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

In 1929 Stalin’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with sycophantic posters and eulogies. Stalin stopped mediating between left and right and veering from one to the other. He named 1929 the year of the “great turnabout” (perelom—the word also means fracture). In April the first five-year plan of industrialization began, incorporating the projects that Stalin had denounced, when Trotsky put them forward, as absurd: “As if a peasant who’d saved a few kopecks for a new plow were to go and buy himself a gramophone.” Economists knew what was demanded of them: they proposed doubling in five years the output of coal, steel, electricity, and gold. Stalin took the wildly optimistic figures and doubled them again, campaigning to achieve the five-year plan in four.

New ways were needed to approach these targets. Foreign investment, given Stalin’s hostility to foreigners as saboteurs, played a minor part, although Henry Ford greedily offered assembly lines for tractors and trucks. Capital reserves were too small. In the world depression, Russia’s oil and timber fetched less than ever. Grain had to be taken from the peasants even more ruthlessly. Russia had vast reserves of coal, gold, and rare minerals in its frozen far north, but even the one and a half million unemployed in the cities could not be lured there. Despite the losses of the First World War and the civil war, Russia had labor in plenty—but it had to be forced.

Enslaving the Peasantry

And behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill-favored and leanfleshed; and stood by the . . . brink of the river. And the ill-favored and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well-favored and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.

Genesis 41: 3–4

STALIN’S CAMPAIGN of 1929 against the peasantry might be seen by a cold-blooded cynic as a long-overdue cure for an overpopulated countryside. In the nineteenth century Europe had sent surplus peasantry to its colonies. In the twentieth century Stalin had Siberia and Kazakhstan to absorb the peasants of Russia and the Ukraine who, despite the terrible mortality of the civil war, were still too numerous for the land to support. The suffering that ensued has few parallels in human history; it can only be compared in its scale and monstrosity with the African slave trade. But whereas the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese took 200 years to transport some 10 million souls into slavery, and kill about 2 million of them, Stalin matched this figure in a matter of four years.

This was an act of unprecedented monstrosity, and the almost total silence and indifference of Europe and America to the fate of the Russian peasantry suggests that the rest of the world, like Lenin, Stalin, and Menzhinsky, considered the Russian peasant hardly human. The Nazi persecution of the Jews began as Stalin completed his genocide of the Russian peasant. We are still shocked today by Europe’s connivance at Nazi racism but, compared with Europe’s indifference to the introduction of slave labor in Russia and to the eradication of the Russian peasant, its murmurs about Nazi atrocities seem like an outcry. The Soviet authorities tried to confine journalists and diplomats to Moscow but could not stop them looking at the countryside from train windows; nor could it prevent foreign technicians working on projects in the provinces from talking. A few European journalists—Nikolaus Basseches in Germany, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge in England—reported accurately and extensively, but their voices were drowned by the disgracefully bland reassurances of such experts as the British professor Sir Bernard Pares or the American journalist Walter Duranty that nothing untoward was happening. Some journalists, notably Duranty, had been suborned by Iagoda and retailed Stalin’s propaganda not just to secure privileged access to commissars but also to avoid unpleasant revelations about their own activities.

Stalin, the party, and OGPU were not worried. Apparently, putting a dozen foreign technologists on trial hurt Soviet prestige, but enslaving and exterminating millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants did not. In January 1929 the Politburo instructed Menzhinsky, Nikolai Ianson (then commissar for justice), and Krylenko to combine forces, “to ensure maximum speed in carrying out repressions of kulak terrorists.”³⁰ In May a Politburo resolution entitled “On the use of the labor of criminal convicts,” strictly secret and signed by Stalin, was addressed to Iagoda in OGPU and to Krylenko in the prosecutor’s office. It runs: “To move to a system of mass exploitation for pay of labor by criminal convicts with a sentence of less than three years in the regions of Ukhta, Indigo, etc.” ³¹ In July “concentration camps” became “corrective labor camps”; the GULAG came of age.