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

No wonder that Stalin later told Churchill in 1945 that collectivization had caused him more anxiety than the Second World War. To stem the chaos, Stalin blamed his subordinates for misleading him. Russian tsars had defused popular resentment by accusing their ministers of pulling the wool over their eyes. A desperate peasantry, unable to conceive of a mind so evil that it would deliberately inflict so much suffering, believed a god who blamed his fallen angels. There was no longer a left or right “deviation” to blame, although they would be resurrected as bogeymen and scapegoats, so Stalin blamed his overenthusiastic subordinates. His article “Giddiness from Success” in Pravda on March 2, 1930, signaled that the worst was over. “Collective farms cannot be imposed by force. . . . Who needs these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of a collective movement, these unworthy threats against the peasants? Nobody but our enemies.” Then came an equally hypocritical decree from the Politburo, “On the struggle against distortions of the party line in the collectivization movement.” The peasantry were so encouraged by these texts that they deserted the collective farms. By summer 1930 the country was only 20 percent collectivized. Peasants left the collectives, even though they lost the animals and tools they had brought with them and were then allotted the worst land to farm.

The activists who had followed instructions from Stalin, Molotov, and Iagoda did not understand the shift in tactics and were nonplussed by this ungrateful disavowal. They were reluctant to apologize to the peasantry but Stalin judged that party discipline required testing the obedience of his subordinates.

There could be no real going back. Land had been redistributed (and often left fallow), houses burned, horses slaughtered, families split up, and heads of households killed. At least half a million people were facing malnutrition in camps or “special settlements,” and a million dispossessed kulaks begged for food, bribed officials for new papers, or sought work in the towns. OGPU’s own reports stressed the hopelessness in barracks in Astrakhan and Vologda, where 20,000 former kulaks were dying of typhus and hunger. Tens of thousands of victims, particularly middle peasants caught up in the waves of arrests, appealed to the judiciary. A few thousand were freed from the camps and sought work in the enormous building sites springing up in the Urals and on European Russia’s rivers.

OGPU recorded executions that followed a written sentence but left uncounted deaths with no paper trail. For want of censuses in the early 1930s, the mortality of the first collectivization campaign has to be guessed. The figures point to a catastrophe even before the terrible famine of 1932–3: a drop in the birthrate from 45 to 32 per thousand between 1928 and 1932, and a climb in the death rate with 620,000 more deaths in 1931 than in 1928. The groundwork for the famine, the greatest demographic catastrophe to hit the peasantry in Europe since the Middle Ages, was laid by Stalin in 1929, for the survivors were so weakened, physically, morally, economically, that they were doomed to die. For want of horses, women pulled plows; there was precious little grain and, with half the livestock slaughtered, no meat.

But Stalin had stepped back simply in order to advance much further. In September 1930 he told Mikoyan to force the tempo of grain exports to “establish our position on the international market” and instructed his faithful acolyte Poskriobyshev, the secretary of the secret section of the Central Committee, to receive warmly the American engineer Hugh L. Cooper, who would accept increased grain exports from the USSR in exchange for help with producing tractors. By 1931, from a starving countryside, over 5 million tons of grain was being exported to pay for turbines, assembly lines, mining machinery, and the funding of communist parties all over Europe, Asia, and America.

The silence of the West, which emerged from its economic depression at least partly as a result of orders from the Soviet Union paid for by the blood of millions of peasants, is a blot on our civilization. Diplomats and journalists may well have shared Stalin’s view that the Russian peasant was a subhuman brute; Western businessmen were eager for the contracts that Soviet industrialization was bringing their way. As the late British historian Christopher Hill said seventy years later of the Ukraine in 1933: “I saw no famine.”