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

Most of what Stalin did, however brutal, before 1928 can be ascribed to necessity, to the logic of events. The violence of the civil war can be explained as preemptive self-defense against an enemy who, given the chance, would have hanged Lenin’s Politburo from public gallows in Moscow. Stalin’s dirty tactics in the battle for the succession to Lenin can be justified by the view, which was not just Stalin’s, that only a dictator could rule the country and that his rivals were even worse. But Stalin’s collectivization and the eradication of the rich peasant as a class makes little sense on economic grounds. The war on the peasantry that Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev had proposed and which Stalin implemented was ideological, like Hitler’s war on the Jews, but it lacked even the populist basis that underpinned Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. Half of Europe could enthusiastically unite behind anti-Semitism, but few Russians blamed the kulak for their misery.

The arbitrary violence of 1928 left the authorities no other option but to go further and enslave the peasantry on collective farms. Russia would never have voluntarily produced surplus grain again, and private trade in grain or withholding it from the state now became criminal offenses.³ Resistance, even by shouts or a show of fists, was terrorism.

For the first time since the civil war and the last time ever, Stalin traveled the country to enforce a policy rather than take a holiday. He took with him a trainload of OGPU, party, and government workers; his cronies worked in parallel. The Armenian Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan, to whom Stalin had transferred Bukharin’s economic tasks, was terrorizing the grain belt of the north Caucasus; Viacheslav Molotov was taking his train through the black earth of European Russia, the middle and south Volga. At each stop Stalin, Mikoyan, and Molotov mobilized local officials and issued targets for grain. Kulaks, traders, and lax officials were arrested. The poorer peasants and officials in each area did OGPU’s dirty work. Sometimes they acted out of fear or in a frenzied mass; sometimes they were covetous or just vindictive. The poor peasant wanted the tools, clothes, houses, and livestock of the rich; the local party or soviet worker hoped to earn himself promotion. In any case, party workers knew that going too far was far less dangerous than not going far enough. They seized even the seed corn for next spring and the sixteen kilos of grain per head per month that the peasant was allotted for personal survival.

OGPU enforced confiscation wherever Stalin, Mikoyan, and Molotov were unable to visit. For example, on January 19, 1928, Menzhinsky telegraphed the GPU chief in Bashkiria: “Communicate by telegraph immediately what you have undertaken to ensure the process of grain requisitioning. What operations have been carried out, how many have been arrested, and who? Has there been any supervision of the movement of factory goods to the country and requisitioned grain to the railways? Are those who buy up coupons for goods in the country being arrested?”

Menzhinsky, with Stalin’s sanction, was implementing what he had proposed in his university thesis thirty years ago: breaking up the peasant community. All Menzhinsky’s senior staff were requisitioned by Stalin for the task in 1928. Iakov Agranov, deputy director of the secret department of OGPU, was taken off his espionage duties and was soon taking his interest down to village level: “Carry out an investigation urgently on the pillaging of the collective farm at Lutsenkovo parish, paying most attention to the leading kulaks. At the same time process the anti-Soviet element in the parish. Inform the secret department of results in detail.” Genrikh Iagoda, too, was roped in to see that OGPU, not the courts, dealt with those arrested for speaking out against requisitioning or for “sabotage.” ⁴ OGPU’s regular reports also warned Stalin that even from the cowed peasantry there might be a backlash. The Red Army was recruited from the peasantry; the letters soldiers had from home undermined morale and made it unwise to use the army to put down peasant uprisings.

Molotov, touring the Volga, was more cautious than Stalin. He enforced party policy but protested at arbitrary arrests or at local officials using the campaign to settle private scores. Not that there was a grain of humanity in Molotov: he rated bureaucratic efficiency above all else, and blamed party disorganization rather than the kulak for the breakdown in the supply of grain. Stalin used every trick: the peasantry were not allowed to pay in money; every purchase and every tax was in grain. They had to pay taxes in advance and buy government bonds and compulsory insurance until nothing was left. The mills only gave back to the peasants a tiny proportion of their grain as flour.