chapter 21
Stalin’s Fortress
On December 21, 1929, Joseph Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The event was marked as a state occasion, leaving no doubt within the Soviet Union or abroad that a new supreme leader had emerged from almost a decade of struggle among the heirs of Vladimir Lenin. During the years leading up to his triumph, Stalin had turned the secondary post of general secretary of the party into the most powerful position in the land, using the party machine to take control of the government and its repressive apparatus embodied in the Chief Political Directorate (GPU), a euphemism for the secret police.
Never before in peacetime had so much depended on the thoughts, actions, and whims of one individual. Stalin’s power and influence surpassed that of Lenin and every one of his imperial predecessors, including Peter I. While it would be a mistake to explain all that happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930s by pointing to Stalin alone—he often reacted to events instead of shaping them—there is little doubt that Stalin and a narrow circle of aides made all crucial decisions of the period. Most of those aides were under the spell of Stalin’s authority and intellect; as time went on, they often became fearful of raising their voices in opposition to their leader, whose cult of personality grew steadily throughout the 1930s. In their eyes, Stalin was the best hope for the survival of the revolutionary regime, which they believed to be under siege from abroad by the capitalist West and from within by the peasant majority of the population, whose mentality they regarded as petty bourgeois.
In a special edition of the newspaper Pravda issued on the occasion of Stalin’s jubilee, numerous articles written by his loyal lieutenants lauded him not only as the continuator of the cause initiated by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin but also as the “organizer and leader of socialist industrialization and collectivization.” The first term, “socialist industrialization,” referred to a Soviet-type industrial revolution, a government-funded and state-run program intended to bring about a revolutionary increase in industrial production, with priority given to the development of heavy industry, production of energy, and building of machinery. The second term, “collectivization,” meant the creation of state-run collective farms based on the plots of land distributed to the peasants in the successful effort to win their support for the Bolshevik cause during and after the revolutionary wars. The implementation of both these programs in the late 1920s effectively spelled the end of the New Economic Policy, which had limited state control to leading industries and allowed elements of the market economy in agriculture, light industry, and services.
The Soviet leadership deemed the industrialization and collectivization programs, coupled with the Cultural Revolution—a set of policies designed to train a new generation of cadres to replace the old managerial and bureaucratic class—the best means of ensuring the survival of the communist regime in a hostile capitalist environment. The three programs were key elements of the Bolshevik plan for transforming a traditional agricultural society into a modern industrial power, with the proletariat replacing the peasantry as the dominant class. Throughout the 1920s, Soviet leaders argued about the pace at which to implement their vision. It became clear early on that they could fund industrialization only from within—the West was not eager to finance a country bent on world revolution—and the only internal source for the so-called socialist accumulation of capital was agriculture, in other words, the peasantry. Stalin had initially advocated “natural,” evolutionary industrialization but then shifted position to insist on faster economic and social transformation.
The Kremlin regarded Ukraine, the second most populous Soviet republic, with slightly more than 2 percent of the Soviet Union’s territory and close to 20 percent of its population, both as a source of funds for industrialization, given its agricultural output and potential, and as an area for investment, given the preexisting industrial potential in the east and south of the republic. But with the center fully in control of resources, the Ukrainian leadership had to lobby Moscow to invest capital, originally extracted from Ukrainian villages, in the Ukrainian cities. Ukraine did relatively well during the first five-year plan (1928–1933), receiving approximately 20 percent of all investment, which matched its share of the total Soviet population. But Ukraine found itself shortchanged after 1932, with the redirection of resources toward the industrialization of the Urals and Siberia, deeper in the Soviet East, away from the dangerous border with Poland. Most of the capital allocated to Ukraine went to the traditional southeastern industrial areas, farther from the border. The Right Bank of the Dnieper remained agricultural—most of the investment channeled there was for the construction of Red Army defense lines.
By far the largest construction project launched in Ukraine during the first five-year plan was Dniprohes, the Dnieper dam and electric power station built immediately beyond the Dnieper rapids. The site was chosen near the city of Oleksandrivsk, renamed Zaporizhia (Site Beyond the Rapids) in 1921—a reminder of the region’s Cossack past and an acknowledgment of the importance of the Cossack myth during the revolutionary years. Once a small, sleepy town, Zaporizhia became a major industrial center, with metallurgical complexes growing around the power plant, which was the main supplier of energy for the industrialized Donbas and Kryvyi Rih regions. Apart from helping to produce electricity, the dam resolved a major problem that had hampered economic development by increasing the depth of the Dnieper sufficiently to drown the rapids and open the river fully to shipping. Dniprohes became the showpiece of the first Soviet five-year plan, while the population of Zaporizhia more than quadrupled in the course of a decade, growing from 55,000 in 1926 to 243,000 in 1937.
Like most Marxists of his time, Lenin believed in the transforming power of technology and once went on record as saying that communism meant Soviet rule plus the electrification of the whole country. Soviet propaganda claimed that Dniprohes was the first major step toward communism, but people at the top knew that they needed not only Soviet rule but also the efficiency of capitalism to get there. “The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism in party and state activity,” asserted Stalin in 1924. A number of American consultants, who lived in newly built brick cottages in an “American garden city” complete with two tennis courts and golf links, provided American expertise to the Dniprohes managers and engineers. The chief American consultant was Colonel Hugh Lincoln Cooper, a civil engineer who had cut his teeth on the construction of the Toronto Power Generating Station at Niagara Falls and the Wilson Dam, which was part of the Tennessee Valley Authority. A proponent of free enterprise who once testified before Congress against direct US government involvement in development projects, Cooper agreed to the Bolsheviks’ offer when they deposited the sum of $50,000 into his account even before the start of negotiations on the scope of his services to the project.
The “Russian revolutionary sweep” that Stalin wanted to combine with American efficiency came to Dniprohes with tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants unqualified to do the job but eager to make a living. The number of workers employed in the construction of the dam and the electric power station grew from 13,000 in 1927 to 36,000 in 1931. The turnover was extremely high, even though the Soviets abandoned the earlier policy of equal pay for all categories of workers, and the top managers received up to ten times as much as unqualified workers; qualified workers made three times as much as the latter. Peasants had to turn into workers not only by learning trades but also by getting accustomed to coming in on time, not taking breaks at will, and following the orders of their superiors. It was a tall order for many new arrivals at the construction site of communism. In 1932, the Dniprohes administration hired 90,000 workers and released 60,000.
On May 1, 1932, after five years of construction, engineers ran the first tests on the turbines and generators produced by American companies, including the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and General E
lectric. In October the brand-new plant, whose original estimated cost of $50 million had increased eightfold by the time of completion, was officially inaugurated for operation. The formal head of the Soviet state, Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, came to the site to preside over the ceremony. Speeches were made; communism was praised. Somewhat later, Colonel Cooper and five other American consultants received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for their contribution to the construction of communism.
The construction of Dniprohes made history in more than one way. For the first time since the beginning of industrial development in Ukraine, the main workforce consisted not of ethnic Russians but of Ukrainians. The latter constituted approximately 60 percent of employees, while the former amounted only to 30 percent. The reasons for this shift would have been obvious to anyone who had left the Dniprohes construction site in October 1932 and explored the countryside, which was bracing itself for the coming man-made famine.
In the late 1920s, the Ukrainian village became as inhospitable to its inhabitants as the Russian village had been before the revolution, if not more so. It was not poor soil or bad weather but the dramatically changed political climate that made the Ukrainian village a living hell for the peasants, driving them out of their homes to construction sites such as Dniprohes. That was the result of Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization, which expelled the peasants from their natural habitat in the process of squeezing all possible resources out of the village.
In the fall of 1929, with the support of Lazar Kaganovich, the former general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine recalled to Moscow the previous year and placed in charge of the agricultural sector, Stalin stepped up the collectivization of land and households, demanding an all-out drive to enforce the policy. Waged throughout the USSR, this campaign hit hardest in the grain-producing areas, of which Ukraine was among the most productive. Tens of thousands of GPU officers, party officials, and rank-and-file party members arrived in the countryside to coerce the peasants to join the collective farms, which meant giving up their private parcels of land, as well as their horses and agricultural equipment. In March 1930, the authorities reported the collectivization of up to 70 percent of all arable land—a more than tenfold increase from the previous year, when less than 6 percent of all land had belonged to collective and state farms. Most of the peasants were bullied into joining the collective farms, but many resisted. By the spring of 1930, a wave of peasant uprisings engulfed the Ukrainian countryside. In March 1930 alone, the authorities registered more than 1,700 peasant revolts and protests. Rebels killed dozens of Soviet administrators and activists and attacked and assaulted hundreds more. In regions of Ukraine bordering on Poland, whole villages rose up and marched toward the border to escape the terror of Stalin’s collectivization campaign.
With peasants in strategically important borderlands in revolt and the wave of peasant unrest spreading to other parts of the Soviet Union, the government used the army and the secret police to go after the rebels. They mainly targeted the well-to-do peasantry, which had no incentive to join the collective farms and often led protests against the forced collectivization of peasant property. The authorities not only arrested and imprisoned leaders of the revolts but also expelled from Ukraine and forcibly resettled anyone branded a kurkul’ (Russian: kulak)—a term applied originally to well-off peasants but then extended to include anyone who did not belong to the poorest stratum of the village population. In 1930, the Soviets deported up to 75,000 alleged kurkul’ families from Ukraine to remote parts of Kazakhstan and Siberia. Many were taken to remote forests by train and left to die of disease and malnutrition.
But opposition in the village was too great to counter with repression alone, and the authorities decided to make a tactical retreat. In March 1930, Stalin published an article with the telling title “Dizziness with Success,” in which he blamed forced collectivization on overzealous local officials. The party activists interpreted the article as a party order to stop forced collectivization, and over the next few months half the previously collectivized land reverted to peasants leaving collective farms. But the retreat was temporary. By the fall of 1930, the forced collectivization campaign had resumed. This time the peasants opted largely for passive forms of resistance, including refusal to grow more grain and agricultural produce than necessary for survival, the slaughter of domestic animals to preclude their confiscation by the state, and flight from the village, often to industrial centers such as Zaporizhia, where they joined the new socialist proletariat.
Faced with this new form of peasant resistance, Stalin and his aides refused to admit defeat and accused the peasants of sabotage and attempting to starve the cities and undermine industrialization. The authorities declared that the peasants were hiding grain and demanded greater quotas both from the collectivized peasantry and from those who refused to join the collective farms. The regime singled Ukraine out for especially harsh treatment, as it was crucial to the fulfillment of Moscow’s economic plans. By mid-1932, 70 percent of Ukraine’s households were collectivized, as opposed to an average of 60 percent across the Soviet Union. The republic that produced 27 percent of Soviet grain became responsible for 38 percent of all grain deliveries to the state. The new policy brought famine and mass starvation to Ukraine in the winter and spring of 1932, hitting the most populous agricultural areas of the forest-steppe zone.
Hundreds of thousands starved, and more than 80,000 died of hunger in 1932 in the Kyiv region alone. Especially hard hit were the sugar-beet production areas southwest of Kyiv, around the cities of Bila Tserkva and Uman. Vlas Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, admitted in June 1932 that excessive requisitions, which left the peasants nothing to eat, had caused the famine. He wrote to Stalin, “Given the overall impossibility of fulfilling the grain-requisition plan, the basic reason for which was the lesser harvest in Ukraine as a whole and the colossal losses incurred during the harvest (a result of the weak economic organization of the collective farms and their utterly inadequate management from the districts and from the center), a system was put in place of confiscating all grain produced by individual farmers, including seed stocks, and almost complete confiscation of all produce from the collective farms.”
According to Chubar, the famine most severely affected individual noncollectivized peasants whose property the state had requisitioned for their failure to meet procurement quotas. Next on the list were members of collective farms with large families. By March and April 1932, thousands of people were either starving or dying of hunger in hundreds of villages. In May 1932, a representative of the Kyiv Central Committee of the Communist Party picked seven villages in the Uman district at random. There were 216 registered deaths from hunger that month, and 686 individuals were expected to die in the next few days. In one of those villages, Horodnytsia, wrote the party official to his bosses in Kharkiv, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, “up to 100 have died; the daily death toll is 8–12; people are swollen with hunger on 100 of 600 homesteads.” Chubar asked Stalin to provide Ukraine with famine relief, but the general secretary would not hear of it. He denied the reality of the famine and banned the word itself from official correspondence.
Stalin attributed the failure of his policies not only to peasant resistance to collectivization and procurement quotas but also to covert resistance on the part of the Ukrainian party cadres. “Most important now is Ukraine,” wrote Stalin to Kaganovich in August 1932.
They say that in two oblasts of Ukraine (Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, I think), about 50 district committees have come out against the grain-procurement plan, calling it unrealistic. . . . If we do not start fixing the situation in Ukraine right away, we may lose Ukraine. Bear in mind that Piłsudski is not dawdling. . . . Also bear in mind that in the Communist Party of Ukraine (500,000 members, ha-ha), there is no lack (yes, no lack!) of corrupt elements, committed and latent Petliurites, and, finally, outright agents of Piłsudski. As soon as
things get worse, those elements will not hesitate to open a front within (and outside) the party, against the party.
The master of the Kremlin was clearly concerned about the regime’s prospects of survival. He had never gotten over the surprise attack of Polish and Ukrainian troops on Kyiv in the spring of 1920. At that time, former Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries had joined the advancing forces of Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura. Stalin feared a recurrence of 1920 on a larger scale. In the early 1930s, party membership in Ukraine was approaching half a million, with 60 percent consisting of ethnic Ukrainians—the result of the Ukrainization policy. Would those cadres remain loyal to Stalin if Piłsudski invaded again? He had serious doubts. In July 1932, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with the selfsame Piłsudski, ensuring that there would be no attack from the West for the next three years. In Stalin’s mind, the time had come to “secure Ukraine” by requisitioning grain, teaching the peasants who had resisted collectivization a lesson, and purging the Ukrainian party apparatus of those who refused to follow his orders.
The Gates of Europe Page 31