Stalin

Early OGPU reports had been channeling Stalin’s delusion that “middle” and “poor” peasants were “turning toward the collective farm,” but soon enough the secret police reported mass resistance. (“Down with collectivization!” “No one is taking an ounce of grain from here!”) In March 1930 alone, the OGPU would register more than 6,500 spontaneous “anti-Soviet group protests.”¹⁷⁷ Peasants could not coordinate their opposition across regions, had no transregional leaders or access to the press, and were armed, if at all, only with hunting rifles. This was by no means a “civil war.” Of the 2.5 million peasants who joined protests, according to the secret police count for the year, most did so nonviolently, refusing to join the collectives. Still, peasants would assassinate more than 1,100 rural officials and activists in 1930. Another weapon was arson, “the Red Rooster,” set loose on administrative buildings.¹⁷⁸ Most frequently, protesters destroyed their own livestock: already one quarter of the country’s farm animals had been lost, a higher proportion than during the cataclysmic civil war. Almost half the mass peasant actions in 1930 would occur in Ukraine, where, in strategic regions bordering Poland, revolt overtook every inhabited settlement. Many villages elected their own leaders, ringing church bells to signal mobilization. Hundreds of leaflets were printed, in thousands of copies: “Down with Soviet power!” “Long live a free Ukraine!”¹⁷⁹

Stalin had been warning of how “liquidation of the kulaks” and the “sharpening of the class struggle” would encourage “imperialist intervention” in the USSR.¹⁸⁰ Had the “imperialists” been anywhere near as aggressive as he and Soviet propaganda painted them, they would have taken full advantage of his reckless destabilization.

Almost no one had foreseen Stalin’s stunning turn to complete liquidation of the kulaks, but now came another bolt from the blue: on March 2, 1930, Pravda published his article “Dizzy with Success,” castigating local functionaries as “blockheads” caught up in “communist vainglory” who “feared acknowledging their errors.” Stalin took no responsibility himself for the dislocation. “The collective farm must not be imposed by force,” he admonished. “That would be stupid and reactionary.”¹⁸¹

Despite his apparent retreat, intended to ease the pressure, the OGPU reports on domestic rebellion kept coming: uprisings in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Central Black Earth region, Siberia’s Barabinsk steppe.¹⁸² Enraged especially about the overthrow of Soviet governing bodies along the frontier with Poland, Stalin privately ripped into the OGPU “to stop making speeches and act more decisively” (March 19, 1930). An offended Vsevolod Balytsky, Ukraine OGPU chief, claimed to the republic party boss, Kosior, that he was already doing just that, from a command post in the field. Orjonikidze, dispatched to the scene, wrote that peasant rebellions in border regions were being smashed “using machine guns and, in some places, cannons.”¹⁸³

Trotsky, of all people, published an open letter to the Communist party (dated March 23) condemning the “adventurism” of violent collectivization and breakneck industrialization. Very few Soviet Communists could read the exile’s text, but they did not have to.¹⁸⁴ The Pravda issue with Stalin’s article was reselling for 3, 4, or 5 rubles in the countryside, and peasants were gathering to listen to it being read.¹⁸⁵ One peasant in the Lower Volga observed, “We have two governments—one in the center that writes to take back everything and the other local one that does not want this.”¹⁸⁶ In fact, some local officials did reject Stalin’s retreat. “If they saw someone with a newspaper, they beat them harder and condemned: ‘So, you’re reading comrade Stalin’s article,’” M. Kvasov wrote, in a letter published in Peasant Newspaper, apropos of a village assembly on March 27. “When the peasants showed the party cell secretary, Petrov, Stalin’s article, they declared, ‘You are concealing the party line.’ But Petrov answered coldly: ‘You, comrades, are non-party, and this does not concern you. Don’t believe everything in the newspapers.’¹⁸⁷ Local officials began to accuse Stalin of “right deviationism.”¹⁸⁸