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

One person was able to get Stalin’s ear, and that was the young Cossack writer Mikhail Sholokhov. Stalin responded, however perfunctorily, to Sholokhov’s boldness when other interventions exasperated him. Sholokhov wrote of the horrors he witnessed at his own Cossack station, Veshenskaia: he described collective farmers left destitute after grain, clothes, and houses were taken, deportees forced to sleep in the freezing cold, children shrieking, a woman with a baby at her breast begging in vain for shelter before both died of the cold. He described mass floggings, torture in frozen pits or on red-hot iron benches, mock executions, women stripped naked on the steppe. “Do you remember, Iosif Vissarionovich, Korolenko’s sketch, ‘In a pacified village’? Well, this ‘disappearance’ was done not to three peasants suspected of stealing from a kulak, but to tens of thousands of collective farmers.”⁵⁰ Sholokhov hinted that if he had no response, he would use the material in his second novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. Stalin thanked Sholokhov and sent out Matvei Shkiriatov from the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. One or two torturers from OGPU were given nominal prison sentences. Stalin told Sholokhov, “your letters create a somewhat one-sided impression . . . you have to see the other side . . . your respected Cossack farmers were being saboteurs and didn’t mind leaving the workers, the Red Army without grain.”

The region that suffered most from Soviet collectivization was the Mongolian People’s Republic, which was in the hands of a Russian puppet, the future Marshal Khorlogiin Choibalsan, a drunken psychopath who connived at the murder of his entire Politburo. Mongolia was not just a cordon sanitaire between the Soviet Union and Japanese Manchuria; it was a laboratory in which Stalin’s antireligious and anti-kulak campaigns were tested. The Buddhist lamas, a third of the adult male population of Mongolia, were slaughtered, the cattle herders dispossessed. In spring 1932, its population reduced by a third, Mongolia revolted and Stalin had to retreat. The government was partially replaced, the rebel leaders declared Japanese agents and their followers promised an amnesty; trainloads of consumer goods were sent and a squadron of aircraft repainted in Mongolian insignia was sent to bomb the insurgents.

In Russia too there were rebellions, though remarkably few. Within a day’s journey of Moscow, on April 10, 1932, thousands in the town of Vichuga rose, burned down the police station, and occupied the party and GPU headquarters, seriously injuring fifteen police. Kaganovich came down to organize the reprisals. In the grain belt the new motor tractor stations became police headquarters not machinery centers. Together with OGPU, MTS “chekas” arrested kulaks, “disorganizers,” and “wreckers.” But even when the tractor stations had tractors available to replace dead horses and plowmen, the collective farms had no money to lease them. “I consider it impermissible,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, “that the state spends hundreds of millions on organizing MTS to serve the collective farms and still doesn’t know how much the peasantry is going to pay for their services.” ⁵¹

Down in the Ukraine what disturbed Stalin was not the deaths of millions of his subjects, but vacillating local leaders who grumbled that plans for grain procurement were “unreal.” “What is this? This isn’t a party, it’s a parliament, a caricature of a parliament,” he wrote to Kaganovich. His own brother-in-law Redens, he grumbled, was “not up to conducting the battle with counterrevolution in such a big and peculiar republic as the Ukraine.”⁵² Stalin claimed to fear another Polish invasion: “Piłsudski’s agents in the Ukraine are not slumbering, they are much stronger than Redens or Kosior thinks. Bear in mind too that the Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha-ha) contains quite a few (yes, quite a lot?) of rotten elements, conscious and unconscious agents of Petliura, even direct agents of Piłsudski.” Stalin asked Menzhinsky to remove Stanislav Redens and put in the field the most brutal GPU man available, Balitsky. The Ukraine was to be “within the shortest time a real fortress.”

By 1934 the main slaughter was over, and a relatively good harvest provided enough grain for the surviving peasants and the townspeople. Effectively, the war of Stalin, the secret police, the party, the army, and the city workers against the peasants was won. Even those who had witnessed the horror tried to put it all behind them. Sholokhov gave Virgin Soil Upturned a happy ending. Gorky, novelists, and filmmakers of the Soviet Union celebrated a countryside feeding industrial workers the calories they needed to build paradise. The only exception was Nikolai Zabolotsky, who imbued “The Triumph of Agriculture” with a Swiftian irony that misled the censor for a few years. Into a horse’s mouth Zabolotsky put the peasant’s De profundis: