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

Comrade Stalin, . . . You and your colleagues are wrong to curse Trotsky. You’re told the workers curse him, not true, not true. Comrade Stalin, I call to you from the depths of the party: Trotsky is more loved than you or Zinoviev, etc. by the workers. . . . Trotsky’s been toppled and you’re kicking him when he’s down. Trotsky is a fighter, he’s a force and a decent party member. . . . With the rotten Leninism you’ve taken up we’ll soon collapse. . . .²

The last spontaneous demonstration in Moscow for sixty years took place at the railway station where Trotsky’s train was waiting, and a dozen OGPU agents were beaten up, although Trotsky was actually still at home. After OGPU came for him two days later, a telegram was sent to Stalin’s train in Siberia: “they had to use force and carry him out in their arms, since he refused to come, had locked himself in his room and the door had to be broken down.” Trotsky was accompanied by his wife, his elder son, Lev, and thirty followers.

When Trotsky arrived in Kazakhstan, Stalin was in Siberia, implementing his version of Trotsky’s policies. The “scissors” problem of the NEP was to be resolved by force. One blade of the scissors was the decreasing price of grain, which deterred peasants from selling surpluses or planting more. The other blade was the sluggishness of Russia’s factories, where the incompetently managed workers on their seven-hour days and rickety production lines were making too few shoddy goods too expensively: a meter of cotton cloth cost the same as fifteen kilos of wheat. The peasants might survive without goods from the cities, but the workers could not live without grain. By the end of 1927, shortages had led to rationing of basic commodities. Stalin understood sticks not carrots. His solution, to the dismay of Bukharin and other liberals, was not to raise factory productivity or prices for farm produce; it was to terrorize the peasantry into handing over grain and money to the state, to confiscate whatever they hid and arrest those who hid, or traded in, grain.

This policy required the peasantry to be sorted into three categories: the rich peasant or kulak (tight fist) to be eliminated, the poor peasant to inherit the earth, and the middle peasant to be left where he was. A kulak was a peasant who farmed more land than his own family could cope with; a poor peasant was one who had lost his land or was unable to subsist on it, and hired out his labor; the middle peasant, on whom Bukharin wanted to stake the future, produced enough both to subsist and to pay his taxes. At first Stalin’s organized pillage of the kulak and middle peasant worked: a million extra tons of grain were collected and famine in the cities was averted in 1928. But over large tracts of Siberia and southern Russia the peasants understood that the years of peace during which, by working hard, they had fed themselves were over.

Stalin’s expedition to Siberia in 1928 was a trial run for a crime against humanity. In the next two years, requisition and dispossession under the names of collectivization and “dekulakization” would lay waste virtually all the arable lands of the USSR. Arrests, deportations, and killings escalated, probably beyond what even Stalin and Menzhinsky had anticipated, into a holocaust unmatched in Europe between the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century and Hitler. Stalin’s attack on the peasantry ravaged Russian agriculture and the Russian peasant to such an extent that for perhaps a century Russia would be incapable of feeding itself. It introduced irrational and unquestioned rule by fear and turned people back into beasts of burden. Stalin was now using OGPU to repress not counterrevolutionaries but a peaceful population.