Stalin and His Hangmen (34 page)

Politbiuro members were flooded with protests: on 18 June 1932 a twenty-year-old Ukrainian Communist Youth activist wrote to Stanislav Kosior, the Ukrainian party secretary:

Imagine what is now being done around Belaia Tserkov, Uman, Kiev, etc. Enormous areas of fallow land… In the collective farms where there were 100 – 150 horses there are now only 40 – 50 and those are falling down. The population is starving terribly… Tens and hundreds of cases when collective farmers go to the fields and vanish and a few days later the corpse is found and without pity, as if it were quite normal, is buried in a pit, and the next day they find the corpse of the man who buried the first one…
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Kosior was so shaken that he held back the grain that Moscow demanded from his starving region. This damned him in Stalin’s eyes and for the time being he was demoted to deputy commissar for heavy industry.

Stalin did not relent. He gave detailed instructions to intensify the campaign: ‘deport from Kuban region in twenty days two thousand rich kulak families who are maliciously preventing sowing,’ he instructed Kaganovich on 22 November 1932.
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In December Stalin and Molotov told Iagoda, Evdokimov, the army commander Ian Gamarnik and the secretary of the lower Volga region Boris Sheboldaev to expel from a north Caucasus Cossack station, ‘the most counter-revolutionary, all inhabitants except for those genuinely devoted to Soviet power… and to settle this area with conscientious Red Army collective farmers who have too little land or bad lands in other regions, handing them the land, the winter wheat, buildings, deadstock and livestock of the deportees.’
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Sheboldaev had to commandeer railway depots to cope with this resettlement. He complained to Kaganovich that the peasants who were starving to death were concealing grain hoards, that out of sheer malice they were letting their horses and cows die of starvation.

Stalin conceded a few adjustments to give peasants incentives to produce a surplus for the market, but the hungry were kept away from food. On 16 September 1932 Stalin’s draconian law ‘of five ears of corn’ came into force. To stop uprooted kulaks from ‘shattering our new structures’, it punished by death orprison any peasant taking just a handful of grain or a cabbage from the land for themselves. Capitalism, Stalin argued, overcame feudalism by making private property sacrosanct; socialism must overcome capitalism by making public property ‘inviolable’. Under this law within a year 6,000 had been shot and tens of thousands imprisoned – prison at least held out the prospect of daily rations for the thieves.
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At Stalin’s behest, Menzhinsky concentrated on procuring grain from the starving regions and seeing that OGPU got it to the ports or, if there was no cover and no transport, that the peasantry were prevented from looting the piles of grain rotting in the rain. Menzhinsky’s part in the famine of 1931 – 3 makes him responsible for more deaths than can be laid at the door of Dzierżyński, Iagoda, Ezhov or Beria. Iagoda, unlike Menzhinsky, was shaken by the enormity of what OGPU had enabled Stalin to do. On 26 October 1931 he wrote to Rudzutak, then commissar for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate:

The sickness rate and mortality of the deportees is too great… The monthly mortality equals I.3 per cent in Northern Kazakhstan and 0.8 per cent in the Narym [Siberia] region. Among those that have died there are a particularly high number of younger children. Thus of those below 3 years old 8-12 per cent of the group has died every month, while in Magnitogorsk it has been even more, up to 15 per cent a month. It must be noted
that on the whole the high mortality is not due to epidemic illnesses but to the lack of arrangements for housing and equipping these people, and child mortality climbs because of the absence of the necessary food.
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Menzhinsky and Iagoda had from the north Caucasus figures for deaths from starvation and disease and for cannibals or corpse eaters. In March 1933 they were informed:

Citizen Gerasimenko ate the corpse of her dead sister. Under interrogation Gerasimenko declared that for a month she had lived on various rubbish, not even having vegetables… Citizen Doroshenko, after the death of his father and mother was left with infant sisters and brothers, ate the flesh of his brothers and sisters when they died of hunger… In the cemetery up to 30 corpses have been found, thrown out at night, some gnawed at by dogs… several coffins have been found from which the corpses have disappeared… In Sergienko’s apartment was found the corpse of a little girl with the legs cut off, and boiled meat…
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For once, Menzhinsky and Iagoda’s men – Georgi Molchanov, who had organized terror in the north Caucasus and now headed OGPU’s secret political sector, and Genrikh Liushkov, Molchanov’s deputy and later a defector to Japan – decided not to punish the cannibals, and requested food, medicine and doctors to be sent. In other areas, Molchanov and Liushkov found that even working collective farmers were dying: ‘On 16 March farmer Trigub, an activist, 175 days’ work credited, died of hunger. He applied several times to the farm administration for an issue of food, but received no help. For the same reason groom Shcherbina (185 days’ work) and carpenter Volvach died.’
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Not only the authorities were brutalized. Surviving peasants turned on each other and the starving. In summer 1933 a GPU man from the north Caucasus reported:

On Malorossiiskaia farmstead a boy was caught in a vegetable garden: he was killed there and then by the collective farmers… At Ivanovskaia farmstead a cultivator and five collective farmers detained a workman on the rice farm whom they tortured, cutting off his left ear; they put his fingers in a door and broke them, then threw him alive down a well. After some time they dragged him out barely alive and threw him into another well which they filled with earth. At Petrovskaia homestead a keeper at the Stalin commune detained an unknown woman on the collective farm area for stealing ears of wheat, took her into a straw barn, tied her to a pillar and burnt her and the barn. He buried the corpse where the fire was.
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Soviet intellectuals had to be blind and deaf not to know of these horrors. Very few even hinted at them.
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Osip Mandelstam, safe from censorship now that he was unpublishable, noted in a short lyric of 1933 that ‘Nature doesn’t recognize its own face, / and the terrible shades of the Ukraine and the Kuban […] / On the felt earth hungry peasants / Guard the gate, not touching the handle.’ Nikolai Kliuev, in his vision of starving Russia
The Country of Burnt-Out Villages,
had prophesied:

The day chirped with sparrows, when as if to go looking for mushrooms, the infant was called to the yard. For a piece of beef and liver a neighbour gutted the boy and salted him with grey salt along his bird-like ribs and sinews. From a joist under the beam an old woman washed away the blood with her mop. Then, like a vixen in a snare, she burst out barking in the storeroom. And the old woman’s bark was terrible, like a lullaby, or like magpies’ chattering. At midnight the grandmother’s suffering rose over the poor hut in the shape of Vasia’s head. Peasants, men and women, crowded round: ‘Yes, the same curls and pockmarked nose!’ And suddenly the mob howled at the moon for mortal guilt. Parfion howled, so did thin Egorka, and the massive wolf echoed them on the eaten-out back yards…

The Ukraine suffered worst from cannibalism, a crime for which Soviet law had made no provision. Cannibals were summarily executed by OGPU.

Stalin’s concern was to make sure the foreign press got no wind of these horrors. ‘Molotov, Kaganovich!’ he wrote furiously in February 1933, ‘Do you know who let the American correspondents in Moscow
go to the Kuban? They have cooked up some filth about the situation in the Kuban… This must be put a stop to and these gentlemen must be banned from travelling all over the USSR. There are enough spies as it is…’
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Very few foreign correspondents saw the famine first-hand and their reports met with disbelief Who in peacetime would destroy his country’s peasantry?

One person was able to get Stalin’s ear, and that was the young Cossack writer Mikhail Sholokhov. Stalin responded, however perfunctorily, to Sholokhov’s boldness when other interventions exasperated him. Sholokhov wrote of the horrors he witnessed at his own Cossack station, Veshenskaia: he described collective farmers left destitute after grain, clothes and houses were taken, deportees forced to sleep in the freezing cold, children shrieking, a woman with a baby at her breast begging in vain for shelter before both died of the cold. He described mass floggings, torture in frozen pits or on red-hot iron benches, mock executions, women stripped naked on the steppe. ‘Do you remember, Iosif Vissarionovich, Korolenko’s sketch “In a pacified village”? Well, this “disappearance” was done not to three peasants suspected of stealing from a kulak, but to tens of thousands of collective farmers.’
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Sholokhov hinted that if he had no response, he would use the material in his second novel
Virgin Soil Upturned.
Stalin thanked Sholokhov and sent out Matvei Shkiriatov from the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. One or two torturers from OGPU were given nominal prison sentences. Stalin told Sholokhov, ‘your letters create a somewhat one-sided impression… you have to see the other side… your respected Cossack farmers were being saboteurs and didn’t mind leaving the workers, the Red Army without grain.’

The region that suffered most from Soviet collectivization was the Mongolian People’s Republic, which was in the hands of a Russian puppet, the future Marshal Khorlogiin Choibalsan, a drunken psychopath who connived at the murder of his entire Politbiuro. Mongolia was not just a cordon sanitaire between the Soviet Union and Japanese Manchuria; it was a laboratory in which Stalin’s anti-religious and anti-kulak campaigns were tested. The Buddhist lamas, a third of the adult male population of Mongolia, were slaughtered, the cattle herders dispossessed. In spring 1932, its population reduced by a third, Mongolia revolted and Stalin had to retreat. The government was partially replaced,
the rebel leaders declared Japanese agents and their followers promised an amnesty; train-loads of consumer goods were sent and a squadron of aircraft repainted in Mongolian insignia was sent to bomb the insurgents.

In Russia too there were rebellions, though remarkably few. Within a day’s journey of Moscow, on io April 1932 thousands in the town of Vichuga rose, burnt down the police station and occupied the party and GPU headquarters, seriously injuring fifteen police. Kaganovich came down to organize the reprisals. In the grain belt the new motor tractor stations became police headquarters not machinery centres. Together with OGPU, MTS ‘chekas’ arrested kulaks, ‘disorganizers’ and ‘wreckers’. But even when the tractor stations had tractors available to replace dead horses and ploughmen, the collective farms had no money to lease them. ‘I consider it impermissible,’ Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, ‘that the state spends hundreds of millions on organizing MTS to serve the collective farms and still doesn’t know how much the peasantry is going to pay for their services.’
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Down in the Ukraine what disturbed Stalin was not the deaths of millions of his subjects, but vacillating local leaders who grumbled that plans for grain procurement were ‘unreal’. ‘What is this? This isn’t a party, it’s a parliament, a caricature of a parliament,’ he wrote to Kaganovich. His own brother-in-law Redens, he grumbled, was ‘not up to conducting the battle with counter-revolution in such a big and peculiar republic as the Ukraine.’
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Stalin claimed to fear another Polish invasion: ‘Piłsudski’s agents in the Ukraine are not slumbering, they are much stronger than Redens or Kosior thinks. Bear in mind too that the Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha-ha) contains quite a few (yes, quite a lot?) of rotten elements, conscious and unconscious agents of Petliura, even direct agents of Piłsudski.’ Stalin asked Menzhin-sky to remove Stanislav Redens and put in the field the most brutal GPU man available, Balitsky. The Ukraine was to be ‘within the shortest time a real fortress’.

By 1934, the main slaughter was over, and a relatively good harvest provided enough grain for the surviving peasants and the townspeople. Effectively, the war of Stalin, the secret police, the party, the army and the city workers against the peasants was won. Even those who had witnessed the horror tried to put it all behind them. Sholokhov gave
Virgin Soil Upturned
a happy ending. Gorky, novelists and film-makers of
the Soviet Union celebrated a countryside feeding industrial workers the calories they needed to build paradise. The only exception was Nikolai Zabolotsky, who imbued ‘The Triumph of Agriculture’ with a Swiftian irony that misled the censor for a few years. Into a horse’s mouth Zabolotsky put the peasant’s
De profundis
:

All around nature is dying, the world is rocking, impoverished… now, bow-legged with pain, I hear: the heavens howl. Now a beast trembles, predestined to turn the wheel’s system. I beg, reveal, reveal it, friends: are all people really lords over us?

Collectivization had brutalized victims and perpetrators to such a degree that civilized society no longer existed in the USSR. The cruelty and passivity it induced in Soviet citizens made it possible for Stalin and his hangmen to proceed to an even more violent campaign in the party and among the urban population.