The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  According to approximate quotas, the Middle Volga OGPU was to arrest and execute 3,000–4,000 people and deport 8,000–10,000; the North Caucasus and Dagestan OGPU, 6,000–8,000 and 20,000; the Ukrainian OGPU, 15,000 and 30,000–35,000, and so on, for a total of 49,000–60,000 people to be imprisoned or executed and 129,000–154,000 people to be deported. The OGPU order of February 2, 1930, made it clear that family members of first-category individuals were to be treated as second-category, and that quotas for the second and third categories referred to families, not individuals. “The measures” as a whole, therefore, targeted about a million people (based on the standard average of five persons per family), but the numbers were subject to negotiation among various deporting officials interested in overfulfilling the plan, bosses of “uninhabited and sparsely populated areas” interested in receiving fewer starving and homeless charges, and industrial managers like Granovsky interested in obtaining free labor. The head of the Middle Volga OGPU, Boris Bak, proposed the deportation of 6,250 families but added that, if necessary, “this number can, of course, always be increased.” A week later, on January 20, 1930, he reported that he was about to launch “a mass operation involving the extraction from the countryside of active counterrevolutionary and kulak–White Guardist elements” numbering ten thousand families (Bak was a relative of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and his neighbor in the House of Government.) During the most intense period of collectivization, 1930–33, about two million second-category exiles were deported to uninhabited and sparsely populated areas. Those who did not die en route built their own “special settlements.”3

  Boris Bak (Courtesy of Nikita Petrov)

  The kulaks, “subkulaks,” and would-be kulaks who were not deported left their villages to become the Tower of Babel of Berezniki, Kuznetsk, and Magnitogorsk. “From Perm they came, and from Vyatka, and from all the provinces where the old peasant ways passed down from their forefathers were no longer possible, but new ones had not yet arrived.” Those who stayed behind were searched, beaten, robbed, and starved until they joined the collectives. According to a March 1930 report on “excesses” in one rural district in Boris Bak’s Middle-Volga Territory,

  In the village of Galtsovka, Lunin District, the middle peasant Mishin was dekulakized because he spoke out against collective farms at a village assembly. All his possessions, including soup spoons, children’s skis, and toys, were confiscated. Mishin had worked for forty years as a day laborer and railroad patrolman, paid ten rubles’ worth of agricultural tax, and was an activist. His children had received a present from N. K. Krupskaia: a little library of books.

  In the village of Ust-Inza, Lunin District, during the dekulakization of the kulak Imagulov, the entire family was evicted at 1 a.m. and forced out into the winter cold. The baby froze to death and Imagulov’s sick daughter-in-law was badly frostbitten. (She had given birth two days previously.)4

  Once inside the collectives, the peasants, herders, hunters, gatherers, and fishermen were given production plans calculated on the basis of yield forecasts and the need for urban food supplies and export revenues. A failure to fulfill the plan resulted in more searches and beatings. According to Bak’s report of June 28, 1932, the most common peasant response was to try to leave the collectives. “Usually, after submitting their resignations, collective farmers attempt to repossess their horses, which must then be retaken by force—and stop reporting for work, thus sabotaging such important activities as weeding, mowing, and silaging, as well as fallow preparation and fall plowing.” Other common practices included flight, the slaughtering of animals, and the killing of local activists. Bak’s response was to restrain the local activists guilty of “excesses” while also “arresting anti-Soviet elements, improving the dissemination of political information, and taking preventive measures through our agent network.” The central government’s response was the decree of August 7, 1932, which equated newly collectivized household possessions to state property and punished theft (attempts at repossession) by applying “the ultimate method of social defense in the form of execution, accompanied by the confiscation of all possessions.” The determined enforcement of ambitious production plans resulted in a famine that killed between 4.6 and 8 million people.5

  Collectivizers at all levels were to demonstrate Bolshevik firmness without committing excesses or suffering from “dizziness from success” (decried by Stalin in March 1930). The line between firmness and excess was both mobile and invisible. Roman Terekhov, who joined the revolutionary movement because of his “great hatred for those who did not work and lived well, especially the bosses” (and began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop), had since become the Party secretary of Kharkov Province and a member of the Ukrainian Central Committee. In December 1932 he inspected the Kobeliaky District and found “an orgy of brazen deception of the state.” Local officials, he wrote in his report to the Ukrainian Party secretary, had abetted the “plundering and wasting of grain” by violating the Party’s directives on “discontinuing the supply of grain for communal consumption,” allowing the farmers to “cut off individual ears of grain,” distributing bread “to the lazy and the greedy,” and setting aside emergency funds for the teachers and the disabled. On Terekhov’s recommendation, all those responsible were arrested and put on trial. The district officials were sentenced to ten years of forced labor “in remote areas of the Union.” A large number of kolkhoz employees (accountants, millers, warehouse guards, and beehive keepers), were unmasked as kulaks. “In addition to that,” concluded the report, “we have taken measures to restore the health of the local Party organization and cleanse it of degenerate elements and kulak agents.”6

  Roman Terekhov with his daughter, Victoria

  Within days of writing this, Terekhov traveled to Moscow and told Stalin that the plan was unrealistic and that the collective farmers were starving. Stalin’s response, according to Terekhov, was: “We have been told, Comrade Terekhov, that you are a good speaker, but it turns out that you are a good storyteller. You came up with this fairy tale about a famine, thinking to scare us. But it won’t work! Wouldn’t it be better for you to resign your posts of provincial Party secretary and Ukrainian Central Committee member and join the Writers’ Union? Then you can write fairy tales, and fools can read them.” On January 24, 1933, Terekhov was relieved of his duties, transferred to the Committee of Soviet Control in Moscow, and given an apartment in the House of Government, which he shared with his wife, Efrosinia Artemovna (who was made deputy director of Clinic No. 2 of the Kremlin Health Service), and their two children, nine-year-old Victoria and two-year-old Gennady.7

  Terekhov was replaced in Kharkov by the first secretary of the Kiev Provincial Party Committee, Nikolai Demchenko, who was firmer in his struggle against sabotage and wiser in not approaching Stalin directly. According to Khrushchev, who worked under Demchenko in Kiev and greatly admired his loyalty to the Party, he approached People’s Commissar of Supplies Anastas Mikoyan instead. In Khrushchev’s version of Mikoyan’s account,

  One day Comrade Demchenko came to Moscow and stopped by my place. “Anastas Ivanovich,” he said, “does Stalin know, does the Politburo know what the situation in Ukraine is like?” (Demchenko was the secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee at the time, and provinces were very large back then.) Some train cars had arrived in Kiev, and when opened, turned out to be full of dead bodies. The train was on its way from Kharkov to Kiev via Poltava, and somewhere between Poltava and Kiev, someone had loaded up all those corpses. “The situation is very difficult,” said Demchenko, “but Stalin probably doesn’t know about it. Do you mind, now that you know about it, letting Comrade Stalin know, too?”8

  Demchenko remained in Ukraine until September 1936, when he became the deputy people’s commissar of agriculture and moved into the House of Government with his wife, Mirra Abramovna (who was made head of the Department of Colleges in the People’s Commissariat of Transportation), and their tw
o sons—Nikolai (seventeen) and Feliks (eight, born the year Feliks Dzerzhinsky died).

  Another high-ranking Ukrainian official who combined public firmness with private pleas for mercy was the chairman of the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, Grigory Petrovsky. “Another reason for providing help,” he wrote to Molotov on June 10, 1932, “is that starving peasants will harvest unripe grain, much of which may perish in vain.” As co-chairman of the All-Union Central Executive Committee and candidate member of the Politburo, Petrovsky had received a permanent apartment in the House of Government—as had his son Leonid, a division commander and an Old Bolshevik in his own right. Petrovsky’s other son, Petr, was in prison as an unrepentant Right Oppositionist.9

  Grigory Petrovsky and his son Leonid

  Terekhov, Demchenko, and Petrovsky were all Ukrainians open to accusations of softness on account of local commitments, but even the republican and territorial viceroys (none of whom was a native of the area he was collectivizing) were often accused of writing fairy tales. Their main job was to fulfill the plan; famines and unrealistic plans made fulfillment less likely. At the October 1931 Central Committee plenum, Molotov had to rebuke the normally firm Filipp Goloshchekin, who called the quotas for Kazakhstan “impossible.”10

  The most obvious remedy for softness born of nepotism, vested interests, and participant observation was to send central officials out on short-term missions. Yakov Brandenburgsky, the family law expert, was sent to the Lower Volga; Solomon Ronin, the planning economist, to the Black Sea–Azov Territory; and Osinsky, still head of the Main Directory of Statistics, to Tatarstan. Boris Shumiatsky, the founder of the People’s Republic of Mongolia and president of the Communist University for the Toilers of the East, was put on the Moscow Province Dekulakization Committee. But they, too, proved unreliable. Brandenburgsky, according to his daughter, cried “so much that, had I not been a witness to those scenes, I would never have believed it.” (He was brought back home in disgrace in March 1931, before the famine had begun to spread.) Ronin, according to his daughter, was shocked by the violence of collectivization and came home in time for the Congress of Victors in January 1934. Osinsky, according to Anna Larina, was among those friends of her father who “were not in opposition to Stalin’s collectivization policy, but reacted with horror to the news of the situation in the countryside.” In May 1933, more than three years after his own stint on the grain procurement front, he wrote to Shaternikova from Ronin’s territory: “During my trip, I saw all those things the local plenipotentiaries had been telling me about, and that I told you about. They can be seen in all their glory all over the western part of the North Caucasus from the Sea of Azov to the mountains.” Shumiatsky, for reasons unknown, was transferred from the dekulakization commission to the chairmanship of the Soviet film industry after seven months. Even Sergei Syrtsov, a strong proponent of the extermination of the Don Cossacks in 1919 and one of the organizers of the anti-peasant violence in Siberia in 1928, had his career end over his objection to the “inflated plans” and the “solution of difficult economic problems with GPU methods.”11

  The method of last resort was the formation of emergency commissions headed by members of the inner sanctum known for their firmness, most particularly Andreev, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Postyshev. Pavel Postyshev, the former “calico printer” from Ivanovo-Voznesensk and a member of the commission charged with the “supervision and overall direction of the deportation and resettlement of the kulaks,” was sent to two of the most important, and most challenging, grain-producing regions: the Lower Volga and Ukraine. Soon after his arrival in the Lower Volga, he received a telegram from Stalin and Molotov about the arrests of two local officials accused of halting grain procurement. “We propose, first, that all such criminals from all the districts be arrested, and, second, that they be put on trial immediately and given five or, better, ten years in prison. Sentences and the reasons for them should be published in the press. Send report upon fulfillment.” The goal of the campaign was, as Postyshev put it at a meeting in Balashov in December 1932, “to fulfill the grain-procurement plan by any means possible.” According to a local official present at the meeting, one of the district Party secretaries said: “‘Comrade Postyshev, we won’t be able to fulfill the plan because we have winnowed the chaff and threshed a lot of straw, but are still a long way from fulfillment. We have nothing left to winnow or thresh.’—‘Is this really a district Party secretary?’ asked Postyshev, addressing the room. ‘I propose relieving him of his post.’ And they did.”12

  Pavel Postyshev

  Postyshev did veto some local initiatives by “dizzy” activists, but his job was to ensure plan fulfillment by any means possible. District prosecutors and people’s courts were told to “proceed to the immediate extraction of all uncovered grain” and “apply a maximum level of repression … to all the malicious non-fulfillers of the grain procurement plan.” On June 12, 1933, the territorial Party secretary reported that, “if not for the help of the Central Committee secretary, Comrade Postyshev, the Lower-Volga Territory would not have managed to fulfill the grain procurement plan.” Over the next year and a half, the population of the area (split between the Saratov and Stalingrad territories) fell by about a million people. By then, Postyshev had received his next assignment. In late December 1932, he, along with Kaganovich, had been told to “leave immediately for Ukraine in order to help the Ukrainian Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars” and “take all the necessary organizational and administrative measures needed for the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan.” The Central Committee decree of January 24, 1933 (which also announced the firing of Roman Terekhov), appointed him second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. He, along with his wife, a fellow Old Bolshevik, T. S. Postolovskaia; their three sons (Valentin, eighteen; Leonid, twelve; and Vladimir, ten); and his wife’s sister and mother moved from the House of Government to Kharkov and, shortly afterward, to Kiev. (A different—smaller—apartment in the House of Government was reserved for their visits to Moscow.) According to Leonid, Valentin accompanied their father on his first trip to the countryside and was so distressed by what he saw that Postyshev had to assemble the family and tell them not to conduct anti-Party conversations at home.13

  ■ ■ ■

  The Lower Volga and Ukraine, along with the North Caucasus, accounted for the largest total number of famine deaths, but, per capita, the most affected area was Kazakhstan, where, according to estimates based on official statistics, 2,330,000 rural residents (39 percent of the whole rural population) were lost to death and emigration between 1929 and 1933. The ethnic Kazakh population was reduced by about 50 percent: between 1.2 million and 1.5 million died of starvation, and about 615,000 emigrated abroad or to other Soviet republics.14

  Filipp Goloshchekin

  The man in charge of Kazakhstan during those years was Sverdlov’s friend, the “regular Don Quixote,” chief regicide, and former dentist, Filipp Goloshchekin. According to the head of the Central Committee Information Section at that time, “F. I. Goloshchekin was a rather strongly built, gray-haired man of about fifty, animated and extraordinarily mobile. His blue, expressive eyes seemed to follow everyone and notice everything. While thinking, he would stroke his pointed beard with his left hand. On formal occasions, he was a lively, fluid, energetic speaker whose gestures merely enhanced his already expressive voice.” In an apparent imitation of Stalin, he liked to pace with his pipe in his mouth.15

  In principle, the “revolution from above” was the completion of the October Revolution and the fulfillment of Lenin’s prophecy (at a pace Lenin could only dream of). In Kazakhstan, it was also a restaging of the entire course of the Bolshevik Revolution and much of human history. “Right now, comrades,” said Goloshchekin at the Sixteenth Party Congress, “we are living through a time when the backward national republics are undergoing the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations, bypassing capitalism.”16

 
The transition began in 1928 with the confiscation of the property of all “semifeudal” nomads. In the Aktiubinsk District, for example, the expropriation of sixty households yielded 14,839 head of livestock, as well as “16 yurts, 11 earth dugouts, 6 haymowers, 4 horse rakes, 7 self-rake reapers, 3 bunkers, 26 carpets, 26 felt mats, etc.” “One thing that makes this experiment interesting,” wrote Goloshchekin in December, 1928, “is that, for the first time in history, we are carrying out the confiscation of livestock, which is considerably more difficult and complicated than the confiscation of land.” Despite the additional difficulties, Kazakhstan was to be in the forefront of collectivization. “I have heard the view,” said Goloshchekin in December 1929, “that the kolkhoz movement will proceed more slowly in our republic than in other regions of the USSR. I consider such a view incorrect.” Collectivization, “sedentarization,” and the final abolition of “feudal, patriarchal, and clan relations” were to proceed all at the same time and without delay. This achievement was going to be, “literally, of global importance.”17

  On March 2, 1930, Stalin accused overzealous collectivizers throughout the Soviet Union of “dizziness from success.” At a Party conference held in Alma Ata in June, Goloshchekin accused his employees of “misunderstanding the Party line.” “In Alma-Ata province,” he told the delegates, the rate of collectivization was “17% in January and 63.7% in April (laughter); in Petropavlovsk, 38% in January and 73.6% in April; and in Semipalatinsk, 18 and 40%, respectively (here the approach was a bit more god-fearing) (laughter).” The highest rates had been recorded in areas of nomadic pastoralism. In Chelkar (where Tania Miagkova had spent time in exile), 85 percent of all households had been collectivized. “We, the Bolsheviks, are seriously alarmed,” said Goloshchekin in his concluding speech (according to the minutes of the conference). “Alarmed, but not panicked.” The conference resolved “to publish Goloshchekin’s complete works in Russian and Kazakh (applause)” and “to name the new Communist university being built in Alma-Ata ‘The Comrade Goloshchekin Kazakh Communist University’ (applause).” Goloshchekin joked that he might get dizzy, but “voices from the audience” assured him that he would not.18