Yet collectivization was always one of the goals of the Party once it had established power and it was always clear that the land being given to the peasants would be taken away again. Before 1949, the Party had distributed leaflets and pamphlets describing in glowing terms the success of the collective farms in the Soviet Union. Woodcuts showed tractors and combine-harvesters, which peasants in China had never seen, crisscrossing fields and bringing in bumper harvests. One interviewee described how Party officials showed the peasants Soviet propaganda films:
We always heard lots of propaganda about the communes in the USSR. There were always films about the fantastic combine-harvesters with people singing on the back on their way to work. In the films there were always mountains and mountains of food. So many films showed how happy life was on the collective farms. I remember scenes of happy, healthy schoolchildren in uniform. In the shots of the homes of the peasants on the collectives there was always lots of food.
After 1949, delegations of peasants were sent on lengthy tours of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan to see model collectives with their own cinemas, bath houses and day-care centres. They ate in peasant homes from tables groaning with food and saw the ease with which fields were ploughed by tractors and harvests gathered in and threshed by modern machinery. Groups of village cadres returned from these study tours of Soviet collective farms filled with a desire to emulate the Russians. Yet the truth, as many in the Chinese Communist Party knew, was that collectivization had been a disaster in the Soviet Union. In attempting it, Stalin had created the worst famine in Russian history in which millions had perished, and the country was still not able to feed itself. The Ukraine famine of the early 1930s was in many ways the forerunner of what was to happen in China. Mao and his followers must have had some knowledge of the events described in the next chapter.
3
The Soviet Famine
‘Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost – maybe even millions. I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.’ Nikita Khrushchev
‘The Soviet Union’s today is China’s tomorrow. ‘Mao Zedong
The origins of Mao’s great famine lie as much in Russian as in Chinese history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire was racked by such severe famines that Lenin was encouraged to think that a revolution was inevitable. He and his followers believed that peasant demands for land would help destroy the social order. However, the crisis in the countryside was partly defused by the reforms of an energetic minister of the Tsar, P. A. Stolypin, who from 1906 introduced agricultural reforms that met some of the demands for more land, thereby creating a class of prosperous peasants.1
As a result, the disappointed Bolshevik faction under Lenin redirected their activities towards exploiting the revolutionary potential of the growing urban proletariat. Nonetheless, when finally military defeat in the First World War led to the collapse of the Tsarist regime in 1917, Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries still needed the support of the peasantry, who constituted the great majority of the recruits in the Tsarist armies. The revolutionaries promised these peasant soldiers that the land would be divided up. In consequence many deserted their units and returned to their villages in order to obtain their share.
However, once Lenin and his followers had consolidated their grip over the cities, it soon became clear that they did not have the interests of the peasants at heart. Within a few months of seizing power, they introduced measures that would bring about the first famine in the new state. In May 1918 a decree was issued empowering the Commissariat of Food to extract from the peasants any grain held in excess of the quotas that it set. In the name of ‘War Communism’, teams of politically reliable workers arrived in the countryside to seize the surplus grain. The peasants refused to hand it over and staged uprisings that were only put down with much bloodshed. The Communist Party then resorted to waging class warfare in the countryside, trying to enlist the poorest peasants in its struggle against the rich kulaks and grain hoarders. Millions perished or fled their homes while grain production fell steeply to half what it had been before 1914. Within three years the entire country was starving and in 1921 the Communist government was forced to appeal for international aid. A massive relief effort was undertaken and, at one stage, the American Relief Administration and other foreign aid organizations were feeding over 10 million mouths. Even so some believe that one-tenth of the population perished from hunger in the midst of a brutal civil war. Finally, a rebellion by sailors at Kronstadt forced Lenin to make a tactical retreat. He introduced his New Economic Policy to create a ‘breathing space’ for the Party, replacing grain requisitioning with taxes and reopening food markets as part of a massive retreat from the moneyless and propertyless Utopia that he had tried to create after 1918.
In a famous speech in 1923, one of Lenin’s colleagues Nikolay Bukharin promised a new deal for the peasantry: ‘To the peasants, we must say “Enrich yourselves, develop your farms, and do not fear that restrictions will be placed on you.” However paradoxical it may appear, we must develop the well-to-do farm in order to help the poor peasant and the middle peasant.’ Nearly sixty years later Deng Xiaoping was to use almost the same words when he abolished Mao’s communes and told the Chinese peasants that ‘to get rich is glorious’. As a result of the New Economic Policy, agricultural production in the Soviet Union returned to pre-1914 levels.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, however, Stalin made a second attempt to realize Marx’s schemes for giant factory-farms. In 1928 he repealed the New Economic Policy and launched the first five-year plan, which was to be the model for Mao’s Great Leap Forward. This was a gigantic crash industrialization campaign in which Stalin wanted to double steel output and triple both pig-iron and tractor production within five years. The investment for industrialization was to come from squeezing the peasants, and this could only be done if they were brought under control in collective farms.
In the Kremlin, a bitter power struggle ensued as Stalin ousted his rivals and silenced opposition to his plan. He attacked Bukharin for restoring capitalism in the countryside and later had him put on trial and shot. Those who had voiced support for Bukharin’s view that collectivization should be a gradual process of persuasion were also silenced. Stalin’s collectivization campaign, which began in 1929, was violent, brutal and sudden. Overnight, small peasant holdings were merged into collectives – giant farms covering as much as 247,000 acres (100,000 hectares). Stalin claimed that these collective farms would create a new world of plenty: ‘In some three years’ time, our country will have become one of the richest granaries, if not the richest, in the whole world.’ Tractors operating in immense fields of grain were supposed to double grain yields, while on the new factory-farms the output of milk, butter, cheese and meat would quadruple. A new life would begin for the peasants, too. They would move out of their medieval villages into modern ‘socialist agro-towns’ in each of which 44,000 people would inhabit skyscrapers with ‘flats, libraries, restaurants, reading rooms and gymnasiums’. In the collectives, money was not altogether abolished but wages were, because the peasant now earned work points. The local Party secretary would calculate the value of these accumulated points and then pay the peasant a share of the collective’s output. In an effort to abolish private property peasants were in many places incited to destroy their own possessions, including their eating utensils, and were encouraged to eat in collective dining-rooms and to live in dormitories. As Marx had foreseen in his Manifesto, the peasants were also organized in industrial-type armies or at least their activities were described using military jargon. So they worked in ‘brigades’ or were dispatched to ‘agricultural fronts’; in emergencies they acted as ‘shock troops’ or ‘shock workers’.
Inevitably, the peasants violently resisted these edicts and from 1929 onwards there were armed rebellions in the countryside. To justify his harsh counter-measures, Stalin alleged that th
e cities were short of food because the peasants were hoarding grain, speculating with it and resisting procurement as an act of sabotage. In fact, they were merely reluctant to sell to the state because procurement prices were set too low. The forcible seizure of grain was resumed as was the war against the kulaks, who were expelled from their villages and killed or deported to labour camps. To whip up mass hysteria against the rich peasants, the Party used the ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ which it had organized in the villages after 1918. Just who was a kulak and who was not, was left deliberately vague. Technically, the term applied to anyone who used hired labour or gave credit to his neighbours, and it extended to wives and children, but anyone could be labelled a kulak at the discretion of the local Party.
The peasants responded by defending themselves with whatever weapons they had or by destroying their own property, burning their grain and slaughtering their animals. Much of the country’s livestock died during the collectivization and for a while peasants gorged themselves on meat, eating until they could eat no more. The Kazakhs and other nomadic tribes with herds of livestock were forcibly settled and in the process most of the herds died. As a result a quarter of the Kazakh population starved to death.
To stop the peasants destroying their animals and farms, Stalin decreed that all collective property including cattle, standing crops and other agricultural produce as well as agricultural implements now belonged to the state. Anyone damaging such state property was ‘a saboteur’, ‘a wrecker’ and ‘an enemy of the people’ to whom no mercy could be shown. As millions tried to flee their villages, Stalin introduced what was called the internal passport. At entrance points to all cities, police set up checkpoints to inspect these registration documents. Those who were not registered as city-dwellers were turned back and only those with an urban registration could obtain grain ration cards. The peasants were forbidden to leave their villages without permission, just as they had been when they were serfs.
Collectivization was also the signal for a massive assault on all aspects of peasant life, and Stalin and others talked of launching a cultural revolution. Religion was outlawed, the clergy arrested, the churches closed and turned into storerooms or barns. The state also set about erasing all aspects of ethnic identity among the Ukrainians and other subject peoples of the former Russian empire.
In 1930 there was a pause during which Stalin condemned the excesses of collectivization, accusing some cadres of ‘left deviation’ in abandoning the ‘Leninist principle of voluntarian-ism’ and of being ‘dizzy with success’. For a brief period peasants could leave the collective farms, but it was not long before they were forced to rejoin them. At the same time, the Soviet Union doubled its grain exports to raise hard currency to buy equipment needed for industrialization. As Nikita Khrushchev later said of Stalin and his colleagues: ‘Their method was like this. They sold grain abroad, while in some regions people were swollen with hunger and even dying for lack of bread.’
Just as in China thirty years later, the forced seizure of grain by the state was the greatest cause of the famine that now followed collectivization. In the Soviet Union this took place from 1931 to 1933 when the Party deliberately and consciously took all the grain it could from the peasants. Cadres suppressed accurate figures on the harvest and replaced them with inflated and spurious calculations based on the ‘biological yield’: in other words they guessed at the size of the harvest by looking at the grain growing in the fields. Even those farms that met their initial quotas were merely assigned supplementary quotas until there was no grain left. To stiffen the resolve of the rural cadres, Moscow dispatched 25,000 urban workers to the countryside. Later, more workers were brought from factories to harvest the grain and till the soil. On average, the peasants were left with a third less grain than they had had between 1926 and 1930 but the food shortages were at their most acute in the Soviet Union’s richest grain-growing areas – the Ukraine, the lower reaches of the Volga and the northern Caucasus. It is also now clear that Stalin used the ensuing famine to extinguish Ukrainian nationalism and to crush the rebellious Cossacks, dismissing as ‘right opportunist capitulators’ those officials who truthfully reported the existence of famine in these regions. Any cadre who refused to participate in the grain seizures was arrested and found guilty of ‘right opportunism’ and a campaign against rightists was elevated to the ‘main struggle’ in the country.
In 1931, Stalin allowed relief grain to be delivered to drought-stricken areas and took other steps to alleviate the suffering caused by famine in all regions except the Ukraine. Instead, officials there went from house to house, ripping up the walls and floors and testing the ground for hidden reserves to find grain to meet procurement quotas. As one participant, Lev Kopolev, wrote in The Education of a True Believer: ‘I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to hidden grain. With the others I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the transformation of the countryside.’ A peasant victim of the campaign later testified at a US Congressional investigation in 1988 that officials ‘would walk all over our fields, probing the latter with sharp pikes. The pike was jammed into the ground and pulled up. If any grains of wheat were picked up, the conclusion was that grain was being hidden from the state. The men with pikes went everywhere.’
When the Ukrainian peasants became desperate in their search for food, militia were deployed to guard the grain stores and protect shipments of grain. Then Stalin issued a new law, ‘On Safeguarding Socialist Property’. It authorized the death penalty for anyone stealing even an ear of wheat and in the first year of its enactment, 1932, 20 per cent of all persons sentenced in Soviet courts were convicted under it. Eyewitnesses said that in the midst of the famine peasants knew that their grain was being transported through the starving countryside and shipped out of Ukrainian ports.
Lev Kopolev described what he saw in the Ukraine and how he, a faithful Party member, felt:
In the terrible spring of 1932 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots, corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov... I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me to take away the peasant’s grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to ‘fulfil the Bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style’. Nor did I lose my faith. As before I believed because I wanted to believe.
That year was followed by an even more terrible spring as the Soviet writer, Vasily Grossman, recorded:
When the snow melted true starvation began. People had swollen faces and legs and stomachs. They could not contain their urine... And now they ate anything at all. They caught mice, rats, sparrows, ants, earthworms. They ground up bones into flour, and did the same thing with leather and shoe soles; they cut up old skins and furs to make noodles of a kind and they cooked glue. And when the grass came up, they began to dig up the roots and ate the leaves and the buds, they used everything there was; dandelions, and burdocks and bluebells and willowroot, and sedums and nettles...
Another eyewitness testified at the US Congressional investigation that ‘In the spring of 1933 the fertile Ukrainian soil was covered with human corpses. Corpses could be seen everywhere – on the roads, in the fields, at the railway station. Sometimes I went to visit my village (for I still had family there) and I saw how special brigades gathered the corpses from the streets and houses, and carted them to common graves, or simply threw them in ravines. Even the undertakers themselves were half dead.’
In the then Ukrainian capital of Kharkov, the Italian Consul noted that ther
e was ‘a growing commerce in human meat’ and that people in the countryside were killing and eating their own children. The authorities distributed public information posters that said ‘Eating dead children is barbarism’, and the Ukrainian chief procurator issued a decree to the effect that since no civil law against cannibalism existed, all cases must be transferred to the local branch of the secret police, the OGPU. As the famine deepened, people tried desperately to flee. Viktor Serge recalled in Memoirs of a Revolutionary: ‘Filthy crowds fill the stations; men, women and children in heaps, waiting for God knows what trains. They are chased out, they return without money or tickets. They board any train they can and stay on it until they are put off. They are silent and passive. Where are they going? Just in search of bread, of potatoes...’
People knew there was bread in the cities and left their babies in railway stations, hoping they would be taken to orphanages and cared for. It was a forlorn hope. In Kharkov in 1932, the police removed 250 corpses every morning from the railway station. They also collected the living, including children, who would be put in cells and then taken in trucks or freight trains back to the countryside. There they would throw the dead and the dying into large pits or down gullies.
Peasants hoped that if they got to the cities they would be able to buy bread using gold or foreign currency at the special foreign exchange shops called torgsin that the government had opened. These shops stocked goods and foodstuffs otherwise unobtainable and the government used them to obtain gold and foreign exchange cheaply. Relatives living abroad were also encouraged to send money through the torgsin in answer to desperate appeals. Those with no relatives abroad broke open graves to borrow gold from the dead.
Hungry Ghosts Page 5