Borderland

by Anna Reid

  Between 1937 and 1939 a third wave of terror swept the whole of the Soviet Union. Victims spanned all types: factory-workers and scientists, priests and atheists, shop-girls and Party wives. For every Party member arrested, six or seven non-Party members also went to the cells, where they were threatened or tortured into denouncing colleagues and neighbours. In one Kiev district sixty-nine people were denounced by one man; in Odessa, over a hundred.9 The victims’ actual identity mattered little, bald quotas for desired numbers of arrestees being imposed from above. Vera Nanivska, a Kiev friend, told me what happened to her grandparents:

  One night – it happened all over the place under Stalin – they were warned by friends in the local soviet that they were on the list of tomorrow’s arrests. That night they left everything and fled, to another small town not very far away. You didn’t have to really hide because Stalin didn’t care about who was on the list and who was not on the list, it didn’t matter. What the Stalin regime cared about was the constant threat, the constant fear . . .

  Ironically, the system allowed some genuine anti-Communists, like Vera’s grandparents, to fade into the background. Mykola Stasyuk, an ex-minister in the Rada government, took a job as a park attendant in Mariupol, surviving to become a partisan leader during the Second World War.10

  Exactly how many people died in the purges is unclear. Conquest reckons that between 1937 and 1938, in the Soviet Union as a whole, 1 million people were executed, and 2 million died in labour camps, the total camp population at the end of the period being about 7 million, and the prison population another 1 million. Adam Ulam comes up with half a million people executed, and somewhere between 3 and 12 million sent to the camps. What percentage of these were Ukrainians we do not know. A mass grave of purge victims in the Bykivnya forest outside Kiev, rediscovered in the late 1980s, contains an estimated 200,000 bodies. Another at Vynnytsya, uncovered during the war underneath a Park of Culture and Recreation, holds at least 10,000, all shot in the back of the head. In Ukrainian villages, quite casually, one hears of other sites, forgotten by everyone but the locals, who themselves can’t quite remember who shot who, or why, or when. Faced with old battleaxes prone to rhapsodising about the good old days of the Soviet Union, I found that a failsafe riposte was to inquire gently whether any of their relatives had been ‘repressed’ under Stalin. The answer was invariably a grudging Yes.

  Rural terror ran in three overlapping stages: food requisitioning, dekulakisation and mass starvation. In the spring of 1928, eighteen months before the first batch of Ukrainian intelligentsia were put on trial in Kharkiv, requisitioning brigades started appearing in the villages, the first time this had happened since the end of ‘War Communism’ seven years earlier. A group of activists, some local, some from nearby towns, would arrive, call a meeting, and demand ‘voluntary’ surrender of a certain quantity of grain or meat. The villagers, naturally, usually voted against. Thereupon the activists denounced the village spokesmen as counter-revolutionary kulaks, and put them under arrest or confiscated their property. The meeting was kept in session until the remainder changed their minds. The confiscations provoked widespread resistance – riots, looting and the murder of several hundred requisitioning agents.

  The next stage, announced by Stalin in December 1929, was the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.11 In practice, this meant the arrest and deportation of anybody who resisted collectivisation – that is to say, of any peasant who refused to give up his land, tools and livestock in favour of bonded labour at derisory wages on a state-owned farm run by a Party appointee. Singled out were richer peasants, priests, and those who could write or read – in other words, all the villages’ natural leaders. Like the purges, dekulakisation proceeded on a quota system. Provincial OGPU offices came up with a total of ‘kulaks’ to be ‘eliminated’, and distributed it among local troikas made up of a soviet member, a Party official and an OGPU man, for fulfilment as they pleased. Denunciations were encouraged, giving ample scope for malice. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ wrote Grossman. ‘You wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows.’12 In some places, dekulakisation was only applied to heads of households, in others to entire families. Protests – very common – from local officials that there were simply no kulaks in their area were ignored.

  In the winter of 1930–31, in the Kharkiv Technological Institute, the up-and-coming Komsomolyets Viktor Kravchenko started hearing something of what was going on:

  Rumours of incredible cruelty in the villages in connection with the liquidation of the kulaks were passed from mouth to mouth. We saw long trains of cattle cars filled with peasants passing through Kharkov, presumably on their way to the tundras of the North, as part of their ‘liquidation’. Communist officials were being murdered in the villages and recalcitrant peasants were being executed en masse. Rumors also circulated about the slaughter of livestock by peasants in their ‘scorched earth’ resistance to forced collectivisation. A Moscow decree making the unauthorised killing of livestock a capital crime confirmed the worst of these reports.

  The railroad stations of the city were jammed with ragged, hungry peasants fleeing their homes. ‘Bezprizorni’, homeless children, who had been so much in evidence in the civil war and famine years were again everywhere. Beggars, mostly country people but also some city people, again appeared on the streets.

  The press told glorious tales of accomplishment. The Turkestan–Siberian railway completed. New industrial combinats opened in the Urals, in Siberia, everywhere. Collectivization 100 per cent completed in one province after another. Open letters of ‘thanks’ to Stalin for new factories, new housing projects . . .

  Which was the reality, which the illusion? The hunger and terror in the villages, the homeless children – or the statistics of achievement?13

  Transferred to the Metallurgy Institute in Dnipropetrovsk, his doubts grew. Arriving home one evening, he was surprised to find a small girl, ‘grey with exhaustion and prematurely old’, squatting by the radiator pipes on the kitchen floor. She was called Katya, his mother told him, and she had come begging to the door. After supper she told her story:

  We lived in Pokrovnaya. My father didn’t want to join the kolkhoz. All kinds of people argued with him and took him away and beat him but still he wouldn’t go in. They shouted he was a kulak agent. . . We had a horse, a cow, a heifer, five sheep, some pigs and a barn. That was all. Every night the constable would come and take papa to the village soviet. They asked him for grain and didn’t believe that he had no more . . . For a whole week they wouldn’t let father sleep and they beat him with sticks and revolvers till he was black and blue and swollen all over . . .

  Then one morning . . . strangers came to the house. One of them was from the GPU and the chairman of our soviet was with him too. Another man wrote in a book everything that was in the house, even the furniture and our clothes and pots and pans. Then wagons arrived and everything was taken away . . .

  Mamochka, my dear little mother, she cried and prayed and fell on her knees and even father and big brother Valya cried and sister Shura. But it did no good. We were told to get dressed and take along some bread and salt pork, onions and potatoes, because we were going on a long journey . . .

  They put us all in the old church. There were many other parents and children from our village, all with bundles and all weeping. There we spent the whole night, in the dark, praying and crying, praying and crying. In the morning about thirty families were marched down the road surrounded by militiamen. People on the road made the sign of the cross when they saw us and also started crying.

  At the station there were many other people like us, from other villages. It seemed like thousands. We were all crushed into a stone barn but they wouldn’t let my dog Volchok come in though he’d followed us all the way down the road. I heard him howling when I was inside in the dark.

 
After a while we were let out and driven into cattle cars, long rows of them, but I didn’t see Volchok anywhere and the guard kicked me when I asked. As soon as our car was filled up so that there was no room for more, even standing up, it was locked from the outside. We all shrieked and prayed to the Holy Virgin. Then the train started. No one knew where we were going. Some said Siberia, but others said no, the far North or even the hot deserts.

  Near Kharkov my sister Shura and I were allowed out to get some water. Mama gave us some money and a bottle and said to try and buy some milk for our baby brother who was very sick. We begged the guard so long that he let us go out which he said was against his rules. Not far away were some peasant huts so we ran there as fast as our feet would carry us.

  When we told these people who we were they began to cry. They gave us something to eat right away, then filled the bottle with milk and wouldn’t take the money. Then we ran back to the station. But we were too late and the train had gone away without us.14

  A few weeks later Kravchenko found himself collectivising in person. Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.15

  Kravchenko was despatched to Podgorodnoye, a large village not far from Dnipropetrovsk. Collectivisation had already reduced it to a shambles. Crops stood unharvested in the fields; farm machinery lay scattered about in the open, rusting and broken. Emaciated cattle wandered the farmyards, unfed and caked in manure. Kravchenko spent the next weeks persuading the peasants to bring in what remained of the harvest while his colleagues went about the business of grain requisitioning and further dekulakisation. He claims – not wholly convincingly – to have been profoundly surprised and shocked when he saw at firsthand just what their methods were:

  Evening was falling when I drove into the village, with several companions. Immediately we realised that something was happening. Agitated groups stood around. Women were weeping. I hurried to the Soviet building.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked the constable.

  ‘Another round-up of kulaks,’ he replied. ‘Seems the dirty business will never end. The GPU and District Committee people came this morning.’

  A large crowd was gathered outside the building. Policemen tried to scatter them, but they came back. Some were cursing. A number of women and their children were weeping hysterically and calling the names of their husbands and fathers. It was all like a scene out of a nightmare.

  Inside the Soviet building, Arshinov was talking to a GPU official. Both of them were smiling, apparently exchanging pleasantries of some sort. In the back yard, guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants, young and old, with bundles on their backs. A few of them were weeping. The others stood there sullen, resigned, hopeless . . .

  For some reason, on this occasion, most of the families were being left behind. Their outcries filled the air. As I came out of the Soviet house again, I saw two militiamen leading a middle-aged peasant. It was obvious that he had been manhandled – his face was black and blue and his gait was painful; his clothes were ripped in a way indicating a struggle.

  As I stood there, distressed, ashamed, helpless, I heard a woman shouting in an unearthly voice. Everyone looked in the direction of her cry and a couple of GPU men started running towards her. The woman, her hair streaming, held a flaming sheaf of grain in her hands. Before anyone could reach her, she had tossed the burning sheaf on to the thatched roof of the house, which burst into flame instantaneously.

  ‘Infidels! murderers!’ the distraught woman was shrieking. ‘We worked all our lives for our house! You won’t have it. The flames will have it!’ Her cries turned suddenly into crazy laughter.

  Peasants rushed into the burning house and began to drag out furniture. There was something macabre, unreal, about the whole scene – the fire, the wailing, the demented woman, the peasants being dragged through the mud and herded together for deportation. The most unearthly touch, for me, was the sight of Arshinov and the GPU officer looking on calmly, as if this were all routine, as if the burning hut were a bonfire for their amusement.16

  The fate of the dekulakised peasants was similar to that of the purge victims. Herded into cattle-cars, they were transported across Russia to labour camps in Siberia, Central Asia and the far north. Deprived of food, heat or water, up to 20 per cent of deportees, especially old people and children, died on the way. One of the main transit points was Vologda, where the corpses were unloaded and the survivors crammed into empty churches. ‘In a little park by the station,’ an eyewitness wrote of another transit town,’ ‘dekulakised peasants from the Ukraine lay down and died. You got used to seeing corpses there in the morning; a wagon would pull up and the hospital stable-hand, Abram, would pile in the bodies. Not all died; many wandered through the dusty mean little streets, dragging bloodless blue legs, swollen from dropsy, feeling out each passer-by with doglike begging eyes . . .’17

  From the railheads, the peasants marched or rode in wagons to their final destinations deep in the forest or taiga. Husbands and wives were often split up with promises that they would be reunited later, never to see each other again. Some were put to work in mines and logging camps; others were dumped in the middle of nowhere and told to fend for themselves. A German communist described how in Kazakhstan, kulaks from Ukraine were simply abandoned in empty wilderness: There were just some pegs stuck in the ground with little notices on them saying: Settlement No. 5, No. 6, and so on. The peasants were brought here and told that now they had to look after themselves. So then they dug themselves holes in the ground.’18

  Many deportees, especially young men, escaped. Others managed to establish viable settlements, only to find themselves dekulakised all over again. But for most, deportation was equivalent to a death sentence. Conquest estimates that between 10 and 12 million peasants were dekulakised up to the spring of 1933, when mass deportation (though not that of individual families) was brought to an end, and that within two years about a third of them had died. ‘In hardly four months,’ wrote a survivor of a camp on the river Dvina, ‘it was necessary to construct several cemeteries . . . cemeteries so large that it would have taken a big European city several years to have as many.19 When winter struck the arctic Magadan peninsula whole camps perished, down to the last guard and guard-dog.

  Dekulakisation left the villages in ruins. For every group of deportees, at least half as many people again fled the countryside of their own accord. Though starvation had already set in by the spring of 1932, in July Stalin ordered that food requisitions continue:

  They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crowbar.20

  In 1931 there had still been some grain to hide. By 1932 there was none. Under a decree defining all standing crops as state property, watchtowers were set up around the fields, manned by armed guards. Anyone spotted picking com was arrested and deported or summarily shot, as was anyone still hiding food. The alert eye of the GPU,’ ran a typical press announcement, ‘has uncovered and sent for trial the fascist saboteur who hid bread under a pile of clover.’ One thousand five hundred death sentences are reported from the Kharkiv court for one month alone. A woman was sentenced to ten years, writes Conquest, ‘for cutting a hundred ears of ripening corn, from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. A father of four got ten years for the same offence. Another woma
n was sentenced to ten years for picking ten onions from collective land.’21

  That autumn Kravchenko was again summoned to Party headquarters, and despatched with a friend to Petrovo, a village seventy-five miles west of Dnipropetrovsk. Their instructions were to organise the harvest. On arrival, they were struck by the ‘unearthly quiet’. All the village dogs, they were told, had been eaten. The next morning, they took a stroll:

  Again we were oppressed by the unnatural silence. Soon we came to an open space which, no doubt, was once the market-place. Suddenly Yuri gripped my arm until it hurt: for sprawled on the ground were dead men, women and children, thinly covered with dingy straw. I counted seventeen. As we watched, a wagon drove up and two men loaded the corpses on the wagon like cordwood.22

  After a hearty meal with local Party officials, they did the rounds of the houses:

  What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables . . .

  The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes lingered the remainder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.

  We knocked at a door and received no reply. We knocked again. Fearfully, I pushed the door open and we entered through a narrow vestibule into the one-room hut. First my eyes went to an icon light above a broad bed, then to the body of a middle-aged woman stretched on the bed, her arms crossed on her breast over a clean embroidered Ukrainian blouse. At the foot of the bed stood an old woman, and nearby were two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl of about ten. The children were weeping quietly . . .