The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Unable to persuade the peasantry, the activists began to use coercive measures. From December 1929, when Stalin called for the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, the campaign to drive the peasants into the collective farms took on the form of a war. The Party and the Komosomol were fully armed and mobilized, reinforced by local militia, special army and OGPU units, urban workers and student volunteers, and sent into the villages with strict instructions not to come back to the district centres without having organized a kolkhoz. ‘It is better to overstep the mark than to fall short,’ they were told by their instructors. ‘Remember that we won’t condemn you for an excess, but if you fall short – watch out!’ One activist recalls a speech by the Bolshevik leader Mendel Khataevich, in which he told a meeting of eighty Party organizers in the Volga region:

  You must assume your duties with a feeling of the strictest Party responsibility, without whimpering, without any rotten liberalism. Throw your bourgeois humanitarianism out of the window and act like Bolsheviks worthy of comrade Stalin. Beat down the kulak agent wherever he raises his head. It’s war – it’s them or us. The last decayed remnant of capitalist farming must be wiped out at any cost.15

  During just the first two months of 1930, half the Soviet peasantry (about 60 million people in over 100,000 villages) was herded into the collective farms. The activists employed various tactics of intimidation at the village meetings where the decisive vote to join the kolkhoz took place. In one Siberian village, for example, the peasants were reluctant to accept the motion to join the collective farm. When the time came for the vote, the activists brought in armed soldiers and called on those opposed to the motion to speak out: no one dared to raise objections, so it was declared that the motion had been ‘passed unanimously’.In another village, after the peasants had voted against joining the kolkhoz, the activists demanded to know which peasants were opposed to Soviet power, explaining that it was the command of the Soviet government that the peasants join collective farms. When nobody was willing to state their opposition to the government, it was recorded by the activists that the village had ‘voted unanimously’ for collectivization. In other villages only a small minority of the inhabitants (hand-picked by the activists) was allowed to attend the meeting, although the result of the vote was made binding on the population as a whole. In the village of Cheremukhova in the Komi region, for example, there were 437 households, but only 52 had representatives at the village assembly: 18 voted in favour of collectivization and 16 against, yet on this basis the entire village was enrolled in the kolkhoz.16

  Peasants who spoke out against collectivization were beaten, tortured, threatened and harassed, until they agreed to join the collective farm. Many were expelled as ‘kulaks’ from their homes and driven out of the village. The herding of the peasants into the collective farms was accompanied by a violent assault against the Church, the focal point of the old way of life in the village, which was regarded by the Bolsheviks as a source of potential opposition to collectivization. Thousands of priests were arrested and churches were looted and destroyed, forcing millions of believers to maintain their faith in the secrecy of their own homes. Rural Communists and Soviet officials who opposed forcible collectivization were expelled from the Party and arrested.

  In Stalin’s view, the war against the ‘kulaks’ was inseparable from the collectivization campaign. As he saw it, there was nothing to be gained from trying to neutralize the ‘kulaks’, or from attempting to involve them as farm labourers in the kolkhoz, as some Bolsheviks proposed. ‘When the head is cut off,’ Stalin argued, ‘you do not weep about the hair.’17 To his mind, the persecution of the ‘kulaks’ had two purposes: to remove potential opposition to collectivization; and to serve as an example to the other villagers, encouraging them to join the collective farms in order not to suffer the same fate as the ‘kulaks’.

  For all the talk of ‘kulaks’, there was no such objective category. The term was so widely and randomly applied that virtually any peasant could be dispossessed as a ‘kulak’, yet this vagueness only added to the terror which the war against the ‘kulaks’ was intended to create. According to Leninist ideology, the ‘kulaks’ were capitalist farmers who employed hired labour, but this could not be said of more than a handful of the peasants who were actually repressed as ‘kulaks’ after 1929. The NEP had allowed the peasants to enrich themselves through their own labour, and some peasants, like the Golovins, had been able, through hard work, to build up a modest property on their family farms.* But the NEP had kept a tight control on the employment of hired labour, and in any case, after 1927, when taxes on the peasants were increased, most of the richest peasants, like the Golovins, lost much of their private wealth. The idea of a ‘kulak class’ of capitalist peasants was a fantasy. The vast majority of the so-called ‘kulaks’ were hard-working peasants like the Golovins – the most sober, thrifty and progressive farmers in the village – whose modest wealth was often the result of having larger families. The industry of the ‘kulaks’ was recognized by most of the peasantry. As one kolkhoz labourer said in 1931, the campaign against the ‘kulaks’ merely meant that all ‘the best and hardest workers of the land’ were pushed out of the collective farms.18

  The destruction of the ‘kulaks’ was an economic catastrophe for the Soviet Union. It deprived the collective farms of the work ethic and expertise of the country’s most industrious peasants, ultimately leading to the terminal decline of the Soviet agricultural sector. But Stalin’s war against the ‘kulaks’ had little to do with economic considerations – and everything to do with the removal of potential opposition to the collectivization of the village. The ‘kulaks’ were peasant individualists, the strongest leaders and supporters of the old rural way of life. They had to disappear.

  The ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ followed the same pattern nationwide. In January 1930, a Politburo commission drew up quotas of 60,000 ‘malicious kulaks’ to be sent to labour camps and 150,000 other ‘kulak’ households to be exiled to the North, Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan. The figures were part of an overall plan for 1 million ‘kulak’ households (about 6 million people) to be stripped of all their property and sent to labour camps or ‘special settlements’. The implementation of the quotas was assigned to OGPU (which raised the target to 3 to 5 per cent of all peasant households to be liquidated as ‘kulak’) and then handed down to the local OGPU and Party organizations (which in many regions deliberately exceeded the quotas in the belief that this demonstrated the vigilance expected by their superiors).19 Every village had its own quota set by the district authorities. Komsomol and Party activists drew up lists of the ‘kulaks’ in each village to be arrested and exiled. They took inventories of the property to be confiscated from their homes when the ‘kulaks’ were expelled.

  There was surprisingly little peasant opposition to the persecution of the ‘kulaks’ – especially in view of Russia’s strong historical traditions of village solidarity (earlier campaigns against the ‘kulaks’, in the Civil War for example, had failed to split the peasantry). Certainly there were places where the villagers resisted the quota, insisting that there were no ‘kulaks’ among them and that all the peasants were similarly poor, and places where they refused to give up their ‘kulaks’, or even tried to defend them against the activists when they came to arrest them. But the majority of the peasantry reacted to the sudden disappearance of their fellow villagers with passive resignation born of fear. In some villages the peasants chose the ‘kulaks’ from their own number. They simply held a village meeting and decided who should go as a ‘kulak’ (isolated farmers, widows and old people were particularly vulnerable). Elsewhere, the ‘kulaks’ were chosen by drawing lots.20

  Dmitry Streletsky was born in 1917 to a large peasant family in the Kurgan region of Siberia. He recalls how his parents were selected for deportation from their village as ‘kulaks’:

  There was no inspection or calculation. They simply came and said to us: ‘You are going
.’ Serkov, the chairman of the village Soviet who deported us, explained: ‘I have received an order [from the district Party committee] to find 17 kulak families for deportation. I formed a Committee of the Poor and we sat through the night to choose the families. There is no one in the village who is rich enough to qualify, and not many old people, so we simply chose the 17 families. You were chosen,’ he explained to us. ‘Please don’t take it personally. What else could I do?’21

  It is very difficult to give any accurate statistics for the number of people who were repressed as ‘kulaks’. At the peaks of the ‘anti-kulak campaign’ (during the winter of 1929–30, the early months of 1931, and the autumn of 1932) the country roads were filled with long convoys of deportees, each one carrying the last of their possessions, pathetic bundles of clothes and bedding, or pulling them by cart. One eye-witness in the Sumy region of Ukraine saw lines ‘stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions, with people from new villages continually joining’ as the column marched towards the collecting points on the railway. There they were packed into cattle trucks and transported to ‘special settlements’. Since the railways could not cope with the huge numbers of deportees, many of the ‘kulaks’ were held for months awaiting transportation in primitive detention camps, where children and the elderly died like flies in the appalling conditions. By 1932, there were 1.4 million ‘kulaks’ in the ‘special settlements’, mostly in the Urals and Siberia, and an even larger number in labour camps attached to Gulag factories and construction sites, or simply living on the run. Overall, at least 10 million ‘kulaks’ were expelled from their homes and villages between 1929 and 1932.22

  Behind such statistics are countless human tragedies.

  In January 1930, Dmitry Streletsky’s family was expelled from the farm in Baraba in the Kurgan region, where they had lived for fifty years. His grandfather’s house was destroyed – the farm tools and the carts, the horses and the cows transferred to the kolkhoz, while smaller items – such as clothes and linen, pots and pans – were distributed to the villagers. The family icons were all smashed and burned. Dmitry’s grandparents, three of their four sons and their families (fourteen people in total) were rehoused in a cattle shed and barred from contact with the other villagers, until the order for their deportation arrived from the district town. Six weeks later, they were all exiled to a lumber camp in the Urals (where the grandparents died within a year). Dmitry’s father, Nikolai, stayed with his family in Baraba. A Red Army veteran of the Civil War, Nikolai had organized the first collective farm (a TOZ) in the village, and his agricultural expertise was desperately needed by the kolkhoz. Nikolai was allowed to keep his house, where he lived with his wife Anna and their six children. But then, one day in the early spring of 1931, they too were informed that they had been ‘chosen’ as ‘kulaks’ for a second wave of deportations from Baraba. They were given just one hour to pack their meagre belongings, before they were escorted from the village under guard, left on their own on the open steppe and told never to return. ‘We lost everything,’ recalls Dmitry.

  ‘Kulaks’ exiled from the village of Udachne, Khryshyne (Ukraine), early 1930s

  What could we hope to pack up in an hour? Father wanted to take his walking-sticks (one of them had a silver top), but the guards would not let him. They also took my mother’s gold chain and ring. It was daylight robbery. Everything was left behind – our home, our barns, our cattle, our linen, clothes and chinaware. All we had was a few scraps of clothing – and of course ourselves – our parents, children, brothers and sisters – the true living wealth of our family.23

  Valentina Kropotina was born in 1930 to a poor peasant family in Belarus. They were repressed as ‘kulaks’ in 1932. Valentina’s earliest memory is of running with her parents from their home, which was burned on the orders of the village Communists. They set fire to it in the middle of the night, when the family was asleep inside. Valentina’s parents barely had time to rescue their two daughters before escaping, with severe body burns, from their house engulfed in flames. Valentina’s father was arrested that same night. He was imprisoned and later exiled to the Amur region of Siberia, where he spent the next six years in various labour camps. The family house and barn were burned to the ground; the cow and pigs were confiscated for the collective farm; the fruit trees in their garden were cut down; their crops destroyed. All that was left was a sack of peas. Valentina’s mother, an illiterate peasant woman called Yefimia, was barred from joining the kolkhoz. She was left to live with her two young daughters in the ruins of their house. Yefimia built a shack from the rubble of her former house on the edge of the village. She scraped a living from various cleaning jobs. Valentina and her sister did not go to school – as ‘kulak daughters’ they were banned for several years. They grew up on the streets, following their mother to her cleaning jobs. ‘All my childhood memories are sad,’ reflects Valentina. ‘The main thing I remember is the feeling of hunger, which never went away.’24

  Valentina Kropotina (second from left) and her sister (second from right) with three of their cousins, 1939

  Klavdiia Rublyova was born in 1913, the third of eleven children in a peasant family in the Irbei region of Krasnoiarsk in Siberia. Her mother died in 1924, while giving birth, leaving her father, Ilia, to bring up all the children on his own. An enterprising man, Ilia took advantage of the NEP to branch out from farming to market gardening. He grew poppy seeds and cucumbers, which could easily be tended by his young children. For this he was branded a ‘kulak’, arrested and imprisoned, and later sent to a labour camp, leaving his children in the care of Klavdiia, who was then aged just seventeen. The children were deprived of all their father’s property: the house, which he had built, was taken over by the village Soviet, while the horses, cows and sheep and the farm tools were transferred to the kolkhoz. For several weeks, the children lived in the bath-house, until officials came to take them all away to an orphanage. Klavdiia ran off with the youngest child to Kansk, near Krasnoiarsk, where her grown-up sister Raisa lived. Before they went they sold their last possessions to the other villagers. ‘We had nothing much to sell, we were just children,’ Klavdiia recalls. ‘There was a fur-lined blanket and an old sheepskin, a feather mattress, and a mirror, which somehow we had rescued from our house. That was all we had to sell.’25

  What were the motives of the men and women who carried out this brutal war against the peasantry? Most of the collectivizers were conscripted soldiers and workers – people anxious to carry out orders from above (and in some cases, to line their pockets). Hatred of the ‘kulaks’ had been drummed into them by their commanders and by propaganda which portrayed the ‘kulak parasites’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ as dangerous ‘enemies of the people’. ‘We were trained to see the kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed,’ recalls one young activist, the leader of a Komsomol brigade in the Kuban. ‘Without the kolkhoz,’ wrote another collectivizer in the 1980s, ‘the kulaks would have grabbed us by the throat and skinned us all alive!’26

  Others were carried away by their Communist enthusiasm. Inspired by the romantic revolutionary passions stirred up by the propaganda of the Five Year Plan, they believed with the Bolsheviks that any miracle could be achieved by sheer human will. As one student in those years recalls: ‘We were convinced that we were creating a Communist society, that it would be achieved by the Five Year Plans, and we were ready for any sacrifice.’27 Today, it is easy to underestimate the emotional force of these messianic hopes and the fanaticism that it engendered, particularly in the younger generation, which had been brought up on the ‘cult of struggle’ and the romance of the Civil War. These young people wanted to believe that it was their calling to carry on the fight, in the words of the ‘Internationale’, for a ‘new and better life’. In the words of one of the ‘25,000ers’ – the urban army of enthusiasts sent into the countryside to help carry out the collectivization campaign: ‘Constant struggle, struggle, and more struggle! This
was how we had been taught to think – that nothing was achieved without struggle, which was a norm of social life.’28

  According to this militant world-view, the creation of a new society would involve and indeed necessitate a bitter struggle with the forces of the old society (a logic reinforced by the propaganda of the Five Year Plan, with its constant talk of ‘campaigns’, ‘battles’ and ‘offensives’ on the social, economic, international and internal ‘fronts’). In this way the Communist idealists reconciled the ‘anti-kulak’ terror with their own utopian beliefs. Some were appalled by the brutal violence. Some were even sickened by their own role in it. But they all knew what they were doing (they could not plead that they were ignorant or that they were simply ‘following orders’). And they all believed that the end justified the means.

  Lev Kopelev, a young Communist who took part in some of the worst atrocities against the Ukrainian peasants, explained how he rationalized his actions. Kopelev had volunteered for a Komsomol brigade which requisitioned grain from the ‘kulaks’ in 1932. They took everything, down to the last loaf of bread. Looking back on the experience in the 1970s, Kopelev recalled the children’s screams and the appearance of the peasant men – ‘frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad daring ferocity’:

  It was excruciating to see and hear all this. And even worse to take part in it… And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five Year Plan.29