, Stalin and Molotov issued orders on January 22, 1933, to restrict the sale of railway tickets. Those caught trying to flee the famine were forced to turn back. Some were simply taken outside the city limits in open wagons and told to fend for themselves.20

  Miron Dolot’s memoir tells of his experiences as a young boy in Ukraine. He writes that his village was forcibly collectivized and that while they already suffered food shortages in 1931, the next two years brought full-scale famine. He remembered the “thousanders” who came for grain, not from the kulaks, but from the poor villagers now working against their will on the collective farms. Much that happened was senseless. Horses, once valued workmates of the peasants who cared for them, had been rounded up by the state and placed on collective farms without first taking steps to ensure they would be properly housed and fed. In the midst of the famine, the horses, now looked upon as “useless eaters,” died from starvation and neglect before the promised tractors were there to replace them.

  The villagers asked “Comrade Thousander” why their homes were searched for food when none existed. They were told the mere fact they were still alive proved there was food to be found. Although the harvest was good in 1932, the state took everything, and starvation grew rampant in the countryside.

  Dolot and his mother left for town in January 1933 to exchange two medallions of gold she had saved. On the way they saw death everywhere. He remembered how the open spaces “looked like a battlefield after a great war. Littering the fields were the bodies of starving farmers who had been combing the potato fields over and over again in the hope of finding at least a fragment of a potato that might have been overlooked or left over from the harvest. They died where they collapsed in their endless search for food. Some of the frozen corpses must have been lying out there for months. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to cart them away and bury them.”21

  By the next spring Dolot’s village was a ghost town. It

  had become a desolate place, horror lurking in every house and in every backyard. We felt forsaken by the entire world. The main road which had been the artery of traffic and the center of village life was empty and overgrown with weeds and grass. Humans and animals were rarely seen on it. Many houses stood dilapidated and empty, their windows and doorways gaping. The owners were dead, deported to the north, or gone from the village in search of food. Once these houses were surrounded by barns, stables, cattle enclosures, pigpens, and fences. Now only the remnants of these structures could be seen. They had been ripped apart and used as firewood.22

  The peasants died in the hundreds of thousands. Some went quietly, others died of poisoning when they ate things unfit for human consumption, and an unknown number committed suicide. Vasily Grossman describes it as follows:

  In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else. People would take crumbs from each other. The wife turned against the husband and the husband against the wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly any strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.23

  Some of the collectors took advantage of their position to exchange food for sexual favors.24 Reports of the Ukrainian OGPU in May 1933 suggest that cannibalism became common.25

  Protests about the excesses committed by the “thousanders” and others were sent to Moscow from many sources, including letters from the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (later a Nobel Prize winner), whose book Virgin Soil Upturned (1932) was based on research into the collective-farm system on the Don. Stalin knew Sholokhov and recommended the book to Kaganovich. He said the writer might not have been all that talented, but was “profoundly honest” and wrote “about things he knows well.”26

  Sholokhov sent Stalin two letters in April 1933 describing what he saw in the North Caucasus. He detailed the tortures used to get grain and worried that such methods would discredit the idea of the collective farm. Stalin responded and told the novelist not to be deceived. If some activists were sadistic, they would be punished, but he should not lose sight of the fact that those who withheld their grain, far from being “innocent lambs,” were engaged in sabotage and prepared to have the Red Army and workers go without food. “The fact that this sabotage was silent and appeared to be quite peaceful (there was no bloodshed) changes nothing—these people deliberately tried to undermine the Soviet state. It is a fight to the death, Comrade Sholokhov!”27

  Nevertheless, Stalin had the allegations investigated, and the Politburo gave grain to the two districts mentioned by Sholokhov. The Politburo approved additional small amounts of grain, some of which was supposed to go to areas of Ukraine, but precisely who received that food remains uncertain.28

  The famine was the result of disastrous farm policies, coupled with wasteful collection measures, so in that sense it was man-made, not simply the result of natural catastrophe.

  Moreover, the regime exacerbated the already dreadful situation because it continued grain exports. These went up dramatically in 1930 over 1929 and rose again slightly in 1931. Thereafter, exports were reduced, but not before the famine had already set in.29

  FATALITY RATES

  Historians have given varied answers concerning the fatalities of the famine, partly because the statistical evidence is flawed. Mortalities were not always recorded, and the dead were often left where they fell. It was also true that deaths related to the famine continued long after, because survivors whose health was seriously undermined died prematurely. Kazakhstan went through a demographic catastrophe in this period, part of which involved a typhus epidemic, and another epidemic in the lower Volga had similar consequences.30 A scholarly account based on newly opened Russian archives concludes that the “excess mortality”—that is, the deaths above and beyond “normal” statistical projections—was between four and five million. These figures can be taken as a minimum.31

  Kazakhstan in central Asia came under the yoke of collectivization, even though no more than 25 percent of the population was engaged in agriculture and a small percentage of those in grain growing. The mostly Islamic people were either nomadic or seminomadic—that is, they migrated with their herds in summer. Soviet experts advised against trying to collectivize this region, but under the Five-Year Plan the Kazakh Communist Party forged ahead, and the people resisted by slaughtering their livestock. The experiment failed, and a famine, coupled with typhus, resulted.

  Nicolas Werth estimates a total of six million deaths in the 1932–33 famine: four million in Ukraine, one million in Kazakhstan, and another million in the North Caucasus and the Black Earth region.32 Robert Conquest suggests five million died in Ukraine, not four million, but otherwise is in agreement with Werth on the effects of the famine.33

  The dekulakization campaign, which began in 1929, was separate from but sometimes overlapped with the famine. Those labeled kulaks suffered from persecution, and an unknown number of them sent to the camps died as a direct result of the famine.

  Between 1930 and 1933 over a million kulak households were affected by dekulakization. Approximately 2.1 million accused of being first
-category kulaks were exiled outside their own region as “special settlers” (spetsposelentsy), but went to work in camps and settlements of the OGPU. In addition, between 2 and 2.5 million were branded second-category kulaks and exiled to somewhere away from their homes, but remained (for a time at least) in the same region. A final group, estimated at between 1 and 1.25 million, “dekulakized themselves,” that is, left their homes and fled. According to what are called “official records,” 241,355 died in exile, and 330,667 “escaped and were not recaptured”—all of this just in 1932–33. The famine continued into 1933–34, the result not of drought but of the state’s brutal grain extraction program.34

  We should be skeptical about Soviet statistics, which inflated production figures “under pressure from politicians” to make the system appear to be prospering. Intimidation was likely also applied to reduce figures on mortalities, lest the system look the failure it was. There can be little doubt that the famine as a whole was one of the worst disasters in modern European history.

  THE STATE INVADES THE COUNTRYSIDE

  Stalin said over and over that the problems of agriculture lay in its poor organization, and he put forward detailed proposals, including the deployment of the Machine Tractor Station (MTS). The theory was to pool machinery and utilize it on the great expanse of collectivized land.35 In January 1933, his proposals began to be implemented. The MTS also had political sections (politotdels), representatives of the central authorities “specifically chosen” from the urban Communist Party. They were sent “to direct the political and economic reorganization” but were independent of the local (raion) Party. With exclusive rights to direct political work on the collective farms, they had links all the way to Moscow. To reinforce the surveillance and control from the center, the deputy of the politotdel was a member of the OGPU.

  Although the political sections of the MTS changed over time, they carried forward the Party’s message and led recruitment drives. The MTS went on to boast enormous gains in terms of machines available. The production and procurement of grain crept upward only slowly during the remainder of the 1930s, and there was no great breakthrough. What was crushed in the process was the last shred of peasant independence.36

  The relationship between the Stalinist regime and the peasantry was not governed only by repression. To get them to bend, Moscow cooled its missionary zeal in the countryside. To entice them to join the collective farms, the government left them some room to work on small plots of land. The peasants manipulated this hybrid system as best they could and over time even accommodated themselves to the collectivization as a whole.37

  Stalin may have hoped his image among the peasants would become something between the “good tsar” and the “leader” who dispensed justice and provided rewards for hard work. But memories of collectivization remained raw, and peasant attitudes toward him in the late 1930s were generally “sour and wary.”38

  Andrea Graziosi thinks Stalin won more grudging support. She suggests that the victory in the battle for grain was “also Stalin’s personal victory. Many peasants now ‘recognized’ him as a stern, master-like ‘father’ whom it was impossible to disobey (even though one could still ‘cheat’ him of a small part of the harvest).” Graziosi believes that this attitude was “one of the roots of the indubitable hold of Stalin’s cult from the mid-1930s onward also in the countryside.”39

  The tough-minded peasants had little choice but to recognize Stalin as their master, since his power of life and death over them was a fact they could not change. Joining in the celebrations associated with the Stalin cult would have been a prudent act for a countryside beaten into submission by a tyrannical and murderous “father.”

  FROM BRIEF “THAW” TO GREAT TERROR

  At the beginning of 1934 Stalin signaled victory in the war against the countryside and a “thaw” in militant Communism. The OGPU was dissolved on February 20, 1934, and incorporated into the new Union People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. Unlike its predecessors, the NKVD initially did not have the power to execute people on its own authority. Cases of treason would henceforth go before the courts. A symbol that police terror might be ending was the death on May 10 of Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, chairman of the OGPU.40

  Genrikh Yagoda, known to be somewhat less of a hard-liner, became the head of the NKVD. The “thaw” or “retreat,” such as it was, hardly lasted a year. It ended on December 1, 1934, with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the dynamic Party leader in Leningrad and supposedly beloved by Stalin.

  Suspicion circulated, especially within dissident circles, that Stalin ordered the assassination because Kirov had become a rival, identified with a more liberal course. No conclusive proof has emerged. If in fact Stalin ordered the killing, it might indicate that he wanted a clampdown on more liberal-minded Party members, perhaps that he meant to touch off events like the terror that would sweep through all sectors of society in 1937–38. Whatever the hidden truths, Stalin used Kirov’s murder to his political advantage and set in motion a process that developed into the Great Terror.

  The Kirov assassination forms part of the backdrop for the mass crimes that followed. Young activists, particularly those who rejected “the tyrant in the Kremlin,” recognized the murder as an excuse for Stalin and his “gang” to launch a campaign “of extermination against the dissenting sector of the Party.” Thus they saw Kirov’s death as the end of the last hope for democracy in the Party, a signal that Russia would soon “be bleeding to death.”41

  Stalin ostentatiously went to Leningrad to investigate and eventually even questioned some of the suspects. The Politburo passed a decree, formulated by him on his trip, which became the notorious law of December 1, 1934. Investigative agencies were to speed up the cases and not to wait to consider the possibility of pardon. The NKVD was permitted to execute immediately. In sum, this decree provided the legal basis for the police terror and purges to come.42

  Stalin handed over the investigation of Kirov’s assassination not to Yagoda but to Nikolai Yezhov, one of the rising stars in the NKVD. Although Kirov’s murderer was a disgruntled Party member who was caught on the spot, Stalin insisted there was a conspiracy involving his former opponents Kamenev, Zinoviev, and perhaps others. This was the line of investigation the relentless Yezhov now pursued, and he came up with the desired results.

  Yezhov reported directly to Stalin and maligned the leadership of the NKVD for its lack of professionalism and readiness. With Stalin’s support, Yezhov moved up in the police and began talking about “idleness” and “complacency.” He said Kremlin security was so lax that it was possible for assassins to get at Stalin and laid this “failure,” too, at Yagoda’s door. It was no surprise on September 25, 1936, when Stalin wrote to members of the Politburo and demanded Yagoda’s dismissal. The grounds were that the man was not “up to the task in the matter of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc” supposedly responsible for Kirov’s murder.43

  Some impressionable idealists were inclined to take Stalin and Yezhov at their word, to believe that there was a “new counterrevolutionary underground” afoot and that “terror was indispensable.”44 Their convictions were about to be tested.

  15

  TERROR AS POLITICAL PRACTICE

  Soviet law enforcement in the 1920s and 1930s was far from being ever present and all knowing. At the beginning of the 1930s the police numbered half what they had been under the tsar during the Great War. There were even fewer in the countryside, where often vigilantes were the ones keeping a semblance of order. In the cities enforcement favored the use of roundups or sweeps of likely areas. The new passport system provided a means of separating out the “undesirables.”

  FORMER PEOPLE

  The “passportization” law, introduced in December 1932 to stem the flow of peasants from the countryside, took a year to implement. Lev Kopelev later remarked how the obligatory registration of all citizens “laid an administrative and juridical cornerstone for the new serfdom; it
provided one of the foundations for an unparalleled state totalitarianism.”1 By mid-1934 around twelve million residents in “regime” cities had passports, which more or less guaranteed or “privileged” supplies. Almost fifteen million had them in “non-regime” and less fortunate cities.2

  The passports singled out those who did not fit the image of the model Soviet citizen. Specific groups were not just denied the crucial documents and food rations, but could be expelled from cities, like kulaks or dekulakized persons. Also banished was anyone with a criminal record; most refugees from abroad; the lishentsy, or “former” people, like former policemen, nobles, and merchants. The relatives of all of the above could also be denied the right to live in the city.3

  Disenfranchised people could flee and change their identities and were hard to keep track of. For the electoral campaigns of the late 1920s, the Russian Federation reported as disenfranchised 3 to 4 percent of the rural electorate and 7 to 8 percent in cities.4

  Stalin removed the status of lishentsy in 1936, but old identities proved almost indelible, and many “formers” were among the first caught in 1937 by secret police order No. 00447. The authorities pursued “former kulaks,” “former members of anti-Soviet parties,” “former Whites,” “former tsarist bureaucrats,” and other such groups. One official argued that the senselessness of the idea of “formers” was reason to drop it: “At one time we had former people; now it turns out we have the children of former people. It looks like soon there will even be the grandchildren of former people’s children. How far will this go?…If a man is 74 years old and he is the son of a former trader, then surely he is not himself a former trader… children of former people, grandchildren of former people, great grandchildren of former people—we can’t carry on like this.”5