5

Collectivization: Revolution in the Countryside, 1930

Green corn waves new shoots

Though planted not long ago

Our brigadier sports new boots

While we barefoot go.

Collective farm song, 1930s1

The words ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ carry few implications of human agony. It seems a formula of social engineering and has an impersonal and metallic ring. But for those who saw the process at close range the phrase is freighted with horror …

Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 1937²

In the winter of 1929 outsiders came to Miron Dolot’s village on the banks of the Tiasmyn River in central Ukraine. It was a large village by the standards of the time, with about eight hundred families, a church and a central square. Villagers owned their own house and land, but most of those houses had thatched roofs and the plots were tiny. Few farmers possessed more than fifty acres, but they felt, by the standards of the time, comfortably off.

As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal. ‘We were completely free in our movements. We took pleasure trips and travelled freely looking for jobs. We went to big cities and neighboring towns to attend weddings, church bazaars, and funerals. No one asked us for documents or questioned us about our destinations.’³ Others remembered the era before collectivization in the same way. The Soviet Union was in charge, but not every aspect of life was controlled by the state, and peasants lived much as they had in the past. They farmed the land, ran small businesses, traded and bartered. A woman from Poltava remembered that her parents, ‘very industrious people and religious’, had owned ten hectares of land and earned money doing other odd jobs too: ‘My father was a good carpenter. He also knew many other crafts.’4

Politics had remained loose and decentralized: ‘The Ukrainian government did not dictate in the 1920s and say that a particular school had to be Ukrainian or Russian, because that decision was made in the locale itself.’⁵ Villages were self-governing, much as they always had been. Tension between the adherents of Bolshevism and the more traditional peasants remained, but the various groups tried to accommodate one another. In Pylypivka, this is how a group of boys prepared to go carolling on Christmas Day:

the boys made a star [traditional for carollers] and thought about how to design it. After some debate, a decision was made: on one side of the star, an icon of the Mother of God would be featured, while on the other, a five-pointed [Soviet] star. In addition, they learned not only old carols, but also new ones. They made a plan: when they were approaching a communist’s house, they would display the five-pointed star and sing the new carols, but when they approached the house of a religious man, they would display the side with the icon of the Mother of God, and would sing [old carols].⁶

But the outsiders who came to Dolot’s village that December brought with them a different set of ideas about how life there should be lived. Loose organization was to be replaced by strict control. Entrepreneurial farmers would become paid labourers. Independence was to be replaced with strict regulation. Above all, in the name of efficiency, collective farms, owned jointly by the commune or the state, were to replace all private farms. As Stalin had said in Siberia, the ‘unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms … for us is the only path’.⁷

Eventually, there would be different types of collective farm with different degrees of communal ownership. But most would require their members to give up their private property – their land as well as horses, cattle, other livestock and tools – and to turn all of it over to the collective.8 Some peasants would remain in their houses, but others would eventually live in houses or barracks owned by the collective, and would eat all of their meals in a common dining room.⁹ None of them would own anything of importance, including tractors, which were to be leased from centralized, state-owned Machine Tractor Stations that would manage their purchase and upkeep. Peasants would not earn their own money, but would rather be paid day wages, trudodni, often receiving for their labour not cash but food and other goods, and those in small quantities.

Supposedly, all of this was to come about spontaneously, as the result of a great upswell of rural enthusiasm. In November 1929, Stalin lauded the collectivization ‘movement’, which he claimed was ‘sweeping the country’:

radical change … has taken place in the development of our agriculture from small, backward individual farming to large-scale, advanced collective agriculture, to cultivation of the land in common … the new and decisive feature of the peasant collective farm movement is that the peasants are joining the collective farms not in separate groups, as was formerly the case, but in whole villages, whole regions, whole districts and even whole provinces.¹⁰

But in practice, the policy was pushed hard from above. In the week starting 10 November 1929 the party’s Central Committee met in Moscow and resolved to ‘speed-up the process of collectivization of peasant households’ by sending party cadres into the villages to set up new communal farms and persuade peasants to join them. The same resolution condemned the opponents of collectivization and expelled their leader, Nikolai Bukharin – Stalin’s most important political opponent by that time – from the Politburo. A few weeks later the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture declared that all of the grain-producing regions of the USSR would be collectivized within three years.¹¹

The men and women who showed up in Dolot’s village that winter were the first tangible evidence of the new policy. At first, the villagers didn’t take them seriously: ‘Their personal appearance amused us. Their pale faces and their clothes were totally out of place in our village surroundings. Walking carefully to avoid getting snow on their polished shoes, they were an alien presence among us.’ Their leader, Comrade Zeitlin, treated the peasants rudely and seemed to know nothing of their ways. Supposedly, he mistook a calf for a colt. A farmer pointed out his mistake. ‘Colt or calf,’ he replied, ‘it does not matter. The world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.’12

Comrade Zeitlin was, in the language of the time, a ‘Twenty-Five Thousander’ – a ‘Thousander’ for short – meaning that he was one of approximately 25,000 working-class, urban aktivists recruited at the end of 1929, following the Central Committee’s resolution, to help carry out the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The physical manifestation of the Marxist-Leninist belief that the working class would be an ‘agent of historical consciousness’, these urban activists were enticed into the countryside with a campaign that had the feel of a ‘military recruitment drive in the initial stages of a patriotic war’.¹³ Newspapers published photographs of these ‘worker-volunteers’, and factories held meetings to celebrate them. Competition to join their ranks was, at least according to official sources, quite fierce. One volunteer, a former Red partisan, later made an explicit comparison to the bloody battles of the previous decade: ‘Here now before me arises an image of ’19, when I was in the same district, climbing along snowdrifts with rifle in hand and blizzard raging, like now. I feel that I am young again …’¹⁴

The motivations of the urban men and women themselves were mixed. Some sought advancement, some hoped for material rewards. Many felt genuine revolutionary fervour, stoked by constant, angry, repetitive propaganda. Others felt fear as well, as the newspapers wrote constantly about imminent war. Urban food shortages, all too real, were widely blamed on the peasants, and the Twenty-Five Thousanders knew that too. Even in 1929 many Soviet citizens already believed that recalcitrant peasants posed a very real threat to themselves, and to the future of their revolution. This powerful belief enabled them to do things that ‘bourgeois morality’ would have once described as evil.

One of the people gripped by this revolutionary fervour was Lev Kopelev, a Twenty-Five Thousander who played an unusual role in the history of Soviet letters. Kopelev was born in Kyiv to an educated Jewish family, studied in Kharkiv, spoke Ukrainian as well as Russian, but identified himself as ‘Soviet’. Much later, in 1945, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag. He survived, befriended the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, became a model for one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, wrote powerful memoirs of his own, and became a prominent dissident. But in 1929 he was a true believer:

With the rest of my generation, I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism’, the attributes of people who ‘could not see the forest for the trees’.15

He was not alone. In 1929, Maurice Hindus, the American socialist, received a letter from a Russian friend, Nadya, who did not yet have the benefit of Kopelev’s hindsight. She wrote in a state of ecstatic excitement:

I am off in villages with a group of other brigadiers, organizing kolkhozy. It is a tremendous job, but we are making amazing progress … I am confident that in time not a peasant will remain on his own land. We shall yet smash the last vestiges of capitalism and forever rid ourselves of exploitation … The very air here is afire with a new spirit and a new energy.¹⁶

Kopelev, Nadya and others like them were bolstered by a sense of grievance. The Bolsheviks had made extraordinary promises to people, offering wealth, happiness, land ownership, power. But the revolution and the civil war had been violent and disorienting, and the promises had not been kept. Ten years after the revolution, many people were disappointed. They needed an explanation for the hollowness of the Bolshevik triumph. The Communist Party offered them a scapegoat, and urged them to feel no mercy. Mikhail Sholokhov, in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, painted a telling portrait of one such disappointed fanatic. Davidov was a Twenty-Five Thousander who had come to collectivize the peasants at any cost. When, at one point, a farmer tentatively suggested that he had been too cruel to the village kulaks, he lashed back: ‘You’re sorry for them … you feel pity for them. And have they had pity for us? Have our enemies ever wept over the tears of our children? Did they ever weep over the orphans of those they killed?’17

It was with this kind of attitude that, after very brief training sessions – usually no more than a couple of weeks – the urban volunteers set out for the villages. But although they boarded trains in Leningrad, Moscow or Kyiv while listening to the strains of revolutionary music and the echoes of patriotic speeches, as they moved into the countryside the music faded away. One brigadier wrote later, ‘They saw us off with a triumphal march, they met us with a funeral dirge.’¹⁸ It was at this moment in time that the Stalinist rhetoric of progress clashed headlong with the reality of Ukrainian and Russian peasant life.

The trains ran more slowly as they entered the countryside: not every provincial railway manager was enthusiastic about the new urban activists. In Ukraine most of these volunteer outsiders were Russian speakers, either from Russia or from Ukrainian cities; in either case they seemed equally foreign to the Ukrainian-speaking peasants. When they arrived in provincial capitals, the activists sometimes found that the reception was hostile, which was unsurprising. To local peasants who had just recovered from the shortages and hunger of the summer of 1929, the newcomers would have seemed indistinguishable from the soldiers and activists who had come to the Ukrainian countryside to expropriate grain a decade earlier.

Nor was their task simple. Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary. The activists were simply meant to argue and harangue, and in the process persuade. Village meetings were held, and these agitators also went from house to house. Antonina Solovieva, an urban activist and Komsomol member in the Urals, remembered the collectivization drive with nostalgia:

The objective was to talk individual peasants into joining the collective farm; to make sure that the collective farm was ready to begin sowing; and, most important, to find out where and by whom state grain was being hidden … We would spend long evenings around a small table with a weakly flickering kerosene lamp at some collective farm headquarters, or by a burning stove in some poor peasants’ hut.19

But while the objectives might have been clear, the lines of command were not. Many different groups had some responsibility for the implementation of collectivization, including the local communist parties, the Komsomol (the communist youth organization), the Young Pioneers (the communist children’s organization), the remaining Committees of Poor Peasants, the Central Control Commission, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Collective Farm Centre (kolkhoz-tsentr), the trade unions and, of course, the secret police. Other state officials, most notably teachers – educators of the new generation – were involved too.

All these local authorities, already burdened with chaotic chains of command and conflicting priorities, had mixed feelings about these young enthusiasts who had no experience in farming, agriculture or even of country life, while the young urban enthusiasts had mixed feelings about the local authorities too. Many documents from the period cite complaints about the local village councils, which were alleged to be dragging their feet or otherwise obstructing the work of the volunteers sent from the outside. Clearly the village councils were inefficient. But they may also have wanted to protect their neighbours from the harsh impact of orders issued by fanatical young outsiders.²⁰

The peasant farmers themselves, whether or not they were classified as kulaks, were even less enthusiastic about the urban activists. The oral historian William Noll, interviewing Ukrainians in the 1980s, found that folk memories of the Twenty-Five Thousanders were still strong. As in Dolot’s description, they were remembered as incompetent: they used the wrong seeds for the soil, gave bad advice, knew nothing about the countryside.²¹ They were also remembered as foreign, Russians or Jews. Oleksandr Honcharenko, a young man at the time, later recalled – incorrectly, since many of his subjects came from Ukrainian cities – that the Twenty-Five Thousanders were ‘all Russians’. He also remembered that in his village in Cherkasy province the brigadier – ‘obviously’ a Russian – was rejected immediately: ‘He came to convince the peasants how wonderful life was under the Soviets. But, who listened? No one. This liar made his way from one end of the village to the other. No one wanted anything to do with him.’22

Of course the urban activists were unpopular not just because they seemed ‘foreign’, but because their policy was unpopular – profoundly so, as the next chapter will explain. But if a small number of peasants eventually came, like Kopelev, to sympathize with their views, most had the opposite reaction. If anything, the peasants’ stubborn opposition made the activists angrier, more prone to violence, and more convinced of the rightness of their cause. In January 1930, Genrikh Yagoda, the deputy director of the secret police at the time, told his senior staff that resistance would be fierce. The kulak ‘understands perfectly well that he will perish with collectivization and therefore he renders more and more brutal and fierce resistance, as we see already, [ranging] from insurrectionary plots and counter-revolutionary kulak organizations to arson and terror’.²³

This notion trickled down to the villages, where the emissaries of the working class saw the peasants’ unfriendliness as evidence of the ‘kulak counter-revolutionary tendencies’ that they had been warned to expect. Much of the subsequent cruelty can be explained by this clash between what the urban activists wanted and the very different reality in the countryside itself.

They also had to prove themselves and their loyalty. ‘Your task,’ a local communist told Antonina Solovieva, ‘is to engage in agitational work among the village youth … and to find out where the kulaks are hiding the grain and who is wrecking agricultural machinery.’ In addition, ‘you will need to talk to these people and explain party policies and collectivization to them’. Solovieva, then a young student, had a moment of doubt: ‘This was a huge task; were we up to it? We really knew nothing about these things; we did not know how to begin.’ Resolved to prove herself – ‘there was no time to lose’ – she had no incentive to be kind.²⁴

There is no doubt that the collectivization drive was ordered by Moscow, imposed ‘from above’, and that it was Stalin’s personal policy, as first outlined on his trip to Siberia at the end of 1928. Nor is there any doubt that collectivization was first brought to the countryside by urban outsiders who were culturally alien and, in the case of Ukraine, linguistically and often ethnically alien as well. But the collectivization drive did find some supporters among both local officials and peasants. Just as Aleksandr Shlikhter had set poor villagers against wealthier ones in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the Bolsheviks yet again sought to empower one group of peasants so that they could exploit their neighbours on behalf of the state.

As soon as they arrived, the outside agitators began to identify and elevate local collaborators – the aktiv – who could help them to do just that. Pasha Angelina, later a celebrated ‘shock worker’ and one of the first female tractor-drivers in the USSR, wrote a highly politicized memoir of collectivization in Starobesheve, her village in Donetsk province. The memoir is notable for its rigid conformity to the socialist realist template – being a predictable tale of the triumph of the Communist Party over all obstacles – as well as for the genuine hatred evoked in her wooden prose. Although she gave few details, Angelina and her family had played an active part in forcing their neighbours to join the new collective farms: ‘Those were difficult days, filled with tension and fierce class struggle. It was only after defeating the kulaks and chasing them off the land that we, the poor, felt truly in charge.’ Neither she nor her parents and siblings felt any remorse:

We went after the ‘kurkuls’ who were strong and ruthless in their hatred of everything new … Our family, and many families like ours, had been working for the kulaks for many generations. We realized that it was impossible for us to live on the same earth as those bloodsuckers. The kulaks stood between us and the good life, and no amount of persuasion, constraint or ordinary taxation was sufficient to move them out of the way. Once again, the party understood our needs and showed us the solution. Through Comrade Stalin, the party told us: ‘Move from limiting the kulaks to the liquidation of the kulaks as a class …’25

She and her siblings were not alone. A Ukrainian secret police report from February 1930 described with enthusiasm the crowds of poor and so-called ‘middle’ peasants, who were rather less impoverished, gathering with ‘red flags and revolutionary songs’ in some villages to oversee collectivization.26 Some of these local participants were former members of the ‘committees of poor peasants’, exactly the same people who had led the grain requisition drives in 1918–20 and felt some loyalty to the Soviet system. Matvii Havryliuk, who had worked as a requisitioner in 1921 despite the kulaks ‘threatening to kill me and my family’, leapt at the chance to rejoin the struggle: ‘All of 1930 I was an agitator, participated in the brigades … I even found those kulaks who tried to avoid de-kulakization by hiding in the woods. I personally brought them to justice.’²⁷

Others sought to use the new revolutionary situation to improve their status. As the OGPU itself recognized, many of the ‘poor peasants’ were in fact ‘criminal elements’ who saw a way to profit off the misfortune of their neighbours.²⁸ Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the OGPU boss who travelled back and forth between Ukraine and Moscow at this time, worried that the authorities relied too much upon people with no background or experience: ‘We take a Komsomol member, we add two or three poor peasants and we call this an “aktiv”, and this aktiv conducts the affairs of the village.’²⁹

Like the Twenty-Five Thousanders themselves, some of these local collaborators found Bolshevik ideology appealing. They believed the promises of a ‘better life’, a phrase that must have meant full stomachs to some and something more mystical to others, and they thought that the destruction of the party’s ‘enemies’ could make the better life arrive faster. As in 1918, collectivization would eventually help create a new rural elite, one that felt confident about its right to rule. Activists argued, even years later, that despite the opposition, the collectivization was ‘for the greater good’.³⁰ Many, though not all, would be rewarded with jobs and better rations. The strengthening of this new elite also helped, in turn, to intimidate the opponents of collectivization further. An OGPU report from Ukraine in March 1930 explained, approvingly, that ‘the activity of the village masses was so great that throughout the period of the operation there was no need to call on the armed forces.’ Thanks to the ‘enthusiasm and activity’ of local volunteers, opponents of collectivization felt abandoned and alone. This, according to the OGPU, removed the incentive for resistance and demoralized those under arrest.31

It is impossible to know, from the evidence available, just how much of the ‘enthusiasm and activity’ was real. The existing memoirs hint that many of those who joined the collectivization brigades, perhaps even the majority, were neither enthusiastic nor cynical nor criminal, but simply afraid: they felt that they had no option but to join in. They were afraid of being hurt or being beaten, of going hungry, of being named as ‘kulaks’ or enemies themselves. Komsomol members received direct orders to participate, and may have believed that it was impossible to refuse.³² One later remembered, ‘once all of the students and teachers who were Komsomol and party members were ordered to surround one of the villages to prevent anyone from escaping while [secret police vans] drove the peasants out of the village to the heated box-cars of the trains waiting to deport them’.³³ A teacher recalled that ‘all teachers were considered helpers in the socialization of the village, so that we were automatically recruited as activists to encourage people to join the collective farms’. Those who refused could lose their property or be transported to another village.³⁴

To those who opposed them, these collaborators were ‘lazy loiterers’ or ‘thieves’ who hoped to profit from the misfortune of others.³⁵ But many of the local perpetrators would have been as terrorized and traumatized as their victims, intimidated by the same undertones of violence and the language of threat. And when famine took hold, some of them would become victims themselves.

One morning in January 1930, not long after the Twenty-Five Thousanders had arrived in Dolot’s village, the peasants awoke to discover that several of their most prominent citizens – a teacher, a clerk, a store owner and several relatively wealthy farmers, all among the most respected members of the community – had been arrested. Immediately afterwards, the wives of the arrested men were evicted from their homes along with their children. One of the women, the wife of a farmer known as Uncle Tymish, tried to fight back after they grabbed her:

She struggled and pulled their hair. She was finally dragged out of the house and thrown onto the sleigh. While two men held her, the children were brought out. A few of their possessions were thrown onto the sleigh and it moved off. Still restrained by the two officials, Uncle Tymish’s wife and his children, wailing and shouting, disappeared in the winter haze.36

Within days of deporting this prosperous farmer and his wife – whether to Siberia or to another part of Ukraine nobody knew – the men from Moscow had occupied Uncle Tymish’s house and refitted it to serve as a district office.

What Dolot had witnessed was the beginning of ‘de-kulakization’ – the ugly, bureaucratic term that was shorthand for the ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’.³⁷ But who was a kulak? As noted, this term was not traditional everywhere in the USSR, and certainly not in Ukraine. Although widely used in newspapers, by agitators and by authorities of all kinds since the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, it had always been vague and ill-defined. In her memoir of the Russian Revolution, Ekaterina Olitskaia noted that in the civil war era:

Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks. A household that had two cows, a cow and a calf or a pair of horses was considered kulak. Villages that refused to give up excess grain or expose kulaks were raided by punitive detachments. So peasants had special meetings to decide who was going to be a kulak. I was astonished by all this, but the peasants explained: ‘We were ordered to uncover kulaks, so what else can we do?’ … To spare the children they usually chose childless bachelors.³⁸

In 1929, just as in 1919, the notion of a ‘wealthy’ peasant remained a relative thing. In a poor village, ‘wealthy’ could mean a man with two pigs instead of one. A ‘wealthy’ peasant might also be one who inspired dislike or envy among his neighbours – or who acquired enemies among the village rulers or the local communists.

As the state demands to ‘eliminate the kulaks as a class’ became a priority, Ukrainian authorities felt the need to find a better definition. In August 1929 the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree identifying the ‘symptoms’ of kulak farms: a farm that regularly hired labour; a farm that contained a mill, a tannery, brick factory or other small ‘industrial’ plant; a farm that rented buildings or agricultural implements on a regular basis. Any farm whose owners or managers involved themselves in trade, usury, or any other activity that produced ‘unearned income’ was certainly run by kulaks too.39

Over time, this economic definition would evolve. Needing to explain how it was possible that people who did not employ hired labour or rent property could still oppose collectivization, the authorities invented a new term. The podkulachniki, the ‘under-kulaks’ – or perhaps better translated as ‘kulak agents’ – were poor peasants who were somehow under the influence of a kulak relative, employer, neighbour or friend. A podkulachnik might be a poor man who had had wealthier parents and thus inherited some kind of kulak essence. Alternatively, he might have been somehow duped or misled into opposing the Bolsheviks, and could not be re-educated.⁴⁰

Other poor peasants became kulaks simply because they refused to join the collective farm. Maurice Hindus stood in the back of the room while a visiting party member harangued a gathering of women in the Belarusian village of Bolshoe Bykovo about the so-called benefits of joining the collective farm: ‘They would have to bother hardly at all with their babies, he declared, for these would be cared for in well-equipped nurseries. They would not have to roast over ovens, for community kitchens would do all the cooking …’

The response to this tirade was silence – and then a ‘babel of shouts’. Finally, one of the women spat at the whole gathering: ‘Only pigs have come here; I might as well go home.’ A local agitator shouted back: ‘What do we see? What do we hear? One of our citizens, a poor woman, but one with a decided kulak quirk in her mind, has just called us pigs!’ In other words, it was not her wealth that defined the woman as ‘kulak’ – or rather as a person with a ‘kulak quirk in her mind’ – but her opposition to collectivization.⁴¹

The definition, infinitely adaptable, seemed to expand most easily to encompass the smaller ethnic groups who lived in the USSR, including Poles and Germans, both of whom had a distinct presence in Ukraine. In 1929 and 1930 many Ukrainian officials believed that all of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine, who had been there since the eighteenth century, should be classified as kulaks. In practice, they were de-kulakized and deported at about three times the rate of ethnic Ukrainians, and were often targeted for special abuse. ‘Wherever you destructive insects have settled in our land,’ a collective farm boss told one group of ethnic German villagers, ‘no God will drop manna from heaven to help you, and nowhere will anyone hear your miserable complaints.’42 Jews, by contrast, were very rarely classified as kulaks. Although many were arrested as speculators, very few of them owned land, since the Russian empire had restricted their ability to own property.

Initially, some in the OGPU were uneasy about how quickly the definition of ‘kulak’ evolved. In a note to Stalin written in March 1930, Yagoda feared that ‘middle-income peasants, poor peasants, and even farm labourers and workers’ were falling into the ‘kulak’ category. So were former ‘red partisans’ and the families of Red Army soldiers. In the Central Volga province, ‘middle and poor peasants’ were counted as ‘dyed-in-the-wool kulaks’. In Ukraine, Yagoda complained, poor peasants were counted as kulaks merely on the grounds that they were ‘babblers’ or troublemakers. In the Central Black Earth province – one of the Russian administrative districts to the north of Ukraine – the list of kulaks was found to contain three poor peasants and a day labourer, the declassé son of a merchant.⁴³

Yet the OGPU was itself responsible for the rapidly expanding definition: in large part, the numbers of people identified as kulaks kept increasing because Moscow said the numbers had to go up. Orders to liquidate the kulaks came accompanied by numbers and lists: how many should be removed, how many exiled, how many sent to the newly expanding concentration camps of the Gulag, how many resettled in other villages. Policemen on the ground were responsible for meeting these quotas, whether they were able to identify kulaks or not. And if they couldn’t find them, then they would have to be created.

Like the central planners of the same era, the OGPU was nothing if not ambitious. Of all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks: 15,000 of the most ‘diehard and active kulaks’ were to be arrested, 30,000–35,000 kulak families were to be exiled, and all 50,000 were to be removed to the Northern Krai, the northern Russian region near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. By contrast, the comparable kulak numbers from Belarus were 4,000–5,000, 6,000–7,000 and 12,000. From the Central Black Earth province 3,000–5,000 were arrested, 10,000–25,000 were to be exiled, and a total of 20,000 were to be resettled. The high numbers for Ukraine may have reflected the higher percentage of peasants there. They may also have reflected Moscow’s perception that the Ukraine’s peasants remained the greatest source of political threat.44

The need to meet these high numbers also meant that anti-kulak rhetoric tended to become more extreme over time, not more moderate. As early as January 1930 an OGPU operative used the term ‘kulak-White-Guard-bandits’ to describe opponents of collectivization, thus stigmatizing the kulaks not only as class enemies but as national enemies – agents of the ‘White Guard’ – and criminals.⁴⁵ Language also quickly became more extreme on the ground. In Dolot’s village one mandatory meeting ended in chaos after villagers refused to sign up for the collective farm. The brigade ‘propagandist’ urged them on, but no one responded:

‘Come on! It’s late,’ he urged us. ‘The sooner you sign in, the sooner you go home.’ No one moved. All sat silently. The chairman, bewildered and nervous, whispered something in the propagandist’s ear … We kept our silence. This irritated the officials, especially the chairman. A moment after the propagandist finished his admonishment, the chairman rushed from behind the table, grabbed the first man before him, and shook him hard. ‘You … you, enemy of the people!’ he shouted, his voice choking with rage. ‘What are you waiting for? Maybe Petliura?’⁴⁶

The immediate association of ‘Petliura’, a name that invoked the anti-Soviet rebellion, was, again, not accidental: to the agitators, anyone who didn’t join the collective farm must by definition be part of the counter-revolution, part of the defeated Ukrainian national movement, part of one of the many ‘enemies’ of the Soviet regime.

Nor were these mere insults. As de-kulakization began in earnest, the vicious language had practical consequences: once a peasant was named a ‘kulak’, he was automatically a traitor, an enemy and a non-citizen. He lost his property rights, his legal standing, his home and his place of work. His possessions no longer belonged to him; expropriation often followed. The aktiv, in conjunction with the agitators and the police, could and did confiscate kulak homes, tools and livestock with impunity.

In principle, the new collective farms were the beneficiaries of this mass theft. One report to the authorities from the Collective Farm Centre from February 1930 speaks approvingly of the ‘decisive methods’ being deployed by those prosecuting the battle against the wealthy farmers: ‘confiscation of kulak property … means of production, equipment, livestock and feed. Houses of kulaks are being used for communal organizations or as barracks for farm labourers.’47

In practice, de-kulakization quickly evolved into plunder. Some kulak property was confiscated and then sold to the public at improvised auctions. Clothes and trinkets were piled up on carts in village squares, and peasants were invited to bid on their neighbours’ possessions:

I can see the scene as clearly as if it were happening right now: a girl, a member of the Komsomol, is standing in front of the village soviet and conducting an ‘auction’. She would pick up some miserable piece of clothing from the pile of goods confiscated from some ‘kulak’, wave it in the air and ask: ‘Who’s going to make an offer for this thing?’⁴⁸

Much property was simply stolen outright. At one village near Kharkiv twelve farms were ‘de-kulakized’. This meant that, on the appointed day, a mob of 400 peasants carrying red flags marched towards the designated farms. They arrived, ripped apart the huts and took what they wanted. One of the mob leaders seized the hat off a kulak’s head and the coat off his body, and walked away wearing both of them.⁴⁹ In another village the collective farm and the collective farm boss simply divided all the confiscated property between them.⁵⁰ Some called this form of theft War Communism, in another nod to the past.⁵¹

At times, expropriation was fast and violent. In the Chernihiv province, the local brigades threw a peasant family out of their home in the dead of winter. The entire family was undressed on the road, driven to an unheated building and told it would be their new home.⁵² In the Bereznehuvate district, a twelve-year-old girl was left with only a single shirt. A baby was stripped of its clothes and thrown into the street along with its mother. An activists’ brigade took away a teenage girl’s underwear, and left her naked in the street as well.53

In other cases de-kulakization was drawn out over many months. When one peasant refused to join his local collective farm, the authorities made him pay: ‘They taxed us more and more. They took away the cow, yet they imposed tax quotas on butter, cheese, and milk, which we didn’t have anymore!’ When the family had nothing left to give, the brigade leaders arrived to seize whatever was left:

They began to break into our grain bins where we kept the seed. They would drive up in their horse-drawn carts, load up the carts, taking everything. After the seed, they started taking our clothes. The confiscation happened in stages … They took all our winter clothes, the sheepskin coats, and cloaks, as well as other clothes. Then they started taking the clothes off our backs.

Finally, in the winter, the local aktiv threw the family out of the house, exiled the father, and split the children up among relatives.⁵⁴

In some instances expropriation took place through the means of heavy, retrospective taxation. One peasant donated his livestock to the collective farm. He worked there for a year, but then tried to take his cows back: his children were starving and he needed the milk. He was allowed to do so, but the following day he was asked to pay the heavy taxes required of the ‘individual’ peasant. To do so, he had to sell a cow, two goats and some clothes. Taxes kept increasing anyway, until the family finally had to sell the house and move into a barn where they slept on hay. Eventually they escaped, blending into the urban landscape of Leningrad.⁵⁵

As collectivization progressed, so did the propaganda campaign. In places where efforts seemed to be flagging, the Red Army would make occasional appearances. Soldiers would march down streets, conduct exercises, fire into the air. Cavalry would ride through the streets at full gallop. Urban agitprop teams sometimes made an appearance as well, ‘a few hundred people from neighboring cities [marching] in orderly columns … ordinary industrial workers, students, office clerks’. They were there to demonstrate the cities’ support for collectivization, and they brought propaganda films, improvised theatre and ‘unceasing noise’.⁵⁶ Although ostensibly intended to show solidarity between the country and the city, their presence also underlined the pointlessness of dissent. The peasants were to understand that the urban working class supported collectivization, and that dissent would win them no allies.

Under pressure to fulfil quotas, inspired and terrified by the propaganda machine, the collectivization brigades sometimes resorted to outright intimidation and torture. Both memoirs and archives record multiple examples of ‘persuasion’ involving threats, harassment and physical violence. In one Russian village a brigade raped two kulak women and forced an elderly man to dance and sing before beating him up. In another Russian village an older man was forced to undress, remove his boots, and march around the room until he collapsed. An OGPU report told of other forms of torture too: ‘In the village of Novooleksandrivka, secretary Erokhin from the Komsomol cell forced a middle peasant to pull the end of a noose that had been thrown around his neck. The peasant was gasping for breath, the secretary mocked him, saying, “Here’s some water, drink it.” ’57

In Poltava province the daughter of another kulak recalled that her father was locked in a cold storage room and deprived of food and drink. For three days he ate only the snow that issued through the chinks in the wall. On the third day he agreed to join the collective farm.⁵⁸ In Sumy province the local brigade leaders set up their headquarters in one of the villagers’ huts. A handful of them sat in the sitting room; a gun lay on a table in front of them. One by one, recalcitrant peasants were marched into the room and asked to join the collective farm. Anyone who refused was shown the revolver – and if that failed, he was marched to an isolation cell in another village with the words ‘malicious hoarder of state grain’ written in chalk on his back.⁵⁹

There were many casual cruelties. In one Ukrainian village, brigades burned down the home of two recently orphaned sisters. The elder girl went to work at the collective farm, and was forbidden to care for her younger sibling when she became very ill. No pity was shown to either girl. Instead, neighbours scavenged the charred remains of their house for firewood, and helped themselves to their remaining possessions.⁶⁰

Nevertheless, the same extreme circumstances that generated fear and hatred also sometimes brought out bravery, kindness and sympathy in people. Even the OGPU saw it. One of its officers observed, with some concern, that ‘due to a lack of mass explanatory work, some poor and middle peasants have treated the kulaks with either sympathy or indifference, and in isolated cases, with pity, helping them with lodgings and providing physical and material assistance’. In one village, the OGPU observed how ‘50 poor peasants, without putting up resistance to the expropriation, wept with the kulaks and helped them take out their household belongings and also [helped] with lodging them.’61

From the officer’s point of view, the peasants who ‘wept with the kulaks’ before inviting them into their home were proof that ‘mass explanatory work’ – vicious propaganda – had failed. But they also proved that even in an atmosphere of violence and hysteria, some people, in some places, managed to preserve their humanity.

Once identified as enemies and robbed of their possessions, the kulaks met a variety of fates. Some were allowed to stay in their villages, where they were given the worst and most inaccessible land. If they continued to refuse to join the collective farm, they often had their tools confiscated, as well as their livestock. They were called names such as odnoosibnyk, or singleton, which eventually became insults.⁶² When famine struck later on, they were often the first to die.

To keep them away from their friends and neighbours, some kulaks were given plots of land in other parts of the country, or even in the same districts but distant from their old farms and with worse soil. Henrikh Pidvysotsky’s family was sent to the Urals: ‘We lived there for one summer and spent almost the entire fall walking back on foot.’⁶³ A Ukrainian government order in late 1930 commanded kulaks to be expropriated and moved to ‘the farthest away and least comfortable’ land inside the republic.⁶⁴

To avoid that fate many escaped. In a few cases neighbours or local officials helped them to sell their property, or even quietly gave some of it back to ease their journey.⁶⁵ Those who could do so made their way to cities. Some 10 million peasants entered the Soviet industrial workforce in the years 1928–32; many, perhaps most, were forced or persuaded to do so by collectivization and de-kulakization.⁶⁶ Whereas unemployment had been a problem in some cities just a year or two earlier, factories scrambling to meet their Five Year Plan targets in 1930 were desperate for workers, and not as concerned by their social origins as they were meant to be.

For those kulaks coming from the villages of Ukraine, the most obvious destination was the coalmining and industrial centre of Donbas, in the southeastern corner of the republic. Donbas was expanding rapidly, and it had long had a reputation as the ‘wild East’, a land of Cossacks and adventurers. In tsarist Russia, Donbas had attracted runaway serfs, religious dissidents, criminals and black marketeers.67 By 1930 it seemed an obvious destination for anyone who wanted to conceal their ‘kulak’ origins. Oleksandr Honcharenko later remembered avoiding arrest by ‘hiding’ in the Donbas: as ‘everyone knew,’ he wrote ‘they were not hunting down kulaks in the Donbas’. Honcharenko believed this was deliberate: Soviet authorities wanted the good workers to go to the factories while the ‘riffraff’ stayed behind on the collective farms.⁶⁸ Even later on, after laws required peasants to have living permits, it was still sometimes possible to flout the rules in Donbas. The work in mines and heavy factories was difficult and dangerous, and the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to their employees’ past.⁶⁹

Some officials still tracked their progress. In Mykolaiv province the authorities recorded the flight of 172 kulak families and their arrival in the industrial quarters of Donbas where they were ‘living in working-class apartments and conducting anti-Soviet agitation among the workers’. In Sumy province hundreds of kulaks were also considered to be suspicious because they had ‘refused’ to sow their land, preferring instead to abandon it and move away, allegedly destroying their farm machinery too.⁷⁰

But the overwhelming number of kulaks wound up much further away from home. Between 1930 and 1933 over 2 million peasants were exiled to Siberia, northern Russia, Central Asia and other underpopulated regions of the Soviet Union, where they lived as ‘special exiles’, forbidden to leave their designated villages.⁷¹ The story of this vast movement of people is separate from the story of collectivization and famine, though no less tragic. This was the first of what would be several mass Soviet deportations in the 1930s and 1940s, and the most chaotic. Whole families were loaded into boxcars, transported hundreds of miles, and often left in fields with no food or shelter, since no preparations had been made for their arrival. Others were abandoned in Central Asian villages where suspicious Kazakhs either deigned to help them or didn’t. Many died on the way, or during the first winter, in settlements with no access to the outside world.

Almost everywhere the facilities were primitive and the local officials were disorganized and neglectful. At what would eventually become a labour camp in the Arkhangelsk region, one prisoner arrived to find ‘neither barracks, nor a village. There were tents, on the side, for the guards and for the equipment. There weren’t many people, perhaps one and a half thousand. The majority were middle-aged peasants, former kulaks. And criminals.’72 In February 1930 the Politburo itself urgently discussed the fact that Siberia was unprepared for such large numbers of prisoners, not to mention their wives and children. The OGPU, it was decided, would divide the exiles into groups of no more than 60,000 families. Ukraine, Belarus and the other regions with high numbers of kulaks were asked to coordinate their activities accordingly.⁷³

In time, the large numbers of deported kulaks would fuel the rapid expansion of the Soviet forced labour system, the chain of camps that eventually became known as the Gulag. Between 1930 and 1933 at least 100,000 kulaks were sent directly into the Gulag, and the system grew, in part, in order to accommodate them.⁷⁴ In this era the relatively small group of ‘political’ camps on the Solovetsky islands expanded across the far north and east. Under the leadership of the OGPU, the Gulag launched a series of ambitious industrial projects: the White Sea canal, the coalmines of Vorkuta, the goldmines of Kolyma – all enterprises made possible by the sudden availability of plentiful forced labour.⁷⁵ Conversely, in some regions ambitious local leaders sought to increase the supply of forced labour in order to expand their industrial projects. In the Urals local bureaucrats may have sought an increase in the number of kulaks precisely because they needed men to work in the local coalmines and metallurgical plants, all of which now had to meet the impossible requirements of the Five Year Plan.⁷⁶

In due course the kulaks met the same wide variety of fates as other Gulag prisoners and Soviet deportees. Some starved to death, others were murdered as ‘enemies’ in the Great Terror of 1937. Some remained in the cities or at the industrial sites to which they had been deported, integrating seamlessly into Soviet working-class culture. Others wound up in the Red Army and fought the Nazis. A few acknowledged that exile saved them from the famine of 1932–3: in the 1980s one Ukrainian peasant told an oral historian he was lucky to have been sent to Siberia, because it meant he could bring his family there when food shortages began.77

Most of the kulaks never returned to their villages. They stayed in Siberia or in Donbas, stopped farming, blended into the working class. Thus did Stalinist policy successfully remove the most prosperous, the most effective and the most defiant farmers from the Soviet countryside.

De-kulakization was the most spectacular of the many tools used to force the revolution in the countryside. But it was accompanied by an equally powerful ideological attack on the ‘system’ that the kulaks supposedly represented, and that the collective farms were meant to replace: the economic structure of the village as well as the social and moral order, symbolized by village churches, priests and religious symbols of all kinds. Religious repression in the USSR began in 1917 and lasted until 1991, but in Ukraine it reached its brutal height during collectivization. It was not coincidental that the Politburo’s January 1930 decree on collectivization also ordered churches to be closed and priests arrested: the Soviet leaders knew that a revolution in the countryside’s class and economic structure also required a revolution in its habits, its customs and its morality.

The assault on religion was part of collectivization from the beginning. All across Ukraine, the same brigades that organized collectivization also ordered peasants to take down church bells and destroy them, to melt down the bells into metal, to burn church property, to wreck icons.⁷⁸ Priests were mocked and holy places were desecrated. Oleksandr Honcharenko has described an agitator who ‘donned the priest’s vestments, took hold of the chandelier and started clowning around in the church, stomping all over the iconostasis’.⁷⁹ Many eyewitnesses – from Odessa, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr provinces in Ukraine among others – remembered this desecration for years afterwards, especially the silencing of the bells.80 A priest’s wife, born in Poltava province, described the assault on her village bell tower: ‘When a man went up to remove the bell and the bell fell to the ground and ran, out, all the people burst into tears. Everyone was weeping and saying goodbye to the bell, because that was the last time that the bell rang …’

After that the aktiv smashed the church icons too. In due course her husband was arrested, along with many other priests: ‘They took him away and we were left alone, my son was fatherless.’⁸¹ Other priests were forced out of their parishes. Many were deported along with the kulaks, or else forced to change jobs. Priests shed their cassocks and became manual labourers or factory workers.⁸²

The state accompanied the destruction of the physical symbols of religion and the repression of priests with a wave of angry, anti-religious propaganda and attacks on the rituals of religion as well as those of peasant life in general. In rural and urban schools children were told not to believe in God. The state banned traditional holidays – Christmas, Easter, saints’ days – as well as Sunday services, replacing them with Bolshevik celebrations such as May Day and the anniversary of the revolution. It also organized atheist lectures and anti-religious meetings. The whole cycle of traditional peasant life – christenings, weddings, funerals – was disrupted. The authorities promoted ‘getting together’ instead of marriage, a status marked by a visit to a registry office rather than a church, and with no traditional feast or celebration afterwards.⁸³

Within a decade musical traditions were lost too. Traditionally, young people had gathered together at somebody’s house, unmarried girls helping out with weaving or embroidering while boys sang and played music. This custom of dosvitky – ‘till dawn’ – celebrations gradually ceased, as did Sunday dances and other informal musical gatherings. Young people were told instead to meet in the Komsomol, and formal concerts replaced the spontaneous village music-making.⁸⁴

At the same time the institution of the kobzar – the traditional wandering minstrel, playing the bandura, who had once been a staple of Ukrainian village life – disappeared so abruptly that many long believed they had been arrested en masse. There is no documentary evidence of this (though Dmitry Shostakovich referred to it in his memoirs), but it is not unthinkable. Still, even without a deliberate murder, the kobzars would have fallen foul of the passport laws passed in 1932; later the famine would have killed many, since they would not have had easy access to ration cards. Inevitably, they would also have attracted the attention of the police. Many of their traditional songs retold Cossack legends, and had anti-Russian overtones that acquired anti-Soviet overtones after the revolution. In 1930 an alert citizen in Kharkiv wrote an indignant letter to a local newspaper, claiming that he had heard a minstrel at a bazaar recite anti-Lenin (and anti-semitic) rhyming couplets, and sing an anti-Soviet song:

Winter asks the Frost

Whether the kolkhoz has boots

There are no boots just sandals,

The kolkhoz will disintegrate.85

The song (which rhymes in Ukrainian) must have been popular, because two ethnographers recorded another man, a blind kobzar, singing exactly the same one at a bazaar in Kremenchuk. When policemen came to arrest him, he sang another verse:

Oh see, good folks,

What world has arrived now:

The policeman has become

A guide for a blindman.⁸⁶

The official dislike of the kobzar and the bandura was no surprise: like court jesters in Shakespeare’s day, they had always expressed impolitic thoughts and ideas, sometimes singing of things that could not be spoken. In the heated atmosphere of collectivization, when everyone was in search of enemies, this form of humour – along with the nostalgia and emotion that folk music evoked in Ukraine – was intolerable. A Red Army colonel in Kyiv complained about it to a colleague:

Why is it that when I listen to a piano concert, a violin concert or a symphony orchestra, or a choir, I always notice that the audience listens politely? But when they listen to the women’s bandura choir, and they get to singing the dumy [epic ballads], then I see tears welling up in the eyes of the Red Army soldiers? You know, these banduras have a Petliurist soul.87

Folk music inspired an emotional attachment to Ukraine and evoked memories of village life. No wonder the Soviet state wanted to destroy both of them.

The joint attack on the churches and village rituals had an ideological justification. The Bolsheviks were committed atheists who believed that churches were an integral part of the old regime. They were also revolutionaries who wanted to destroy even the memory of another kind of society. Churches – where villagers had gathered over many decades or centuries – remained a potent symbol of the link between the present and the past. In most Russian and many Ukrainian cities, the Bolsheviks had immediately sacked churches – between 1918 and 1930 they shut down more than 10,000 churches across the USSR, turning them into warehouses, cinemas, museums or garages.⁸⁸ By the early 1930s few urban churches were still functioning as places of worship. The fact that they had continued to exist in so many villages was one of the things that made the peasants seem suspicious to urbanites, and especially to the urban agitators who arrived to help carry out collectivization.

Churches also served a social function, especially in poorer villages that had few other social institutions. They provided a physical meeting place that was not controlled by the state, and at times were centres of opposition to it. During a series of violent peasant riots in Ryazan province, near Moscow, church bells had served as a call to arms, warning the farmers that the brigadiers and soldiers from the capital had arrived.⁸⁹ Above all, the church was an institutional umbrella under which people could organize themselves for charitable and social endeavours. During the 1921 famine Ukrainian priests and church institutions had helped organize assistance for the starving.

Once the churches were gone, no independent bodies in the countryside remained capable of motivating or organizing volunteers.⁹⁰ The church’s place in the cultural and educational life of the village was taken instead by state institutions – ‘houses of culture’, registry offices, Soviet schools – under the control of the Communist Party. Churches were eliminated in order to prevent them from becoming a source of opposition; in practice, their absence also meant that they could not be a source of aid or comfort when people began to die from hunger.

Whether they had volunteered to join communal farms or had been forced, whether they joined the campaign or opposed it, collectivization was a point of no return for all the inhabitants of the Soviet countryside. Villagers who had participated in acts of violence found it difficult to return to the old status quo. Long-standing friendships and social relationships were destroyed by unforgivable acts. The attitude to the village, to work and to life changed for ever. Petro Hryhorenko was shocked to discover, on a trip into the countryside in 1930, that his formerly hard-working neighbours had lost their desire even to bring in their own harvest:

Arkhanhelka, an enormous steppe village consisting of more than 2,000 farmhouses, was dead during the height of the harvest season. Eight men worked one thresher for one shift daily. The remaining workers – men, women and young people – sat around or lay in the shade. When I tried to start conversations people replied slowly and with total indifference. If I told them that the grain was falling from the wheat stalks and perishing they would reply, ‘Of course, it will perish.’ Their feeling must have been terribly strong for them to go to the extreme of leaving the grain in the fields.91

Family relationships changed too. Fathers, deprived of property, could no longer bequeath land to their sons and lost authority. Before collectivization it was very unusual for parents to abandon children, but afterwards mothers and fathers often went to seek work in the city, returning sporadically or not at all.⁹² As elsewhere in the USSR, children were instructed to denounce their parents, and were questioned at school about what was going on at home.⁹³ Traditions of village self-rule came to an abrupt end too. Before collectivization, local men chose their own leaders; after collectivization, farcical ‘elections’ were still held, with candidates making speeches exhorting their neighbours to join the great Soviet project. But everyone knew that the outcome was determined in advance, guaranteed by the omnipresent police.94

Finally, and perhaps most ominously, collectivization left the peasants economically dependent on the state. Once the collective farms were established, nobody who lived on them had any means of earning a salary. The farm bosses distributed food products and other goods according to the quality and quantity of work. Theoretically, the system was supposed to provide an incentive to work. In practice, it also meant that peasants had no cash, no way to purchase food, and no mobility. Anyone who left without permission or refused to work could be deprived of his or her ration. When their family cows and garden plots were taken away, as they would be during the autumn and winter of 1932–3, the peasants had nothing left at all.⁹⁵

By itself, collectivization need not have led to a famine on the scale of the one that took place in 1932–3. But the methods used to collectivize the peasants destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order. Old values – respect for property, for dignity, for human life – disappeared. In their place the Bolsheviks had instilled the rudiments of an ideology that was about to become lethal.