Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Our Cossack station has been divided into three categories. “Whites”—the males have been shot and the women and children scattered wherever they could save themselves. The second category is “reds”—they were deported, but not harmed. And the third, “communists.” Nobody in the first category was given anything, reds were allotted one cart per family to take everything they wanted, while communists had the right to take over all their movable property. . . . Don’t send any money, because the collective farm gets it and we just sign for it. Our deported men are in the infantry and very few come home—everyone says they’ve died.³⁵

Ordinary peasants could write only to party bosses or the newspapers, and Soviet newspapers referred letters they did not print to OGPU. Kulaks had nothing to lose—they wrote to Stalin. For instance:

Dekulakization happens like this: 15 people come at night and take everything. They stole pickled berries, salted gherkins and even the meat from the saucepan. They ripped my only fur coat off me, I resisted and was arrested on the spot. . . . Many people perished when the kulaks were deported, at –40° they took families by horse-drawn cart to Tiumen and Tobolsk. In Tobolsk alone about 3,000 are buried, these are completely innocent victims, it is like the order that King Herod once gave to slaughter babies under six months. . . . Comrades Bukharin, Rykov, Frumkin and Tomsky are right, they know peasant life and peasant thinking better than you. ³⁶

Molotov was well pleased with the campaign of 1929–30. All targets were exceeded, many by well over 100 percent: 140,000 had been arrested, twice the figure suggested by the Central Committee at the end of January; the far north had received 70,000 deportees for slave labor in mines and forests, twice the number budgeted for. Twice as much grain as targeted had been requisitioned, leaving even the remaining poor and middle peasants with too little to eat, let alone to sow in spring. The monetary supply was under control, by annulling kulaks’ savings and confiscating their silver.

Iagoda’s final report on liquidating the kulak, circulated to the Politburo on March 15, 1931, is a proud compilation of disgraceful figures. ³⁷ The party and police had nearly lost control: in 1929 and 1930 thousands of anti-Soviet leaflets and posters had circulated, some 14,000 mass demonstrations and 20,000 acts of “terrorist violence” had occurred, and there had been 3,000 incidents of grain being burned rather than handed over. Resistance reached its peak in March 1930. The figures reported by Iagoda omit atrocities in the north Caucasus, the Urals, and Siberia, and OGPU’s 20,000 executions omit the slaughter of women and children in villages which offered armed resistance. In 1929 the Buriat Mongols, despite their Buddhist faith, rose up. Their own historians agree on a figure of 35,000 Buriats shot in the course of “pacification.” Figures for Bashkirs, Chechens, and Cossacks are still guesswork. To judge by OGPU’s informants, the peasantry were bewildered about what political course to take. Some shouted their support for Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, acclaim which helped to doom the right in Stalin’s eyes; some called for the Industrial Party (an invention of Stalin and Menzhinsky) to assume power. In remote areas, kulaks resorted to partisan warfare against OGPU and the collective farms.