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

OGPU was flooded with reports of discontent and open rebellion, as well as abuse from drunken officials “discrediting Soviet power.” A few officials were killed by peasants; many were assaulted or had their houses burned down. So many peasants were arrested after Stalin’s stay in Novosibirsk that the local GPU could not cope; Iagoda had to hand over kulaks to the militia and the courts.

The peasantry were perplexed by this renewed assault. Was the Soviet Union about to go to war and therefore requisitioning grain? Was the ruble about to collapse and therefore money not being accepted? They concluded, in the words of a letter intercepted by OGPU, “For food we are left with 16 kilos a month per head, but we’re against that and we say we’ll fight to the death, rather than die of famine.” Support for kulaks grew: “Now we shan’t vote for the paupers, we voted for them for two years and they ruin everything; we must vote for a well-off peasant who has property as a pledge so that he is answerable,” wrote another peasant. ⁵

Stalin’s entourage was enslaved to doctrine. The kulak was to be eliminated even though he was rarely rich enough to be an exploiter, but often employed the poor peasants, giving them corn to survive the winter and buying them tools. Worse, to meet targets for confiscation, middle peasants were arrested as kulaks. The idiocy of Stalin’s policy was that the peasants who could farm the land and worked hard were turned off it, very often to die, and those who could not farm and would not work inherited the earth as members of collective farms. All the achievements of Piotr Stolypin, the prime minister who had in 1908 granted the incentives that revived Russian agriculture and sent wagonloads of butter from Siberia to Britain and grain from Odessa to Germany, were nullified.

Why was there no effective protest from within or outside the party at this campaign of unprovoked violence against the class that all of Russian society had long professed to be the core of the nation? Was it ignorance of what was happening? Did people believe the Stalinist propaganda that the USSR had to become industrially strong, if necessary at the expense of the peasantry? Did dissenters fear deadly reprisals? All three factors deterred intellectuals and party workers from taking a stand. The deafening silence must lead us to conclude that Stalin’s apparatus on the one hand and Menzhinsky’s OGPU on the other had by 1928 established their reputations for omniscience and ruthless intolerance.

One man did remonstrate with Stalin: Georgi Chicherin, commissar for foreign affairs. Stalin had inherited him from Lenin and for all his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism Chicherin was as fastidious and rational as any traditional minister of foreign affairs. Stalin put up with Chicherin partly because he quite liked him—Chicherin was a genteel decadent in the style of Menzhinsky—partly because there was nobody else as competent as Chicherin or as acceptable to Western governments and partly because Chicherin, mortally ill, would soon vanish from the scene of his own accord. In March 1929, from his sanatorium in Germany, Chicherin expressed lukewarm support for Stalin’s “general line in peasant policies” but refrained from judging the details and pointed out that it was Stalin’s fault there was no meat to be had in Moscow. He also said, “How good it would be, if you, Comrade Stalin, could change your appearance and travel abroad for some time, with a proper interpreter, not a biased one. Then you’d see reality. You’d learn the value of these outbursts about a final struggle. You’d see the utterly revolting rubbish in Pravda in its real nakedness.”⁶ Chicherin was a voice crying out in the wilderness, but a disinterested one. Bukharin’s protests could be dismissed as the whining of a dismissed satrap.

In a typical maneuver, Stalin put right a nominal amount of the damage he had done: by March 1929 a few unjustly arrested and destitute peasants had been amnestied. OGPU also cut down on its executions: officially, in 1928 only 869 were shot in the Soviet Union, a third of the figure for 1927 when Trotskyism was being suppressed. But OGPU noted that “class warfare has now become more acute in the countryside” and they were eager to proceed with mass arrests of the kulaks they had flushed out.