The Bolsheviks exterminated every member of the former ruling family they could find. They shot and bayoneted the tsar and tsarina, their children, three servants, and their pet spaniel; cut them in pieces; doused them in acid; and dropped them into shallow, unmarked graves. They killed four grand dukes in prison, and they shot a nobleman and threw his body into a blast furnace. They beat some other aristocrats and dropped them, still alive, down a mineshaft.
Many once-rich landowners had already fled the country. Now many of the middle class did the same. So did many socialists and communists who had not been shrewd enough to join the Bolsheviks. But many didn’t flee who should have. When sailors at a naval base revolted, demanding democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners, Trotsky used the new Red Army to quell the mutiny. Those who survived the army’s merciless repression were shot to death.
Lenin and his governing committee moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, from which the tsars had once ruled Russia, and they governed from the Kremlin, which had been the fortress of the tsars. They gave Russia a new and bulky name: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It would keep that name for seven decades, but many called it by its former name. To keep things simple we shall call it Russia.
Five years after taking power, Lenin had the first of several strokes. He died in 1924. On Moscow’s Red Square an Immortalization Committee built a huge red granite tomb. They embalmed his corpse and placed it in the tomb in a glass coffin. There the faithful could file by silently and gaze on the hero of the revolution.
Now the Bolsheviks had to choose another chief. One might suppose the choice was easy; surely they would pick the brilliant Trotsky, leader of their coup and commanding general in the civil war. Not so obvious a possibility was Joseph Stalin, who had the weighty job of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. “Stalin” was his revolutionary name; it means “the one of steel.” Unlike Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Bolsheviks, Stalin really came from the working class. His father had been a shoemaker and his mother a washerwoman.
In public, Stalin posed as slow and placid, always puffing on a pipe. His rival Trotsky underestimated Stalin as “a gray and colorless mediocrity,” but he was a hard-driving, head-bashing administrator. In private he was rude and crude. His daughter once witnessed this: while Stalin was pacing in his office, smoking and spitting on the floor as usual, his pet parrot imitated his spitting. Stalin pushed his pipe inside the cage and smashed the parrot’s head.
Lenin had found Stalin useful, but in his final months, he lowered his opinion of him. Stalin had insulted Lenin’s wife, shouting at her on the telephone that she was a “syphilitic whore.” Lenin wrote a letter, to be opened after his death, in which he warned the Bolsheviks that Stalin was grub, meaning rude or coarse. When Stalin learned of this he cursed his one-time friend: “He shat on me and he shat on himself.” Stalin kept Lenin’s letter secret as long as he could.
Stalin was a skilled manipulator. As general secretary he had found jobs for many of the Bolsheviks, and they owed him favors and also feared him. As his friends and enemies were well aware, he had a special staff that maintained files on them. As time went by, he made alliances with other men of power (most of whom he later killed), and quietly won control of the party.
Then he disposed of his rival, Trotsky. First he eased him from his post as minister of war, and then he had him expelled from the Politburo, the group of Bolsheviks that made the policy decisions. Later a party congress led by Stalin expelled Trotsky from the party and exiled him within the country. He was dragged screaming from his apartment and hauled by train to a Russian town far to the east, near the Chinese border. The next year, Stalin exiled Trotsky from Russia. He went to Turkey, then France, then Norway, and finally Mexico. There he wrote attacks on Stalin that found many readers outside Russia and some inside.
Stalin soon regretted letting Trotsky get away. As we’ll see, he never put him out of mind. He did obliterate him from Russian history books, as he did with many other fellow revolutionaries. Before allowing publication of old group photographs of Trotsky and other longtime Bolsheviks, Stalin’s aides brushed out any men whom Stalin had later turned against and in some cases executed.
By 1930 Stalin was fully in charge. Where Lenin, in his few and hectic years in power, had scarcely started to remake the country, Stalin would have a quarter century in which to do it. He soon announced his goals. He would build a nation that was self-sufficient, strong, and up to date, and he would lay the foundations of a workers’ society.
Those may sound like inconsistent goals: a modern nation and a communist utopia. But Stalin saw no contradiction, or if he did he smoothed it out with patriotic pride. “We are becoming a country of metal,” he said, “a country of automobiles, a country of tractors.” And when the people ride in cars and the peasants in tractors, he said, “we shall see which countries may then be ‘classified’ as backward and which as advanced.”
If Russia was to be a nation of metal, millions of peasants would have to move to the cities and work in factories. At the same time the peasants who stayed on the land would have to grow more food, so that they could feed the growing millions who made the steel, the tractors, and the cars. That was the problem, how to get fewer farmhands here to grow more food for more factory hands over there. To Stalin, the way to raise more food was clear: Russia must “collectivize” at once.
FOR MANY MILLIONS of Russians, the real revolution in their lives was not the communist takeover in 1917 and ’18, but collectivization, which began in 1929. In vast areas of Russia peasants now were suddenly forced to give up their little holdings, some of which they had taken over from the landowners only a decade before. Their scraps of land were joined to make big farms that averaged several miles in size, and here the communists reshaped the peasants’ lives as if they were soft clay. The peasants were made to do what Marx would have wished: to work together, own no capital (that is, no land, animals, or machines), and exploit no laborers.
Not all peasants moved quickly to collective farms (or to factory jobs). In the Ukraine region southwest of Moscow, Russia’s “breadbasket,” the peasants resisted collectivization. Stalin decided to starve them to death. Two years in a row he demanded that the region supply the state with huge amounts of grain. Gangs of enforcers swooped down on farms, seized all the grain, and demanded more. Peasants caught eating a handful of their own wheat or rye were jailed or shot. Starving, they first ate dogs and cats. Then earthworms, rats, and ants, and a soup of dandelions and nettles. Then, sometimes, their children.
Naturally, in every Russian village some peasants owned a little more land than the others and sometimes hired their neighbors as laborers. The communists, pretending that these peasants were tough and grasping, called them kulaks, a Russian epithet meaning “fists.” Stalin, who wanted their land for his collective farms, claimed that they were class enemies who had to be wiped out. “We must smash the kulaks,” he said, “eliminate them as a class.”
Exactly how to smash the kulaks wasn’t clear. If the government simply shot them, it got no work from them. If it put them in its concentration camps, there was little work to make them do, and they had to be fed. Also, everybody knew that slave laborers were poor producers. Then a former wealthy man, himself in prison, wrote to Stalin to suggest a labor scheme. His basic concept, not very complicated, was to subordinate food intake to work output. Send the prisoners, he suggested, to some awful place where there was work to do, feed them very little, and squeeze perhaps six months of hard labor from them. And when they died of hunger, cold, and exhaustion, bring in others. For making this suggestion, the former millionaire was released from prison and appointed a director in the system he had proposed.
Men with guns stormed villages and rounded up the so-called kulaks, more than 15 million women, men, and children. They were jammed in railroad cars and hauled for days or weeks to lonely places in the Arctic north, and from there they mar
ched across the tundra and through the forests. By the time they reached their camps, 15 or 20 percent, mainly children, had already died. Now they were told to dig a hole to live in, and soon they were told to grow their own food. Half starved, they were made to work until they died.
Some kulaks mined for gold in northeast Siberia, one of the coldest spots on earth. In some camps everybody died of cold and hunger, even the guards and their dogs. Other kulaks were made to dig a waterway from the Baltic Sea to the White Sea, using shovels, hammers, and chisels, and carrying rubble on their backs. Even in winter they were half-clad and housed in flimsy barracks. Perhaps a million of these prisoners died. (And then the waterway proved too narrow for the navy ships it had been intended for.)
How many peasants died in one way or another because of collectivization no one knows because, as one official said, “no one was counting.” But this is fairly certain: 8 million more people died in Russia in 1933, the last year of collectivization, than died in 1934, when the worst was over. So many lives were lost that when the next census was taken, the government suppressed the results, and members of the census board were arrested and later “purged” for “treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population.”
As Marx would probably have wished, collectivization put all peasants (those it did not kill) on one “classless” level. Now they lived and worked without their brains, robbed of freedom to succeed or fail, and robbed of the right to leave the land at will.
It is true, however, that the collectives did, eventually, raise the farmers’ living standards. After a decade had gone by, farmers had somewhat better housing and more to eat than they had had in the old precommunist days. They also raised more food for the cities, since the government provided the collectives with farming experts, and tractors and combines. By 1938, the eve of World War II, Russian farmers produced as much grain as a much larger number of farmers had done before World War I. So collectivization did advance industrialization, as Stalin had intended. Fewer hands were needed on the land, and 20 million peasants were plucked from farms to move to the cities and work in the new factories.
The “steel one” wanted a “country of metal,” and he wanted it fast. His planners therefore ruled that a third of Russia’s national income must be spent on building industries. Only two-thirds of everything produced was left for the people. This was a harsh decree in a land where most were poor. They were made to pay for the new plants and machines and railroads with heavy sales taxes, which the government hid from them by including the taxes in the prices of the things they bought. They also paid for industrialization with hard work at low wages. Labor was drafted from the villages and from the collective farms, which had to supply set numbers of factory workers. These workers usually lived in unheated barracks and ate one skimpy meal a day.
Russia did build up its heavy industry quickly. Huge steel mills rose in several places, and hydroelectric dams vastly increased electric power, and mines were opened, and industries arose even in the Asian grasslands, far to the east of Moscow. By the end of the 1930s Russia was the world’s largest producer of farm tractors and railway locomotives. Only the United States and Germany were bigger industrial producers.
And it must be said that everyday life improved somewhat. By the late 1930s, stores carried more food and basic goods, and the state provided medical care. Everyone had a job, such as it was. Children went to school, and many of their parents, after working many hours, went to night schools and learned to read and write. In the most backward areas of Russia women had been emancipated.
BY THE 1930S Stalin loomed over Russia like a giant rearing bear. He was stronger and crueler than any tsar, and for the next twenty years he would have more control over more people and events than any other figure in the history of the world. But he had his enemies, of course, and they began to whisper and to plot. Some were simply jealous of his power, while others heeded Trotsky’s cries from far away that Stalin was a monstrous traitor to the thoughts of Marx and Lenin.
Stalin was himself by profession a plotter, and by nature paranoid. He trusted no one, even Bolsheviks — no, especially Bolsheviks. When his spies reported seeing dirty looks and sullen moods, Stalin readily believed them. He knew his rivals, or he thought he did, and he had to wipe them out. He found a cunning way to carry out a purge.
One rival was Sergei Kirov, the communist boss of Leningrad (the former Petrograd, renamed). Like others, Kirov had expressed concern at Stalin’s cruelty. What was just as bad, from Stalin’s point of view, was that if Stalin should be ousted Kirov might be picked to take his place. So he was an enemy of Stalin and therefore an enemy of the people.
Hard proof does not exist, but it is clear enough that Stalin gave the order, “Kill Kirov.” Someone hired a thug, who did the job, and Stalin rushed to Leningrad and personally ran an “inquiry.” The hired killer was shot, of course, and so were his wife, ex-wife, sister-in-law, and a brother. Kirov’s bodyguard, probably in on his boss’s murder, was beaten to death with crowbars, and the chief of police, who may have hired the thug, was sentenced to a labor camp and later murdered. Stalin also seized the opportunity to shoot some rival politicians, claiming they were terrorists. At Kirov’s funeral he helped to carry the coffin, and he named the Kirov Ballet for his late, lamented friend.
Using Kirov’s murder as an excuse, he now began a purge, a Terror. He put to death more than a hundred of his enemies, real or fancied, and sent thousands more to labor camps. Then he put Bolsheviks on trial, men whom he had known for many years. Most of the accused were charged with murdering Kirov, plotting against Stalin, and taking orders from far-off Trotsky. Stalin appears to have watched their trials from an alcove where he could not be seen.
All around the world people closely followed these trials. To their amazement, the men accused stood up in court and regretfully confessed to killing Kirov, plotting against Stalin, and taking orders from far-off Trotsky. Most were quickly sentenced, quickly killed. Why, baffled people outside Russia asked, did they grovel and make these preposterous confessions? No one knows. Perhaps they did it because they had been tortured, or to save their families from death, or because they really believed that what the Party wanted from them must be just.
The public trials were only the visible part of Stalin’s purge. Out of sight, many more Russians were arrested, often after a loud knock on the door in the dead of night. They were shot without a trial, or sent to the labor camps with a notation stamped on their files: “To be preserved [imprisoned] forever.” Nine out of ten generals in the army were purged and about 15 percent of the officer corps. During his years in power Stalin approved the executions of 230,000 people, and lower officials approved many, many more. On just one day in December 1937 Stalin approved 3,167 deaths. Then he went to see a movie.
Stalin had not forgotten his old enemy, Trotsky. Three floors in the headquarters of his political police held files and operations rooms devoted solely to this man. Now Trotsky lived in Mexico, still writing against Stalin, who found him as maddening as a horsefly. In 1940, an employee of Stalin’s secret police entered Trotsky’s house in Mexico City and swung an ice ax into Trotsky’s brain.
Chapter 19
A Leader tries to shape a master race.
WHILE LENIN AND STALIN steered Russia toward that ever-receding goal, the classless society, Adolf Hitler led Germany toward a different kind of Utopia. The means and the result were much the same: a state imposing nearly total power on human lives.
However, Hitler worked with different material. Whereas Russia had been torn apart by World War I, Germany emerged intact. Travelers who drove into the country from France right after the war were astonished, as soon as they had driven past the crumbling trenches, to find a smiling land of planted fields, well-cared-for houses, and decently fed people. Germany could still take pride in its modern industries, its famous universities, and its well-schooled and hardworking people. What’s more, the Germans had reshaped their governmen
t at the end of the war. The kaiser had resigned, and Germany was, for the first time ever, a democracy.
But in the next fifteen years, the Germans had their troubles. For one thing, they believed they had been unjustly treated and humiliated. The Allies had forced them at Versailles to admit a guilt they didn’t feel, and to agree to pay the victors compensation they could not afford. They had also been forced to give up the lands and peoples east of Germany that Lenin had conceded to them just a year before.
For fifteen years after the war the German economy wobbled through three crises. First, right after the war, many people, especially war veterans, were out of work. Then, after a recovery had begun, Germany had a terrible bout of inflation due to printing enormous amounts of paper money to pay war reparations. Money lost its value to the point where even a large bank account was not enough to buy a bunch of carrots or a pound of flour. Many Germans lost all their savings. And then, a decade later, the Great Depression overwhelmed Germany and most of the industrialized world. By the early 1930s 6 million Germans were out of work.
The Human Story Page 33