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

Stalin had full reports from commissariats, party, and OGPU. All June, July, and August of 1930, 1931, and 1932 he spent recuperating on the Black Sea coast, supervising Kaganovich and Molotov by courier and telegram. In August 1933 he went south again for a two-month break, traveling slowly by train, riverboat, and car, taking a week to pass through the worst-affected regions. Stalin saw abandoned villages, victims of famine and of typhus epidemics. “Koba,” Voroshilov wrote to Abel Enukidze, “like a sponge, kept soaking it all up and there and then, after a little reflection, sketched out a series of measures.”³⁹

Politburo members were flooded with protests: on June 18, 1932, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian Communist Youth activist wrote to Stanislav Kosior, the Ukrainian party secretary:

Imagine what is now being done around Belaia Tserkov, Uman, Kiev, etc. Enormous areas of fallow land . . . In the collective farms where there were 100–150 horses there are now only 40–50 and those are falling down. The population is starving terribly. . . . Tens and hundreds of cases when collective farmers go to the fields and vanish and a few days later the corpse is found and without pity, as if it were quite normal, is buried in a pit, and the next day they find the corpse of the man who buried the first one. . . .⁴⁰

Kosior was so shaken that he held back the grain that Moscow demanded from his starving region. This damned him in Stalin’s eyes and for the time being he was demoted to deputy commissar for heavy industry.

Stalin did not relent. He gave detailed instructions to intensify the campaign: “deport from Kuban region in twenty days 2,000 rich kulak families who are maliciously preventing sowing,” he instructed Kaganovich on November 22, 1932.⁴¹ In December Stalin and Molotov told Iagoda, Evdokimov, the army commander Ian Gamarnik, and the secretary of the lower Volga region, Boris Sheboldaev, to expel from a north Caucasus Cossack station, “the most counterrevolutionary, all inhabitants except for those genuinely devoted to Soviet power . . . and to settle this area with conscientious Red Army collective farmers who have too little land or bad lands in other regions, handing them the land, the winter wheat, buildings, deadstock and livestock of the deportees.”⁴² Sheboldaev had to commandeer railway depots to cope with this resettlement. He complained to Kaganovich that the peasants who were starving to death were concealing grain hoards, that out of sheer malice they were letting their horses and cows die of starvation.

Stalin conceded a few adjustments to give peasants incentives to produce a surplus for the market, but the hungry were kept away from food. On September 16, 1932, Stalin’s draconian law “of five ears of corn” came into force. To stop uprooted kulaks from “shattering our new structures,” it punished by death or prison any peasant taking just a handful of grain or a cabbage from the land for themselves. Capitalism, Stalin argued, overcame feudalism by making private property sacrosanct; socialism must overcome capitalism by making public property “inviolable.” Under this law within a year 6,000 had been shot and tens of thousands imprisoned—prison at least held out the prospect of daily rations for the thieves.⁴³

At Stalin’s behest, Menzhinsky concentrated on procuring grain from the starving regions and seeing that OGPU got it to the ports or, if there was no cover and no transport, that the peasantry were prevented from looting the piles of grain rotting in the rain. Menzhinsky’s part in the famine of 1931–3 makes him responsible for more deaths than can be laid at the door of , Iagoda, Ezhov, or Beria. Iagoda, unlike Menzhinsky, was shaken by the enormity of what OGPU had enabled Stalin to do. On October 26, 1931, he wrote to Rudzutak, then commissar for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate: