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

On Malorossiiskaia farmstead a boy was caught in a vegetable garden: he was killed there and then by the collective farmers. . . . At Ivanovskaia farmstead a cultivator and five collective farmers detained a workman on the rice farm whom they tortured, cutting off his left ear; they put his fingers in a door and broke them, then threw him alive down a well. After some time they dragged him out barely alive and threw him into another well which they filled with earth. At Petrovskaia homestead a keeper at the Stalin commune detained an unknown woman on the collective farm area for stealing ears of wheat, took her into a straw barn, tied her to a pillar and burned her and the barn. He buried the corpse where the fire was.⁴⁷

Soviet intellectuals had to be blind and deaf not to know of these horrors. Very few even hinted at them.⁴⁸ Osip Mandelstam, safe from censorship now that he was unpublishable, noted in a short lyric of 1933 that “Nature doesn’t recognize its own face, / and the terrible shades of the Ukraine and the Kuban [ . . . ] / On the felt earth hungry peasants / Guard the gate, not touching the handle.” Nikolai Kliuev, in his vision of starving Russia The Country of Burnt-Out Villages, had prophesied:

The day chirped with sparrows, when as if to go looking for mushrooms, the infant was called to the yard. For a piece of beef and liver a neighbor gutted the boy and salted him with gray salt along his birdlike ribs and sinews. From a joist under the beam an old woman washed away the blood with her mop. Then, like a vixen in a snare, she burst out barking in the storeroom. And the old woman’s bark was terrible, like a lullaby, or like magpies’ chattering. At midnight the grandmother’s suffering rose over the poor hut in the shape of Vasia’s head. Peasants, men and women, crowded round: “Yes, the same curls and pockmarked nose!” And suddenly the mob howled at the moon for mortal guilt. Parfion howled, so did thin Egorka, and the massive wolf echoed them on the eaten-out backyards. . . .

The Ukraine suffered worst from cannibalism, a crime for which Soviet law had made no provision. Cannibals were summarily executed by OGPU.

Stalin’s concern was to make sure the foreign press got no wind of these horrors. “Molotov, Kaganovich!” he wrote furiously in February 1933, “Do you know who let the American correspondents in Moscow go to the Kuban? They have cooked up some filth about the situation in the Kuban. . . . This must be put a stop to and these gentlemen must be banned from traveling all over the USSR. There are enough spies as it is. . . . ”⁴⁹ Very few foreign correspondents saw the famine firsthand and their reports met with disbelief. Who in peacetime would destroy his country’s peasantry?