Bloodlands
Page 12
The optimistic assumption had been that the movement and the punishment would strip the kulak of his harmful social origins, and make of him a Soviet person. By the second half of the 1930s, Stalinism had shed any such expectations of progress. The very social mobility intrinsic to his policy of industrialization was now unsettling. Kulaks were rejoining the collective farms: perhaps they would lead rebellions, as other peasants had done in 1930. The kulaks were returning to a social order that was traditional in many ways. Stalin knew, from the 1937 census that he suppressed, that a majority of adults still defied the atheism of the Soviet state and believed in God. Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, religious faith was perplexing, and perhaps unnerving. Could the kulaks rebuild the society that once had been?46
The kulaks sentenced later or to longer terms in the Gulag were still in exile in Siberia or Kazakhstan, in Soviet east or central Asia: might not such people support a Japanese invasion? The NKVD reported in June 1937 that exiled kulaks in Siberia constituted a “broad base on which to build an insurgent rebellion.” Surely, given the support of a foreign power and the cover of war, the kulaks would fight against Soviet power. In the meantime, they were the enemy within. One repressive policy created the foundations for another: exiled kulaks did not love the Soviet system; and their place of exile, so far from their homes, was close to a source of foreign threat, the expanding Japanese empire.47
Reports from the NKVD in the Far East provided the scenario for an alliance between internal opponents and a foreign power. In April 1937 riots had broken out against the Soviet presence in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, the Japanese were recruiting Russian émigrés, who were making contact with kulaks in exile throughout Siberia. According to the NKVD, a “Russian General Military Union,” backed by Japan, planned to incite exiled kulaks to rebel when Japan invaded. In June 1937 the regional NKVD received permission to carry out mass arrests and executions of people suspected of collaborating with the “Russian General Military Union.” The targets of the operation were to be exiled kulaks and the former Russian imperial officers who supposedly commanded them. Naturally, the former were in much greater supply than the latter. And so began the killing of the kulaks, in their Siberian exile.48
Soviet leaders always regarded the Japanese threat as the eastern half of a global capitalist encirclement involving Poland and Nazi Germany. Preparations for a war against Japan in Asia were also preparations for a war in Europe. Precisely because many kulaks were returning home at this time from Soviet Asia to Soviet Europe, it was possible to imagine networks of enemies that extended from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. Though the shooting of peasants began in Siberia, Stalin apparently decided to punish kulaks not only in eastern exile but throughout the Soviet Union.
In a telegram entitled “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” Stalin and the politburo issued general instructions on 2 July 1937 for mass repressions in every region of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership held kulaks responsible for recent waves of sabotage and criminality, which meant in effect anything that had gone wrong within the Soviet Union. The politburo ordered the provincial offices of the NKVD to register all kulaks who resided in their regions, and to recommend quotas for execution and deportation. Most regional NKVD officers asked to be allowed to add various “anti-Soviet elements” to the lists. By 11 July the politburo already had a first round of lists of people to be repressed. At Stalin’s initiative, these initial numbers were rounded up, adding “an extra thousand.” This raised the stakes of the operation, sending a clear signal to the state police that they were to do more than simply sentence all of the people on whom they already had files. In order to demonstrate their diligence in a climate of threats and purges, NKVD officers would have to find still more victims.49
Stalin and Yezhov wanted “the direct physical liquidation of the entire counter-revolution,” which meant the elimination of enemies “once and for all.” The revised quotas were sent back down from Moscow to the regions as part of Order 00447, dated 31 July 1937, “On the Operations to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” Here Stalin and Yezhov anticipated the execution of 79,950 Soviet citizens by shooting and the sentencing of 193,000 more to eight to ten years in the Gulag. It was not that the politburo or the NKVD central office in Moscow had 272,950 particular people in mind for repression. Just which Soviet citizens would fulfill these quotas remained to be seen; the local NKVD branches would decide that.50
The killing and imprisonment quotas were officially called “limits,” though everyone involved knew that they were meant to be exceeded. Local NKVD officers had to explain why they could not meet a “limit,” and were encouraged to exceed them. No NKVD officer wished to be seen as lacking élan when confronting “counter-revolution,” especially when Yezhov’s line was “better too far than not far enough.” Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.51
Order 00447 was to be implemented by the same institution that had brought terror to the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s: the three-person commission, or troika. Composed of a regional NKVD chief, a regional party leader, and a regional prosecutor, the troikas were responsible for transforming the quotas into executions, the numbers into bodies. The overall quota for the Soviet Union was divided among sixty-four regions, each with a corresponding troika. In practice, the troikas were dominated by the NKVD chiefs, who usually chaired the meetings. Prosecutors had been ordered to ignore legal procedures. Party chiefs had other responsibilities, were not experts on security matters, and were afraid that they might themselves be targeted. NKVD chiefs were in their element.52
The fulfillment of Order 00447 began with the emptying of the file cabinets. The NKVD had some sort of material on kulaks, since kulak was a category created by the state. Criminals, the second group mentioned in the order, were by definition people who had an encounter with the judicial system behind them. In practical terms, the other “anti-Soviet elements” named in the order were simply the people on whom the local NKVD had a file. Local NKVD officers, helped by police, carried out investigations in “operational sectors” within each of the sixty-four zones. An “operational group” assembled a list of people to be interrogated. Those targeted were arrested, forced to confess, and encouraged to implicate others.53
Confessions were elicited by torture. The NKVD and other police organs applied the “conveyer method,” which meant uninterrupted questioning, day and night. This was complemented by the “standing method,” in which suspects were forced to stand in a line near a wall, and beaten if they touched it or fell asleep. Under time pressure to make quotas, officers often simply beat prisoners until they confessed. Stalin authorized this on 21 July 1937. In Soviet Belarus, interrogating officers would hold prisoners’ heads down in the latrine and then beat them when they tried to rise. Some interrogators carried with them draft confessions, and simply filled in the prisoner’s personal details and changed an item here or there by hand. Others simply forced prisoners to sign blank pages and then filled them in later at leisure. In this way Soviet organs “unmasked” the “enemy,” delivering his “thoughts” to the files.54
The numbers came down from the center, but the corpses were made locally. The troikas who fulfilled Order 00447 were responsible for sentencing the prisoners, with no need for any confirmation from Moscow, and no possibility for appeal. The three members of a troika would meet at night with investigating officers. For each case they would hear a very brief report, along with a recommendation for sentencing: death or the Gulag. (Only a very few of those arrested were not sentenced at all.) The troikas would almost always accept these recommendations. They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example
, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55
Terror prevailed in the Gulag, as everywhere else. It might be difficult to see how concentration camp inmates could threaten the Soviet state: but like the regions of the USSR, the Gulag system had its own death quota, to be met or exceeded. Just as people who had been defined as kulaks might be dangerous, so might people who were incarcerated as kulaks—so went the logic. The camps of the Gulag had an initial quota of ten thousand executions, though in the end 30,178 of its prisoners were shot. Omsk, a southwest Siberian city whose environs were full of special settlers deported during collectivization, was the site of some of the most vicious campaigns. Its NKVD chief had already requested an additional quota of eight thousand executions on 1 August 1937, before Order 00447 even went into effect. His men once sentenced 1,301 people in a single night.56
This kulak operation was carried out in secret. No one, including the condemned, was told of the sentences. Those sentenced would simply be taken, first to some sort of prison, and then either to a freight car or an execution site. Execution facilities were built or chosen with an eye to discretion. Killings were always carried out at night, and in seclusion. They took place in soundproofed rooms below ground, in large buildings such as garages where noise could cover gunshots, or far from human settlement in forests. The executioners were always NKVD officers, generally using a Nagan pistol. While two men held a prisoner by his arms, the executioner would fire a single shot from behind into the base of the skull, and then often a “control shot” into the temple. “After the executions,” one set of instructions specified, “the bodies are to be laid in a pit dug beforehand, then carefully buried and the pit is to be camouflaged.” As the winter of 1937 came and the ground froze, the pits were prepared using explosives. Everyone who took part in these operations was sworn to secrecy. Only a very few people were directly involved. A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57
The kulak operation involved shooting from the beginning to the end: Yezhov reported to Stalin, with evident pride, that 35,454 people had been shot by 7 September 1937. During the year 1937, however, the number of Gulag sentences exceeded the number of death sentences. As time passed, new allocations tended to be for executions rather than exile. In the end, the number of people killed in the kulak operation was about the same as the number sent to the Gulag (378,326 and 389,070, respectively). The overall shift from exile to execution was for practical reasons: it was easier to kill than to deport, and the camps quickly filled to capacity—and had little use for many of the deportees. One investigation in Leningrad led to the shooting (not the deportation) of thirty-five people who were deaf and dumb. In Soviet Ukraine, the NKVD chief Izrail Leplevskii ordered his officers to shoot rather than exile the elderly. In such cases, Soviet citizens were killed because of who they were.58
Soviet Ukraine, where “kulak resistance” had been widespread during collectivization, was a major center of the killing. Leplevskii expanded the framework of Order 00447 to include supposed Ukrainian nationalists, who since the famine had been treated as a threat to the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. Some 40,530 people in Soviet Ukraine were arrested on the charge of nationalism. In one variant, Ukrainians were arrested for supposedly having requested food aid from Germany in 1933. When the (already-twice-increased) quotas for Soviet Ukraine were fulfilled in December 1937, Leplevskii asked for more. In February 1938 Yezhov added 23,650 to the death quota for the republic. All in all, in 1937 and 1938, NKVD men shot 70,868 inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in the kulak operation. The ratio of shootings to other sentences was especially high in Soviet Ukraine during the year 1938. Between January and August, some 35,563 people were shot, as against only 830 sent to camps. The troika for the Stalino district, for example, met seven times between July and September 1938, and sentenced to death every single one of the 1,102 people accused. The troika in Voroshilovgrad, similarly, sentenced to death all 1,226 people whose cases it reviewed in September 1938.59
These tremendous numbers meant regular and massive executions, over enormous and numerous death pits. In Soviet Ukrainian industrial cities, workers with real or imagined kulak backgrounds were sentenced to death for some sort of sabotage, and typically killed the same day. In Vinnytsia, people sentenced to death were tied, gagged, and driven to a car wash. There a truck awaited, its engine running to cover the sound of the gunshots. The bodies were then placed in the truck and driven to a site in the city: an orchard, perhaps, or a park, or a cemetery. Before their work was done, the NKVD men had dug no fewer than eighty-seven mass graves in and around Vinnytsia.60
Like the show trials, the kulak operation allowed Stalin to relive the years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the period of his true political vulnerability, this time with a predictable outcome. The former political opponents, representing the moment of political debate over collectivization, were physically eliminated. So were the kulaks, standing for the moment of mass resistance to collectivization. Just as the murder of party elites confirmed Stalin’s succession of Lenin, so the murder of kulaks confirmed his interpretation of Lenin’s policies. If collectivization had led to mass starvation, that had been the fault of those who starved and the foreign intelligence agencies who somehow arranged the whole thing. If collectivization had given rise to a sense of grievance among the population, that too was the fault of the very people who had suffered and their supposed foreign sponsors. Precisely because Stalin’s policy was so disastrous in the first place, its defense seemed to require such tortured logic and massive death. Once these measures had been taken, they could be presented as the verdict of history.61
Yet even as Stalin presented his own policies as inevitable, he was abandoning (without admitting anything of the kind) the Marxism that allowed leaders to discuss and pretend to know the future. Insofar as Marxism was a science of history, its natural world was the economy, and its object of investigation the social class. Even in the harshest of Leninist interpretations of Marxism, people opposed the revolution because of their class background. Yet with Stalinism something was changing; normal state security concerns had infused the Marxist language and changed it unalterably. The accused in the show trials had supposedly betrayed the Soviet Union to foreign powers. Theirs was a class struggle, according to the accusation, only in the most indirect and attenuated sense: they supposedly had aided states that represented the imperialist states that encircled the homeland of socialism.
Although the kulak action was at first glance a class terror, the killing was sometimes directed, as in Soviet Ukraine, against “nationalists.” Here, too, Stalinism was introducing something new. In Lenin’s adaptation of Marxism, nationalities were supposed to embrace the Soviet project, as their social advance coincided with the construction of the Soviet state. Thus the peasant question was initially linked to the national question in a positive way: people rising from the peasantry into the working or clerical or professional classes would come to national awareness as loyal Soviet citizens. Now, under Stalin, the peasant question was linked to the national question in a negative sense. The attainment of Ukrainian national consciousness by Ukrainian peasants was dangerous. Other, smaller national minorities were more threatening still. Most of the victims of Order 00447 in Soviet Ukraine were Ukrainians; but a disproportionate number were Poles. Here the connection between class and nation was perhaps most explicit. In a kind of operational shorthand, NKVD officers said: “Once a Pole, always a kulak.”62
The Nazi terror of 1936-1938 proceeded along somewhat similar lines, usually punishing members of politically defined social groups for what they were, rather than individuals for anything that they might have done. For the Nazis the most important category were the “asocials,” groups that were thought to be (and sometimes truly were) resistant to the Nazi worldview. These were homosexuals, vagrants, and people who were thought to be alcoholic, addicted to drugs, or unw
illing to work. They were also Jehovah’s Witnesses, who rejected the premises of the Nazi worldview with strikingly greater clarity than most other German Christians. The Nazi leadership regarded such people as racially German but corrupt, and thus to be improved by confinement and punishment. Like the Soviet NKVD, the German police carried out organized raids of districts in 1937 and 1938, seeking to meet a numerical quota of specified sectors of the population. They, too, often overfulfilled these quotas in their zealous desire to prove loyalty and impress superiors. The outcome of arrests, however, was different: almost always confinement, very rarely execution.63
The Nazi repression of these undesirable social groups required the creation of a network of German concentration camps. To the camps at Dachau and Lichtenberg, both established in 1933, were added Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), and Flossenberg (1938). By comparison with the Gulag, these five camps were rather modest. While more than a million Soviet citizens toiled in the Soviet concentration camps and special settlements in late 1938, the number of German citizens in the German concentration camps was about twenty thousand. When the difference in population size is taken into account, the Soviet system of concentration camps was about twenty-five times larger than the German one at this time.64
Soviet terror, at this point, was not only on a far greater scale; it was incomparably more lethal. Nothing in Hitler’s Germany remotely resembled the execution of nearly four hundred thousand people in eighteen months, as under Order 00447 in the Soviet Union. In the years 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, as compared to 378,326 death sentences within the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. Again, given the difference in population size, the chances that a Soviet citizen would be executed in the kulak action were about seven hundred times greater than the chances that a German citizen would be sentenced to death in Nazi Germany for any offense.65