Nobody knew exactly who belonged to which category. It was impossible to say definitely who was a “kulak,” to distinguish “kulaks” from “middle peasants.” The unfortunate prosperous peasant was completely at the mercy of the GPU, the Party authorities, and, above all, the malicious “village poor.” Well-off peasants voluntarily surrendered their property to the kolkhoz, imploring those in charge not to class them as kulaks. But the idle and shiftless rural paupers took their revenge: the new masters were inexorable. I. Vareikis, a member of the Central Committee and of Molotov’s commission, wrote with satisfaction that “de-kulakization is being carried out with the active participation of the poor. The poor accompany the commissions in large groups and confiscate cattle and other property. On their own initiative they post a watch on the roads out of villages at night, with the object of detaining kulaks trying to escape.”
All over the country, as women howled and sobbed, the unfortunates were loaded onto carts, which moved out of the village under the watchful eyes of the GPU. People gazed round at the empty houses which had been their family homes for centuries. They were leaving behind a life which they would never see again.
The Molotov commission deported fifty thousand kulak families to the far northern territory. The Northern Territorial Committee had reported that it could take only twenty thousand: the huts, without heat or light, were not yet ready. Stalin’s telegraphed response to the problem was: “The Central Committee cannot agree to a decision which overturns the resettlement plans already adopted by the Party.” And: “Novosibirsk. To Secretary of the Siberian Territorial Committee Eikhe: Take all necessary preparatory measures for reception in mid-April of not fewer than 15,000 kulak families.” Telegrams such as these sped to every provincial committee. And Stalin’s plans were carried out in full. Freight cars unloaded people out in the open steppe, into a hungry wilderness fenced with barbed wire. A whole class was being destroyed.
The commission did its work well. Its members were the new Stalin boyars, the obkom secretaries installed by Stalin, Party leaders all-important in their own provinces. Together, of course, with Yagoda, representing the GPU. The onetime head of the commission, Molotov, recalled at the age of ninety that “we made a pretty good job of collectivization.… I personally delineated the resettlement areas.… Around 400,000 were deported.” S. Kosior, a new member of the Politburo, who was on the commission, told the commission that “we must inflict a really annihilating blow on the kulaks,” while S. Kirov wrote picturesquely of “columns of tractors digging the kulaks’ graves.” If Kirov had only known it, graves were being dug for others besides the kulaks.
Kirov, Kosior, and Vareikis would all perish. Ninety percent of the commission’s membership (nineteen out of twenty-one) would soon be lying in unmarked holes, victims of Stalin’s purges. But for the present they worked with a will destroying others. Train after train after train transported peasants in cattle wagons. There were floodlights on the roofs of the wagons, and guards with dogs inside.
The poor peasants and those of the middle peasants who survived were united in collective farms. The kulaks’ carefully tended herds, their well-built houses, goods and chattels accumulated over the centuries, money in the savings banks—all had to be handed over to the kolkhoz. The kolkhoz originated in the bloody misappropriation of other people’s property.
All Party organizations raised their targets with feverish haste and undertook to complete collectivization in the shortest possible time. Naturally, lip service was paid to the principle of voluntary membership. Or, as the current joke went, “voluntary-compulsory membership.” The GPU herded the peasants into the kolkhoz to the strains of music and singing. Local Party leaders knew that it was a case of either 100 percent collectivization or hand in your Party card. In his old age Molotov recalled a joke popular with the general public at the time: “How do you get rid of lice?” “Write ‘kolkhoz’ on your head and they’ll all run away at once.”
There were rebellions. A bloody riot, in which kolkhoz chairmen and GPU plenipotentiaries were killed, flared up in the Ryazan area. The rising was savagely suppressed. (That was when my nanny’s sister, the tall and beautiful Pasha, turned up in the city. Half-asleep, I heard Pasha telling my mother in the next room how she had set fire to her cottage so that “those devils wouldn’t get their hands on it.”)
Putting down the risings was the Red army’s job. But Stalin knew the effect all this might have on an army made up mainly of peasants’ sons. He had not yet completely tamed the country; he still had to think of such things. Hence his article “Dizziness with Success.” It seemed, he explained, that “certain comrades,” dizzied by the headlong voluntary rush of the masses to join the kolkhoz, had become overzealous. These “certain comrades” had sometimes forcibly collectivized. Worst of all, they had confused middle peasants with kulaks. All these “comrades” would, of course, prove to be crypto-Trotskyists, deliberately trying to sabotage collectivization. They were responsible for the deviations from the correct line. A wave of trials swept over the country. Trials, this time, of the “malicious exaggerators.” Stalin skillfully kept up the pressure of the Terror.
Pope Pius XI chose now to call for prayers for persecuted Christians in Russia. On the eve of the day appointed by the Pope for this universal prayer, Stalin published a decree “on the distortion of the Party line in the kolkhoz movement.” Once again, it all was their fault: maliciously overzealous deviationists had, it seemed, forcibly closed down a number of churches.
And although priests and monks were not brought back from exile, although by the end of the year 80 percent of village churches were closed, people still enthused over the handful of churches reopened on Stalin’s orders. He was skillfully reinventing a figure beloved of Russians: that of the good tsar with bad ministers.
Even after “Dizziness with Success,” the extermination of better-off peasants continued to escalate. From all over the country convoys including children and old people were moved on “by stages” toward their places of exile. The trains were packed with people dying of cold and thirst. Children died on the journey, some of them killed by their mothers to spare them suffering. According to (understated) official figures, another 240,000 families had been deported by 1933. The gigantic revolutionary experiment was a success. The class which Lenin so hated, the prosperous Russian peasantry, no longer existed.
All this was accompanied by sensational trials. In the summer of 1930 cars raced around Moscow and throughout the surrounding countryside. The police were rounding up intellectuals. Yagoda had a new large-scale operation in hand. The flower of the intelligentsia—academicians, eminent scholars and scientists, technologists, professors, the economists Chayanov, Kondratiev, Yurovsky etc.—were all arrested. Among the most important of those accused of “wrecking” was M. Ramzin, a famous specialist in boilermaking and director of the Moscow Thermo-Technical Institute. The GPU also announced the discovery of a powerful terrorist organization, with almost 200,000 underground members, and claimed that a clandestine Industrial Party had been plotting to seize power.
Those under arrest confessed to everything. Volumes have been written on the way in which the required testimony was obtained from them—how they were tortured by interrogation round the clock, denied sleep, and so on.
One thing unknown until the present was the extent of Stalin’s involvement. Only now, after reading the new documents, can I say for sure that he personally staged the trials. And what a producer he was! How meticulously he worked out the details of this Grand Guignol. And even dictated the actors’ lines.
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
July 2, 1930. Stalin to Menzhinsky. Strictly Personal. Ramzin’s testimony is interesting. My suggestions—make one of the most important, crucial points of Ramzin’s (future) depositions the question of intervention. And the dates of the planned intervention. Why was intervention postponed in 1930? Was it because Poland is not yet ready? Or perhaps Romania is not yet ready? Also—
why did they postpone intervention until 1931? Could they postpone it till 1932?
In this concocted fantasy, the accused were being told that the imperialists were secretly preparing intervention in the Soviet republic. By admitting their involvement in the intervention scheme, the accused would automatically thwart it and save the country. They were invited to slander themselves out of true proportion, in return for which they were, of course, promised more lenient sentences. Ramzin agreed to admit in court that his “party” had welcomed the capitalists’ plans to intervene against the USSR. But Stalin still needed to amplify Ramzin’s “interesting testimony.” The point was that there was no intervention. And he knew that there would be none. So now he suggested a variety of explanations as to why the intervention had not yet happened. And why it would not happen. Not all of the accused behaved as sensibly as Ramzin. In exasperation, Stalin demanded that “Messrs. Kondratiev, Yurovsky, Chayanov, etc., who are craftily trying to wriggle out of the intervention tendency should be made to run the gauntlet. We will make this material available to a section of Comintern. Then we shall conduct the broadest possible campaign against the interventionists, thereby frustrating and paralyzing attempts at intervention for the next year or two, which is not unimportant to us. Understand?” So it was all pure invention, devised by him to serve “not unimportant” ends. The fact that the “wriggling” Kondratievs were innocent was unimportant.
How exactly the intellectuals were “made to run the gauntlet” we can only guess. One way or another, his orders were carried out.
In a note to Molotov, Stalin wrote, “You must have received Kondratiev’s new testimony by now. Yagoda brought it along to show me. I think that all these statements should be distributed to all members of the Central Committee.” Capitalist plans for intervention and the atmosphere of a fortress under siege were required by the Terror. Stalin meant to keep the country in a permanent state of emergency.
At the very end of 1930 a grandiose new spectacle was mounted—the public trial of the “Industrial Party.” The indefatigable Krylenko prosecuted, and once again the trial went splendidly. Workers’ meetings all over the country demanded the execution of these “vile traitors,” whereas in the courtroom spectators marveled at the extraordinary politeness shown to the accused by the judge: they were even allowed to smoke. The press was there in force, and the proceedings were filmed. The accused vied with one another in confessions of guilt. They readily supplied an amazing variety of information on their wrecking activities, and their links with hostile émigrés, foreign embassies, and even French President Poincaré himself. Still, things did not go absolutely smoothly. The “vile wrecker” Ramzin, for instance, asserted that his plans for intervention by foreign states included the formation of a government in waiting. His candidate for the post of Minister of Trade and Industry was the Russian capitalist Ryabrushinsky, with whom he had negotiated successfully. Unfortunately it transpired that Ryabrushinsky had managed to die before Ramzin could enter into “successful negotiations” with him.
Stalin was capable of gratitude. The main defendant, Ramzin, was sentenced to death by shooting, but this was commuted to imprisonment. The same Ramzin whose name had been anathema to the country at large was shortly released, and eventually became director of the very same Technological Institute, and a winner of the country’s highest award, the Stalin Prize. Several other of the “inveterate wreckers” would be numbered among Stalin’s pet scientists.
He still saw to it that blood was spilled abundantly. How can you have Terror without blood? The trials of intellectuals for sabotage in every branch of the economy went on without a break. Bacteriologists were tried on charges of spreading cattle plague and shot. Officials in the food industry were accused of organizing a famine, and forty-eight of them were shot. People, mostly professors and engineers, were sitting on the bare cement floors of the Butyrki Prison, sixty to eighty to a cell. Jails had long been known to the public as “Holiday Homes for Engineers and Technicians.” Stalin tirelessly directed these “measures of no small importance.”
13.9.30. Stalin to Molotov. All the testimony of wreckers in fish, meat, canned goods, and vegetables should be published immediately … followed in a week’s time by the announcement that all these scoundrels have been shot. They must all be shot.
It seems fantastic. He himself organizes the trials, he declares innocent people to be criminals, yet he is genuinely indignant at their crimes. The actor has fully identified himself with his role.
But the damage done became more and more serious, and his commissars sounded the alarm. Skilled personnel had vanished completely. But here too he had a remedy to hand—to fill the gaps, to man the depopulated enterprises they began bringing engineers in from the jails! People who had sorely missed the jobs they had lost thought themselves lucky.
At the Sixteenth Congress in July 1930 he was truly crowned. In his report to the Congress he said frankly that NEP had been a maneuver. He had been building up his strength all the time, in the knowledge that “at the appropriate moment” he would destroy the old village and carry out industrialization:
The Party chose the right moment to go over to the attack all along the front. What would have happened if we had listened to the right-wing opportunists of the Bukharin group, if we had refused to attack, had slowed down the development of industry, held back the development of collective and state farms, and based ourselves on individual peasant farming? We would surely have disrupted our industrial program … we would have found ourselves without bread … we would be sitting by a broken trough. What if we had listened to the left-wing opportunists grouped around Trotsky and Zinoviev, and launched an offensive in 1926–1927, when we had no way of replacing grain produced by kulaks with grain produced by collective and state farms? We should surely have come to grief that way … and found ourselves without bread … sitting beside a broken trough. [Applause] Advancing regardless dooms an offensive to failure. Our experience of the Civil War tells us that.… The basic orientation in the Party at the present moment is away from a socialist offensive limited to particular sectors of the economic front, and toward an offensive along the whole front.
BUT WHOSE IDEA WAS IT?
In my memory, I am back in the seventies. In Moscow. It was early morning in the Lenin Library, as it was then called. As soon as the library opened, a little, thin-necked man appeared. The striking thing in his appearance was a pair of pince-nez of the sort once worn in tsarist Russia. But all those who frequented the library recognized that face and those pince-nez. They belonged to Vyacheslav Molotov.
One day I succeeded in introducing myself to him. It happened at the first night of some play or other at the Yermolova Theater. I had left my overcoat in the manager’s office, and when I went to get it after the play I saw an old man in pince-nez outside the office door. I went in and the manager said, “Did you see Molotov? He left his coat here. I had to ask the old man to wait. We had an important guest tonight—our district Party secretary. I had to let him put his coat on and leave first, to avoid any embarrassment.” The embarrassment was that Molotov had been expelled from the Party after his clash with Khrushchev. And now the man who had once controlled the destiny of postwar Europe had to wait while a district secretary got his overcoat on. Sic transit gloria mundi. I took Molotov’s coat and galoshes, and the street clothes of his companion, and carried them out to him. His companion was an elderly lady, apparently his housekeeper. His wife was dead.
That was how we met.
He lived on Granovsky Street, quite near the theater. Which was why he valued his connection with it, and was concerned about embarrassing the manager.
I volunteered to see him home. It was a quiet winter night. I was stupid and impatient enough to start talking about Stalin right away. I sensed his uneasiness, and began with innocuous questions, such as “Why did Stalin wear boots even in summer? Many strange explanations have been given.”
He answered me very politely.
“Please tell me just one of them,” he said. I suggested that the semimilitary tunic and the military boots hinted at war for world revolution.
He laughed dubiously. “Very poetic. Stalin, however, wrote poetry only in his early youth. As for the world revolution—we never did forget our obligation to the world proletariat. But unlike the Trotskyists who kept shouting about world revolution—we made one. Made one, and created a worldwide socialist camp. We didn’t keep shouting about industrialization like the Trotskyists, but we did it. In just the same way, they talked about collectivization, but it was Stalin who brought the peasants into the kolkhoz. Although to begin with he seemed to be defending even kulaks. Incidentally, Lenin too only ‘sort of believed’ in NEP.”
I remember to this day his flat voice and that sarcastic “sort of.” But like an idiot I interrupted him. “You mean ‘sort of’ believed in NEP to appease the deaf-mutes?”
He was silent for a while, then said stiffly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m talking about Lenin’s Testament. There was a rumor that there was a longer one somewhere.”
“There was no longer Lenin Testament,” he said in the same flat voice.
Later I read a little book by the poet Chuyev about his long conversations with Molotov. Chuyev asked him whether there were any secret agreements about the Baltic States. Molotov, who had drafted them himself, said that there were none.
I imagine that he answered in the same icy tone.
For the rest of the journey he remained silent. I rang him up occasionally after this but could never arrange another meeting. I had probably broken some sort of taboo.
But, invoking poetic license, let us suppose that there was a Testament. If so, when Stalin laid hands on it in Lenin’s private office it would have been like finding a map of buried treasure. Kamenev once said of Lenin that “whenever I disagreed with him he always proved to be right.” They all had faith in the God Lenin’s compass. If Lenin’s command in his Testament had been to regard NEP as “serious and here to stay” Koba, who as yet had little experience of leadership, would, just as energetically, have taken the country to the very end of that road. Ilyich, of course, had willed something different. To a radical like Lenin, NEP was merely the rocket designed to lift off his spacecraft and disappear. Was Stalin, at the Sixteenth Congress, putting into his own words the economic plan contained in Lenin’s Testament?
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