Authors: Owen Matthews
The train from Simferopol carried Martha weswards to Kurman Kimilchi. People told her there was work to be had there, so she descended on to the dusty platform and walked to the collective farm office. She was given a cot in a jerry-built barracks for itinerant summer labourers. There she met the young commissar Boris Bibikov.
Martha and Boris's liaison was a revolutionary marriage. He was a fast-rising and educated member of the new revolutionary élite, she a simple farm girl with impeccable proletarian credentials. There may have been an element of calculation in Bibikov's choice. Or, perhaps more likely, it was a shotgun wedding, the result of a summer fling consummated in the high grass of a Crimean meadow on a hot summer night.
Their first daughter was born seven months after they 'signed' - the new jargon for civil marriage - in March 1925. Bibikov named her Lenina after the Revolution's recently deceased leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When Lenina was eight months old her father entered the Red Army for his military service. Martha would show Lenina the letters Bibikov sent home, would point to them and say, 'Daddy'.
When Bibikov returned home Lenina was two years old, and she cried as the strange man came into the house. Martha told her that her Daddy had come back. Little Lenina said no, that's not Daddy, and pointed to the tin box where Martha kept her husband's letters - that's Daddy in there. It was as if she had a childish premonition of the day when Boris would walk out of the door and out of their lives - and turn back into a stack of papers.
Boris Bibikov's life only really comes into focus in 1929, when Lenina's clearest memories of him begin, and the project to which he dedicated his career and which was to propel him to a kind of greatness was launched. In April of that year the Sixteenth Communist Party Conference approved the first Five Year Plan for the Development of the People's Economy. The Civil War was won, the Party's General Secretary Iosif Stalin had ousted his arch-rival Lev Trotsky, and the Plan was the Party's grand design for creating a socialist country out of the ruins of a Russia wrecked by war and revolution. It was not just an economic project - it was, to young believers like Bibikov, no less than the blueprint for a shining socialist future.
The key to the Plan was socializing the peasants, who made up over eighty per cent of the population and were considered by the Party to be dangerously reactionary. The Revolution was predominantly urban, educated, doctrinaire -like Bibikov himself. The peasants, with their blasphemous desire to own land, their strong attachment to family, clan and church, directly challenged the Party's monopoly over their souls. The aim was to turn the countryside into a 'grain factory', and the peasants into workers.
'A hundred thousand tractors will turn the
muzhik,
the peasant man, into a Communist,' wrote Lenin. As many peasants as possible were to be driven into the cities, where they would become good proletarians. Those who remained on the land were to work on vast, efficient, collective farms. And what was needed in order to make those farms efficient and free up labour for the cities was tractors. During the spring planting of 1929 there were only five tractors in use in the whole of the Ukraine. The rest of the labour was carried out by men and horses. The vast black-earthed land still moved, as it had for numberless generations, to the slow heartbeat of the seasons and the rhythms of human and animal labour.
This, the Party would change. Stalin personally ordered two giant tractor factories built in the heart of the grain belt of south-central Russia - one in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the empire's bread basket, and another on the edge of the empty steppes of western Kazakhstan, in Chelyabinsk, The Party also coined a slogan: 'We will produce first-class machines, in order to more thoroughly plough up the virgin soil of the peasant consciousness!'
The Kharkov Tractor Factory, or KhTZ, was to be built on scrubland outside the city, in a bare field. The scale of the project, its sheer ambition, was staggering. For the first year of construction the Party allocated 287 million gold rubles, 10,000 workers, 2,000 horses, 160,000 tons of iron and 100,000 tons of steel. Bricks were to be made of the clay dug out for the foundations. The only machines on the site when the ground was broken were twenty-four mechanical concrete mixers and four gravel-crushers.
The vast majority of the labour force was made up of untrained peasants who had just been dispossessed of their land. Most had never seen a machine other than a horsedrawn thresher. Bricklayers knew how to build a Russian stove but had no idea how to construct a brick building, carpenters knew how to build an
izba,
a log cabin, with an axe, but not a barrack.
It seems appropriate to speak of these days in a heroic tone because that was certainly how Bibikov viewed himself and his mission. That the project got started, let alone finished in record time, is a testament to the ruthless faith and fanatical energy of its builders. Unlike later generations of Soviet bureaucrats, the Party men of the KhTZ were not desk-bound pen-pushers. Even discounting the hyperbole of the official accounts, reports that they worked in the mud among the bewildered, sullen and half-starved peasants are well-documented. More, they turned them not just into workers but into believers themselves. And in the absence of proper equipment or skilled workers, it was little more than pure faith - and pure fear - that turned a clay field into ninety million bricks, and from those bricks built an industrial behemoth. The whole project was to be a demonstration of how the Party's unshakeable will could triumph over impossible odds.
Bibikov and his family lived in a large communal apartment at 4 Kuybishev Street in central Kharkov, a grand-ish place in an old bourgeois building appropriate to his rank as a rising Party official. They shared the apartment with a childless Jewish couple, Rosa and Abram Lamper. Abram was an engineer, Rosa an excellent cook. Martha's jealous suspicion that her children preferred Rosa's cooking to hers was spiced with her peasant's reflexive anti-Semitism.
Bibikov would disappear for days at the factory; Lenina hardly ever saw him. An official car would arrive early in the morning to pick him up, and he would come back home very late, after Lenina had gone to bed. But he still made time at weekends to take German lessons from a beautiful and aristocratic young teacher. Because Martha suspected her husband was having an affair with this teacher, Bibikov would take Lenina with him to the lessons, walking hand in hand past the 'Gigant' technical university. On the way he would buy Lenina sweets. Bibikov would greet the teacher by kissing her hand - an unforgivably bourgeois gesture if performed in public. Then he would give Lenina a book to read and retire into the teacher's room, closing the door behind him.
Some evenings he would bring factory friends back to the apartment - men like Potapenko, the head of the factory's Party committee, and Markitan, head of the Kharkov Party. Even though he didn't drink or smoke, Lenina remembers her father as being the life and soul of the party. She describes him as a great
zavodila
-Literally, a great winder-upper, an agitator, from the word
zavodit,
to wind up a clock. 'I was proud to be the child of a leader - and he was a leader,' remembers Lenina. 'He had a magic power to enthuse people.'
Magic or not, Bibikov certainly seems to have worked with an enthusiasm bordering on the fanatical on the building of the great factory. One of his colleagues later told Lenina that her father would write, 'Lads, let's fulfil the Plan!' in chalk on the lavatory wall in an effort to encourage his workers. Bibikov was also in charge of recruitment drives into the countryside and to Red Army units who were demobilizing, his task to sign up more labour. On these whistle-stop tours in trains, charabancs and cars, Bibikov and a few hand-picked workers would give speeches in praise of the KhTZ, complete with vividly coloured storyboards for the benefit of their mostly illiterate audiences. Bibikov would return from these trips dirty and exhausted. Lenina remembers her mother complaining of the lice he'd picked up from sleeping in peasant huts, and boiling his underclothes in a great enamel pot on the gas stove.
The factory's official history was written, anonymously, in 1977. But its author, apparently a retired factory executive, was clearly an eyewitness to the momentous early days of the KhTZ. One of the history's heroines is Varvara Shmel, a peasant girl who came to Kharkov from a remote village to join her brother on the construction site. Her time at the factory becomes a metaphor for the progress of the proletariat under the influence of the
stroika,
or building project. Varvara, the history recalls, amazed by her first sight of a tractor, got her hands and face covered in grease as she was examining it. The scene was observed by 'a sardonic young man in yellow rubber boots', a foreign correspondent visiting the site who becomes an allegory of the scoffing West, convinced of the inalterable backwardness of Russia.
'Symbolic!' said the foreign journalist. 'The peasant Miss is inspecting a tractor. And what happened? She only got her face dirty. I repeat and will always repeat - that the building of this factory is an unrealistic project. I would heartily advise this Miss not to waste her time and go home to cook - what do you call it -
shchi
with cabbage.'
The official history claims that people 'came from all over the Union, many answering the call of the Party and the Komsomol [the Communist Youth League]. These were people who were passionately committed to their task, giving it all their strength, true enthusiasts. They formed the basic backbone of the building, the front line of the active fighters for the creation of a sturdy foundation for the socialist economy.'
The reality was different. Most of the peasants who flocked to the site were starving refugees from a war the fledgling Soviet state had unleashed against its own people.
'The Party is justified in shifting from a policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks [prosperous peasants] to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class,' read the Central Committee's decree of 5 January 1930. The Wannsee memorandum of 1942 which mapped out the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem is more famous - but the Soviet Communist Party's condemnation of the kulaks to extermination was to prove twice as deadly.
Army units were mobilized to drive the peasants from their land and confiscate their 'hoarded' grain for the cities and for export. Officers of the NKVD went with them to weed out suspected kulaks - which in practice meant any peasant who was a little harder working than his neighbours, or who resisted the move to collective farms. The Red Army, brutalized by the horrors of the Civil War, set out on its war against the peasants in the same spirit. There were summary executions, villages were burned and their inhabitants sent on forced marches in midwinter or packed on to cattle trucks for resettlement in great slave labour camps all over the Soviet Union. The deportees were called 'white coal' by their guards.
'It was a second Civil War - this time against the peasants,' wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his epic history,
The Gulag Archipelago,
a 'literary investigation' of the terror of this period. 'It was indeed the Great Turning Point, or as the phrase had it, the Great Break. Only we are never told what it was that broke. It was the backbone of Russia.'
By early 1930, after a winter of virtual warfare - virtual because one side was unarmed - half the farms of the Ukraine had been forcibly collectivized. On 2 March 1930 Stalin published an article in
Pravda,
the Party's newspaper, in which he blamed the violence and chaos of the winter months on local cadres who were 'Dizzy with Success'. The reality was that local Party members were confused and demoralized, the peasants had abandoned the new collective farms in droves, and peasant resistance to the system and its representatives had escalated to a level which caused even Stalin to call a temporary halt.
Despite the horrors which were being played out in the countryside all around, Bibikov and the other cadres selected to build the great tractor factory pressed on.
'When flocks of swallows returned from distant warm lands, when larks began buzzing in the air and the ground thawed under the gentle sun, the steppe began to glint with thousands of shovels,' writes the author of the official history, in the ringing language of a
Pravda
editorial. But conditions were grim. Teams of workers hauled loads of fresh-dug clay on sleds because of a lack of horsepower - fully half the horses of Russia were slaughtered by starving or vengeful peasants by 1934. Carpenters knocked together 150 rough-hewn barracks for the workers, and a makeshift underground kiln fired the first bricks to build the chimney of the brick factory proper. Two railway carriages were brought up on newly laid rails, one a bath-house and the other a mobile clinic. Liquid mud squirted up through the floorboards of the workshops, and every evening rows of mud-soaked bast shoes were laid outside the barracks to dry in the spring sunshine. Slowly, the walls of the factory began to rise out of the heavy clay fields from which they were built.
It was a miracle which was being repeated all over the Soviet Union. The giant steel cities of Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Tomsk in Siberia were ordered built on bare steppe; in Sverdlovsk there was the giant heavy machinery plant, Uralmash; the other great tractor factory in Chelyabinsk, known as the ChTZ, and a factory for combine harvesters, the 'ships of the steppe'. Across the Ukraine new metal works were going up in Krivy Rog and Zaporozhiye, new anthracite mines were being sunk in the Donetsk basin. Each day of the first Five Year Plan one new factory was founded and 115 new collective farms opened. all over the country the apparently fantastical projects handed down by the politburo in Moscow were being made a reality. Certainly, the state had proved its ruthlessness in punishing the Revolution's enemies, and the cost of failure would doubtless be severe. But it is hard to believe that these prodigies of industrialization were created by fear alone. Behind the deluge of propaganda photographs of happy, smiling workers, I believe there lay a spark of truth. For a brief but intense moment, a genuine and fierce pride in what they were creating flowered in the men and women involved in the great project.