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

In the south the liquidation of the kulaks turned into ethnic warfare as Don Cossacks who had survived the 1920 genocide were murdered as kulaks by their impoverished neighbors, Ukrainian peasants. All over the north Caucasus “spontaneous” atrocities, spurred on by OGPU, flared up: Cossacks were burned alive in cinemas, Chechen shepherds and beekeepers were gunned down as “bandits.” Frinovsky, head of OGPU’s border guards, arrived to quell national uprisings, allegedly provoked by kulaks. He reported, after putting the uprisings down, that corpses choked the rivers flowing into the Caspian Sea. A few communities were hard to crack: the million German farmers who had lived for two centuries on the left bank of the Volga rallied behind their church pastors. Not until 1941 were Stalin’s men able to dispossess the Volga Germans. Inspired by their mullahs, the Tatars also withstood attempts to separate out the kulaks, but they could not hold off OGPU, and dreadful retribution was exacted.

The Ukraine suffered worst, for anti-Muscovite feeling fueled resistance so widespread that it took Stalin two years to devise adequate reprisals. There was more violent resistance in the Ukraine than in the rest of the Soviet Union; of all kulaks deported, a quarter were Ukrainian.

There were now virgin lands in Kazakhstan on which to begin an arable experiment; they were won, like the American west, by exterminating the nomads who had lived on them for centuries. Unlike the American west, however, Kazakhstan received new settlers with no money, clothes, seed corn, or tools, and many would freeze or starve to death. Other Kazakhs fled with their animals into China. Perhaps 2 million emigrated, even though their fellow Kazakhs in China had no pasture to spare, and half of the refugees died.

The information dam erected around the country by OGPU still leaked. Until 1935, when rural post offices stopped accepting letters for abroad, Cossacks wrote to their relatives scattered from Uruguay to China. But Westerners in general were too gullible or indifferent to protest about the holocaust among the Russian peasantry and Cossacks. As one Kuban Cossack wrote to his relatives abroad: “Various delegations come from abroad, all communists of course. They are fed well and told stories. If they see people queueing and ask why, ‘our’ lot explain that these are poor people come for a free meal. And the foreigners go home and probably talk about miracles in the land of the Soviets.”

In 1930 a Terek Cossack woman described to an émigré cousin her life over the last ten years:

You reproach us for not writing to you, but we’d be glad to have a correspondence, except it’s impossible. You probably heard we were deported in 1922. . . . We were scattered over the wide world, each going where he could, to the Ingush, the Chechens, Osetians, Georgians—so that we relatives don’t see each other. . . . Your family was chased out in 1923 and on the night of December 10 outside Grozny all six were shot, but S. was killed right on the street. The next morning all your farm was looted—the house was blown up, the sheds, barns and gates went to the Chechens. . . . When we were expelled we wrote to you that many had died, they were all shot.