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

The silence of the Russian intelligentsia, bludgeoned and cajoled by OGPU and the party, is more excusable. When writing about the civil war, Soviet novelists and poets could talk of atrocities on both sides and mourn the waste, but on this second civil war there was no leeway. Nevertheless, a handful of Russian poets could not blind themselves to what everyone knew was happening. The young poet Nikolai Zabolotsky lost his freedom and his health for speaking of the horrors in his ironically entitled “Triumph of Agriculture”: he let the Russian peasant protest through the mouth of a horse:

People! You are wrong to believe that I cannot cogitate, if you thrash me with a stick, after putting a breast band on my neck. A peasant, his legs gripping me, gallops, lashing horribly with the knut, and I gallop, though ugly, my hungry mouth gasping for air. All around nature is dying, the world is rocking, impoverished, flowers are dying, weeping, swept away by a blow of the legs.

The Peasantry: The Final Solution

IN FEBRUARY 1933 Stalin told a congress of handpicked peasants that the collective farms had snatched at least 20 million of them from the clutches of the kulak and pauperdom. Each household, Stalin promised, would have one cow, once the kulaks were finished off. Stalin’s final words ring true, read with or without irony: “This is an achievement such as the world has never known before and which no other state in the world has tried to achieve.”

Stalin told Churchill that collectivization cost 10 million lives. OGPU counted the deaths by starvation and disease only for a few months; they kept records only of peasants shot, arrested, or deported as kulaks, their mortality rates, their escapes, their recapture. A few registry offices in the worst-affected areas along the Volga kept track of who died from what. In some villages and Cossack stations, abashed officials and a few courageous peasants tried to keep a toll. Today’s statisticians can estimate the losses from the age and sex structure of the generation that lived through this catastrophe. Another basis for calculation is the difference between the population predicted in 1926 for 1937 and the real figures (some 20 million less) obtained in 1937 by the census takers—they were shot for their honesty. Allowing for famine, violence, hypothermia, and epidemics caused by the disruption, the number of excess deaths between 1930 and 1933 attributable to collectivization lies between a conservative 7.2 and a plausible 10.8 million.

The surviving peasants were enslaved for two generations. On December 27, 1932, the Soviet state issued internal passports to its citizens but not to the peasants, who were left unable to leave their collective farms. For them the civil war had come back, but with no Whites or Greens to defend them. Provincial towns suffered, too: refugees brought epidemics of typhus—there were nearly a million cases in 1932. Food shortages in many cities made ration cards meaningless. Rickets, scurvy, and dysentery killed children; in many areas more than half the infants under one year old died.

The kulaks began dying the moment they were dispossessed: in trains that took them north and east, over 3 percent died of disease and privation. Despite the annual influx of deportees, the population of the “labor settlements” actually fell from 1932 to 1935. Of 1,518,524 kulaks in exile in 1932, nearly 90,000 died.³⁸ The following year was worse: 150,000—13 percent of deportees—died and a quarter of the escapees were recaptured. Only in 1934 did mortality drop below 10 percent. The death rate in Iagoda’s labor camps gave prisoners a one-in-three chance of surviving a ten-year sentence. Not counting the victims of the Great Terror, in the 1930s, over 2 million persons were deported to labor settlements in hitherto uninhabited areas of the north and Siberia. Kulaks were followed by the inhabitants of frontier zones and other undesirables. Of the 2 million, well over 400,000 died, including 50,000 “repressed” by OGPU and the NKVD, and over 600,000 fled into anonymity or to the building sites of the Urals and Siberia (a third of these were recaptured). To the casualties of the subsequent famine, we have to add half a million kulaks who died outside the grain-producing regions.