Stalin

There were more than 500,000 settlements in just the European part of the Soviet Union. Newspaper articles and decrees made their way to the county level and even below, but the party-state lacked rural cadres that could see through consistent implementation.¹⁶¹ Stalin, however, had an ace in his deck: a decision to recruit urban workers to build socialism in the countryside had been announced at the November 1929 plenum. Trade unions (“Time does not wait!”) were recruiting “politically literate” workers who were to inject their superior “consciousness” into the vast “spontaneity” of the petit bourgeois countryside.¹⁶² Worker volunteers were backed by considerable force. Red Army men would be used sparingly—the OGPU was warning of “kulak” moods even among poor peasant soldiers—but thousands of OGPU internal troops were deployed.¹⁶³ “Those who are joining the collective farm, sign up with me,” one activist announced. “Those who do not want to join, sign up with the police chief.”¹⁶⁴

Of Stalin’s many instruments, however, none was greater than the enchanted vision of building a new world. The regime had planned to mobilize up to 25,000 urban workers; more than 70,000 were said to have volunteered, and around 27,000 were accepted. More than two thirds were party members, and more than four fifths were from industrial regions. The vast majority had between five and twelve years’ factory experience, but nearly half belonged to the 23–29 age cohort.¹⁶⁵ Only one in fourteen were female. “Your role is the role of the proletarian leader,” Kaganovich told a group of Moscow and Leningrad “25,000ers” about to depart for villages. “There will be difficulties, there will be kulak resistance and sometimes even collective farmer resistance, but history is moving in our favor. . . . Either we destroy the kulaks as a class, or the kulaks will grow as a class of capitalists and liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹⁶⁶ Semyon Budyonny, the civil war cavalry hero, and Voroshilov had appeared at Moscow train stations to conduct send-offs to “the grain front.”¹⁶⁷ One worker recruit was quoted as saying, “It has been necessary for a long time to carry out such a firm policy, the sooner to catch up to capitalist countries.”¹⁶⁸

The 25,000ers descended on the countryside in late January/early February 1930, in advance of the spring sowing drive.* They discovered that the regime-instigated class war was eliciting both social solidarity—poor peasants hiding or aiding kulaks—and peasant eagerness to benefit from expropriating those betteroff.¹⁶⁹ Peasant property, seized in the name of the state without compensation, was supposed to be turned over to the new collectives after settlement of outstanding debts of the household in question, and its value counted toward the joining fees for poor peasant members.¹⁷⁰ But activists (or onlookers) who evicted “kulaks” could take their possessions. One OGPU report stated that members “of lower echelons of the party-soviet apparatus deprived members of kulak and middle peasant households of their clothing and warm underwear (directly from their body), ‘confiscated’ headwear from children’s heads, and removed shoes from people’s feet.”¹⁷¹ A favored trick was the “auction”: one new village party secretary managed to obtain a four-room house, valued at 700 rubles, for 25.¹⁷²

The OGPU secretly reported that some of the volunteers tried to rape village women and lusted for power. (“If I command it, you must do it, whether to jump into water or fire, otherwise it’s a bullet to the forehead.”)¹⁷³ Administrative chaos ensued in many places. Even conscientious 25,000ers were not well versed in management or agronomy, and most faced material hardships on-site, as well as armed resistance. “Remember, you sons of bitches, we’ll get even with you,” read notes delivered to 25,000ers in their names.¹⁷⁴ Ambushes by peasants with axes and sawed-off shotguns spread fear, concretizing the Manichaean propaganda.¹⁷⁵ But the orgy of confiscation occurred alongside rampant idealism.¹⁷⁶ Some 25,000ers reported indignantly that kommuna—not artel—collective farms had been imposed; others wrote earnest letters about “violations of socialist legality” (to the very authorities who committed them), risking charges of playing into the “kulak’s hands.” Many of the 25,000ers had escaped villages not long before and imagined that they were helping to overcome darkness and bring modern life to the countryside.

WRATHFUL SPRING