6

Rebellion, 1930

Comrades! I call on you to defend your property and the property of the people. Be prepared for the first and the last call. The rivers and seas will dry up and water will flow on to the high Kurgan and blood will flow in the streams and the land will rise up in high whirlwinds … I call on you to defend each other, don’t go into the collective farm, don’t believe the gossips … Comrades, remember the past, when you lived freely, everyone lived well, poor and rich, now all live poorly.

Anonymous proclamation, 19301

If we had not immediately taken measures against violations of the party line, we would have had a wide wave of insurrectionary peasant uprisings, a good part of our lower officials would have been slaughtered by the peasants.

Central Committee secret memorandum, 1930²

In just a few short months during the winter of 1929–30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken.

The result was rapid, massive, sometimes chaotic and often violent resistance. But properly speaking, it is incorrect to say that resistance followed collectivization, since resistance of various kinds actually accompanied every stage of de-kulakization and collectivization, from the grain requisitions of 1928 to the deportations of 1930, continuing throughout 1931 and 1932, until hunger and repression finally rendered further defiance impossible. From the beginning, resistance helped shape the nature of collectivization: because peasants refused to cooperate, the idealistic young agitators from outside and their local allies grew angrier, their methods became more extreme and their violence harsher. Resistance, especially in Ukraine, also raised alarm bells at the highest level. To anyone who remembered the peasant rebellion of 1918–19, the rebellion of 1930 seemed both familiar and dangerous.

At different stages the rebellion took different forms. The initial refusal to join collective farms was itself a form of resistance. Many Ukrainian peasants did not trust the Soviet state that they had fought against only ten years earlier. Parts of Ukraine were just recovering from the famine and food shortage of 1929; with no tradition of jointly owned land, the peasants had good reason to believe that outsiders would make things worse rather than better. All across the USSR peasants felt attached to their cows, horses and tools, which they did not want to surrender to some uncertain entity. Even in Russia, where there was a tradition of communally owned farmland, peasants were suspicious of collective farms, which had an uncertain future and an unfamiliar organization. The Soviet state had proposed rapid policy changes before, and sometimes unwound them with equal speed. Some remembered that the disarray of the civil war years had given way to the more ‘reasonable’ New Economic Policy, and assumed collectivization was another short-lived Soviet fad that would soon disappear.

Peasants also had reason to fear that, even if they went along with it, worse could follow. In his first report to Moscow for the year 1930, Vsevolod Balytsky noted that many middle-income peasants – farmers who were not kulaks but not quite the poorest either – had been overheard saying that ‘after the kulaks, they will de-kulakize us too’.3

Outright refusal was often followed by immediate action. Ordered to hand over their livestock to collective farms that they did not trust, peasants began to slaughter cows, pigs, sheep and even horses. They ate the meat, salted it, sold it or concealed it – anything to prevent the collective farms from getting hold of it. All across the Soviet Union, in all the rural districts, slaughterhouses suddenly began working overtime. Mikhail Sholokhov penned a famous fictional portrait of a livestock bloodbath:

Hardly had darkness fallen when the brief and stifled bleating of a sheep, the mortal scream of a pig or the bellowing of a calf would be heard piercing the silence. Not only those who joined the collective farm, but individual farmers also slaughtered. They killed oxen, sheep, pigs, even cows; they slaughtered animals kept for breeding … the dogs began to drag entrails and guts about the village, the cellars and granaries were filled with meat … ‘Kill, it’s not ours now!’ ‘Kill, they’ll take it for the meat collection tax if you don’t!’ ‘Kill, for you won’t taste meat in the collective farm!’4

This most visceral and immediate form of resistance continued well into the following year and beyond. Between 1928 and 1933 the numbers of cattle and horses in the USSR dropped by nearly half. From 26 million pigs, the number went down to 12 million. From 146 million sheep and goats, the total dropped to 50 million.⁵

Those who did not slaughter their animals protected them ferociously. In one village the OGPU observed a mob attempting to beat up a Komsomol member who was trying to lead away a horse. In another village a group of twenty women, armed with clubs, raided a collective farm to take back their horses. In yet another, peasants burned a barn full of horses to the ground, preferring to see their animals dead rather than confiscated.⁶ Peasants were heard to declare that it was ‘better to destroy everything’ rather than let the authorities have their property.⁷

In a few cases peasants simply released their animals into the streets rather than hand them over. In the North Caucasian village of Ekaterinovka one farmer set his chestnut mare free to wander the streets, carrying the sign ‘please take, whoever wants’. One report on this incident indignantly described the horse as playing the role of a ‘kulak agitator’: the mare was ‘wandering around the village for two days already, provoking curiosity, laughter and panic’.8

Both the killing of animals and the resistance to their confiscation was entirely personal: peasants feared losing their wealth, their food, their entire future. But the authorities perceived the slaughter as purely political: it was deliberate ‘sabotage’, motivated by counter-revolutionary thinking – and they punished the saboteurs accordingly. One man who refused to give his cow to the collective farm and killed it instead was forced to walk around the village with the dead cow’s head tied to his neck. The local brigade leaders wanted to ‘show the entire village what can happen, what everybody can expect later on’.⁹ More commonly, those who slaughtered their livestock were automatically categorized as ‘kulaks’, if they had not been so designated already, with all of the consequences: loss of property, arrest, deportation.

Unsurprisingly, demands for seed grain produced similar reactions. The memory of the grain confiscations, shortages and famines of the previous decade were still strong. One woman, a young girl at the time, remembered the day that her father abruptly came home and locked her in the house. She sat at the window and saw dozens of people, mostly women, running across her courtyard towards the railway station. Not long afterward, she saw them come back, dragging sacks of grain. Later, her father told her that people from the surrounding villages had attacked the grain storage bins at the town’s railways station – bins containing their own grain – and had begun removing the contents. Although the local security guards failed to prevent them from entering the storage area, additional police troops arrived from Poltava. Horses trampled the ‘thieves’. A few people escaped with some grain, but most were left with nothing.¹⁰ This was not unusual: in a report covering sixteen Ukrainian districts the OGPU noted that the riots following the ‘collectivization’ of seed grain led to the deaths of thirty-five people ‘from our side’ – meaning the police and authorities. Another thirty-seven were wounded and 314 were beaten. In the exchange twenty-six rioters – described by police as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – were killed as well.¹¹

But if police viewed the rioters as political agents rather than desperately poor people who feared starvation, it was equally true that the rioters viewed the government as a hostile force, or worse. To some, the collectivization policy was the ultimate betrayal of the revolution, proof that the Bolsheviks intended to impose a ‘second serfdom’ and rule like the nineteenth-century tsars. In 1919 similar fears had helped inspire the anti-Bolshevik sentiments of the peasant rebellion. Now they were frequently expressed, so much so that the OGPU gleaned them from informers. In the Russian Central Black Earth district OGPU sources heard one peasant declare, ‘The communists deceived us in their revolution, all land was given out to work for free and now they take the last cow.’ In the Middle Volga province another said, ‘They said to me “revolution”, I didn’t understand but now [I] understand that such a revolution means to take everything from the peasants and leave them hungry and naked.’ In Ukraine a peasant declared, ‘They push us into the collective farm so that we will be eternal slaves.’12 Many decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the grandson of kulaks, described the collective farms as ‘serfdom’. In order for the memory of collective farms as a ‘second serfdom’ to have had such a long life, it must have been deeply rooted.¹³

But to some people the regime quickly became far more than just an ordinary earthly enemy. In the past, fears of the apocalypse and expectations of the end of the world had periodically swept through the Russian and Ukrainian countryside, where religious cults and magical practice had been present for centuries. The 1917 revolution inspired another wave of religious mania. Throughout the 1920s dire prophecies were common, as were omens and miracles. In Voronezh province, pilgrims flocked to see trees that had unexpectedly burst into bloom: their ‘regeneration’ was taken as a sign of a change to come.¹⁴ In Ukraine a crowd gathered to watch a rusty icon on the road to Kharkiv ‘come to life’, taking on shape and colour.¹⁵

In 1929–30 some Soviet peasants, appalled by the attacks on churches and priests, once again became convinced that the Soviet Union was the Antichrist – and that collective farm managers were therefore his representatives. Priests told their parishioners that the Antichrist was taking their food, or that the Antichrist was trying to destroy them.16 In line with those beliefs, peasants rejected the collective farms not merely for material or political reasons, but for spiritual ones: they feared eternal damnation. The state was attacking the Church; group prayers, singing and church services became a form of opposition. One local official recorded the words of a Ukrainian farmer: ‘You will be forced to work on Sundays if you go into the collective farm, [they] will put the seal of Antichrist on your forehead and arms. Now already the kingdom of Antichrist is begun and to go into the collective farm is a big sin. About this it is written in the bible.’¹⁷ Members of the Catholic minority in Ukraine were affected by the same spirit: in the ethnic German village of Kandel, the local bishop, Antonius Zerr, began to offer counsel and even ordain priests in secret, in defiance of anti-religious laws.¹⁸

Buffered sometimes by faith, sometimes by anger at the theft of their possessions, the peasants grew bolder. In response to the Soviet propaganda songs that they heard played over and over again – songs with refrains such as ‘Our burdens have lightened! Our lives have gladdened!’ – they began to write their own:

Hey, our harvest knows no limits or measures.

It grows, ripens, and even spills over onto the earth,

Boundless over the fields … While the patrolling pioneers

Come out to guard the ripening wheat-ears of grain.¹⁹

Songs and poetry of resistance were passed from village to village. According to one inhabitant of the Dnipropetrovsk province, they were sometimes even printed and bound into small booklets.²⁰ Graffiti formed a part of the culture of resistance too: one Ukrainian peasant later remembered inscriptions appearing on the walls of houses: ‘Down with Stalin’, ‘Down with Communists’. They were wiped off, and the next day they appeared again. Eventually, two men were arrested as members of the ‘organization’ that had written them.²¹

Protest also took the form of escape, not just from the countryside but from the Soviet Union itself. Already in January 1930 guards caught three peasants in the Kamianets-Podilskyi border province trying to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border.22 A month later, a group of 400 peasants from several villages marched towards the border shouting ‘We don’t want collectives, we’re going to Poland!’ Along the way they attacked and beat up anyone who stood in their way, until they were finally stopped by border guards. The following day another crowd from the same group of villages marched towards the border, also shouting that they would ask for help from the Poles. They too were stopped by guards, this time only 400 metres from the border. Secret police also recorded several attempts to raid grain warehouses near the border. Peasants who lived close to the border seem to have been inspired by the proximity of the ‘normal’ life of their neighbours on the other side.²³

Inevitably, these spontaneous protests, church meetings and border marches gave way to organized violence. All across the USSR – but with significantly higher numbers in Ukraine – people who saw that they were about to lose their possessions and possibly their lives took matters into their own hands. The OGPU archives record what happened next.

In Sumy province thirteen ‘kulaks’ took the weapons they had saved from the civil war, slipped into the forest and became partisans. Near Bila Tserkva, in Kyiv province, another ex-partisan was, according to a secret police report, organizing an armed band. Pasha Angelina, the female tractor-driver who had so delighted in the downfall of her kulak neighbours, felt this violence first hand:

In the summer of 1929, when my brother, Kostia, my sister, Lelia and I were walking to a Komsomol meeting in the neighboring village of Novobesheve, somebody shot at us with a sawed-off shotgun … I will never forget how we ran, barefoot, through the prickly grass, our hearts beating wildly with fear.²⁴

The OGPU responded immediately to these early ‘terrorist incidents’. By 6 February 1930, only a few months after collectivization had been formally launched in November, the Soviet secret police had already arrested 15,985 people across the Soviet Union for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ in the countryside. Of that number, about a third were Ukrainians. Between 12 and 17 February the secret police across the USSR made another 18,000 arrests. Those hauled into prison were accused of planning organized armed uprisings, of ‘recruiting’ rebels among the poor and middle peasants, and even of seeking contacts with the peasant soldiers in the Red Army, in order to alienate them from the government and convert them to the kulak cause.25

None of this news was sufficient to convince Stalin to abandon collectivization or to reconsider whether it was a good idea to force farmers into collective farms they detested. The situation still seemed as if it was under control. Nevertheless, he was worried enough by these initial reports to tone down the collectivization rhetoric – with unexpected results.

‘Dizzy with Success’. That was the title of an article written by Stalin and published in Pravda on 2 March 1930. The phrase might well have been borrowed from Josef Reingold, the Chekist who had used the same expression in 1919 to bring a halt to the bloody repression of the Don Cossacks. But whether or not he hinted at any such allusion, Stalin certainly did not intend any irony. ‘Dizzy with Success’ began with a long tribute to the great achievements of collectivization. Not only was the policy going well, he declared, it was proceeding far better and far more quickly than expected. The USSR had already ‘overfulfilled’ the Five Year Plan for collectivization, he declared: ‘Even our enemies are forced to admit that the successes are substantial.’ After only a few weeks the countryside had already made a ‘radical turn … towards socialism’. An extraordinary amount had been accomplished – so much so that perhaps it was time to slow the pace of change. Even such a great achievement had drawbacks, he warned:

Such successes sometimes induce a spirit of vanity and conceit … People not infrequently become intoxicated by such successes, they become dizzy with success, lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities … adventurist attempts are made to solve all questions of socialist construction in a trice … Hence the party’s task is to wage a determined struggle against these sentiments, which are dangerous and harmful to our cause, and to drive them out of the party.²⁶

Collectivization, Stalin disingenuously reminded the cadres, was intended to be ‘voluntary’. It was not supposed to require force. It might not progress uniformly: not every region would be able to collectivize at the same pace. Because of the enormous enthusiasm, he feared these principles had been forgotten. Some excesses had occurred.

Of course, neither Stalin nor anyone else back in Moscow took responsibility for these ‘excesses’, either then or later. Nor did he give any real details. The murders and beatings, the children left outside in the snow with no clothes – all of this naturally went unmentioned. Instead, Stalin shifted the blame for any mistakes squarely onto the shoulders of local party members, the men and women on the lowest rung of the hierarchy, who had ‘become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision’. He mocked them for using militaristic language – which was, of course, an echo of his own – and condemned their ‘blockheaded’ attempts to lump different kinds of farms together. He even took them to task for removing church bells: ‘Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of the collective farm movement, these unworthy threats against the peasants? Nobody, except our enemies!’27

Why did he write this article? By the time it appeared, Stalin would have seen the secret police accounts of rebellion, resistance and armed attacks on party members. He may also have known that at least some of the Communist Party leadership in both Russia and Ukraine had doubts about the policy. Although these critics only began to speak openly some months later, Stalin might already have sensed the potential for a backlash against him in the wake of a failed or chaotic drive to collectivization, so he sought someone else to blame. The lowest party officials – the local leaders, the village bosses – made the perfect target: they were far away, they were nameless, and they were powerless. The letter neatly shifted the responsibility for what was clearly a disastrous policy away from him, and onto a social group far from Moscow.

Ostensibly, the article was also conciliatory. Stalin seemed to be seeking at least a temporary halt to the worst excesses of his policy. In the wake of the article some genuine concessions were made as well: the Central Committee decided, for example, to allow peasants to keep a family cow, some poultry, and their own kitchen gardens.28 But if these gestures were meant to stop the rebellion then they backfired. Far from calming the peasants, ‘Dizzy with Success’ inspired a new wave of insurrection, a vast array of armed and unarmed resistance. One official christened this movement ‘March Fever’, but that expression was misleading: it implies that the protest wave was a brief illness, or perhaps a form of temporary insanity. What began to happen was in fact far more profound. ‘What the state labelled a fever,’ wrote Lynne Viola, ‘was in fact a massive peasant rebellion, reasoned in cause and content.’²⁹

The impact was immediate. All across the USSR party officials read and discussed Stalin’s article at party meetings and with one another. In Myron Dolot’s village, as in many villages, a local activist read the ‘Dizzy with Success’ article aloud to the villagers. As he was explaining that mistakes had been made, that errors had been committed, and that party members had made grave miscalculations, ‘the assembled crowd was deathly still’. Then the activist added his own view: the Jews within the party were at fault, not the party itself. This explanation neatly exempted himself and his comrades from blame. ‘What happened next,’ wrote Dolot, ‘was a spontaneous riot.’ ‘Away with you!’ one man shouted. ‘We’ve had enough of you,’ cried another. ‘We have been duped! Let’s get our horses and cows out of that stinking collective farm before it’s too late!’ In a disorganized wave the villagers ran to get their livestock, tripping over one another in the dark. About twenty peasants were shot in the subsequent chaos.³⁰

In the days that followed, similar riots broke out all across the Soviet Union, and in a few places they acquired new layers of sophistication. The first signs of organized opposition that had so worried Balytsky in January became, by March, April and May, a real movement. The riots quickly became organized – sometimes very well organized – and they acquired a much more obvious political character. Men and women across the USSR, but especially and most numerously from Ukraine, attacked, beat and murdered activists in the spring of 1930. They organized raids on warehouses and grain storage containers. They broke locks, stole grain and other food, and distributed it around villages. They set fire to collective and Soviet property. They attacked ‘collaborators’. In one village those who were ‘not satisfied with the regime … burnt down the houses of the [collective farm] activists’.31 The activist who had ‘donned the priest’s vestments’ and stomped on the iconostasis was found dead in a ditch the following day.’³²

There was little pity for the victims. One man who had played in a local concert band remembered being asked to play at the funerals of ‘Twenty-Five Thousanders’ who had been murdered by peasants. ‘For us it was a happy event because every time somebody was killed, they would take us to the village, give us some food and then we would play at the funeral. And we were looking forward every time to the next funeral, because that meant food for us.’³³

Some of the angriest protests took the form of babski bunty, a phrase that literally translates as ‘women’s revolts’ or ‘riots’, though the word baba connotes not just a woman but a peasant woman, and implies something uncouth and irrational. Women had organized protests in the USSR before, in 1927 and 1928. But these riots had focused on food shortages, not politics. As one secret policeman wrote about those earlier protests, ‘In this period, demonstrations with the participation of women didn’t have, as a rule, any kind of clearly defined anti-Soviet character: crowds or groups of women gathered at state and cooperative organizations, demanding bread.’³⁴

In the spring of 1930 the peasant women’s inchoate demand for bread turned into equally rudimentary attacks on the men who had confiscated it. Crowds of women mobbed activists, Soviet officials and visiting dignitaries, demanding their property back. They shouted and chanted, sang songs and hurled threats. Others took matters into their own hands. In one Ukrainian village a young girl watched her mother, along with other ‘hungry women’, break the locks of the collective farm storehouse and take the stored grain; local officials, intimidated by the mob, called in provincial party officials and Komsomol members to help arrest the women and recover the grain. They remained in prison for two weeks.³⁵ In another Ukrainian village a boy watched activists go from house to house claiming property on behalf of the collective farm. In response, a group of women stormed the farm and demanded everything back: ‘One woman grabs her plough; the other her horse; a third, the cow.’ Soldiers, or possibly secret police troops – the memoirist isn’t clear – then ‘came and chased all of these women away … all of the confiscated items, agricultural implements and horses, once again became part of the collective farm’.36 In early March 1930 some 500 ethnic German women from three different villages also spent a week demonstrating, demanding their property back from the collective farms and preventing them from functioning.³⁷

Sometimes the crowds went even further. The OGPU itself recorded an incident in Mariupol province in Ukraine, which began when a ‘mob’ of 300 women descended on the village council and demanded the key to the village church, which had been turned into an administrative building. The women then shouted that Naumenko, the boss of the village soviet, had broken down the door of a member of the church council. When he denied doing so, ‘The women sat him on a wagon (tachanka) and forcibly took him to the man’s house, where it was established that he had indeed been present. The mob decided to hold an impromptu trial.’

The women then forced Naumenko to sign a paper promising to free the churchman – and then attempted a citizens’ arrest of a local party official, Filomynov. They publicly mocked both officials, spitting in their eyes and face, calling the communist officials ‘bandits, thieves and White guards’. The two men were freed only by the intervention of the OGPU. For several days afterwards, crowds armed with sticks and clubs continued to meet in front of local administrative buildings, demanding their property back. The rebellion was finally put down, and the peasants were ‘pacified’. But nobody believed that the Soviet state had won them over.³⁸

There were many such incidents. By the end of March 1930 the OGPU had recorded 2,000 ‘mass’ protests, the majority of which were exclusively female, in Ukraine alone.³⁹ At the Ukrainian Party Congress in the summer of 1930 several speakers referred to the problem. Kaganovich, no longer head of the Ukrainian Communist Party but still keenly interested in Ukrainian affairs, declared that women had played the ‘most “advanced” role in the reaction against the collective farm’.⁴⁰ The OGPU explained this phenomenon, naturally, as evidence of the influence of the ‘kulak-anti-Soviet element’ on their ignorant wives and daughters. More propaganda work and agitation among peasant women would surely solve the problem.41

The OGPU also suspected that women were protesting precisely because they knew that they were less likely to be arrested. They may have been right: even without bringing in the men, women could attack officials – even physically attack them – with far less fear of retribution. Women’s protest also offered a ‘legitimate’ way for men to join: if activists arrived to fight peasant women, then the village men could leap in to defend them on the grounds that they were defending the honour of their wives, mothers and daughters.

Not all of them needed a pretext. Many Ukrainian men had, in recent memory, taken up arms against hated rulers. As they had done during the civil war, some began to organize themselves into partisan units. As one remembered, ‘Rifle fire was heard at night. Partisan groups operated out of the forests. It was a typical peasant uprising. The village soviet was destroyed. Heads of the village soviet either fled or ran the risk of being killed.’⁴² Many local communists failed to escape and were killed on the spot.

The violence was real, and it was widespread. Soviet documents from 1930 record 13,794 ‘incidents of terror’ and 13,754 ‘mass protests’, of which the largest number took place in Ukraine and were caused, in the OGPU’s own view, by collectivization and de-kulakization.⁴³ The local records of the secret police in Ukraine are both more emotive and more precise about the rebellions on their territory. Despite prior attempts to confiscate weapons, they noted that peasants still had them: shotguns and rifles, kept in storage since the civil war period, as well as pikes and staves. In the spring of 1930 they began once again using them in a coordinated fashion. Balytsky did not doubt that he was witnessing the same kind of ‘anti-Soviet activity’ that had taken place in Ukraine in the past. ‘Kulak counter-revolutionary activists have not stopped their struggle,’ he declared, ‘but are rather fortifying their position.’ Between 20 January and 9 February his men arrested 11,865 people, including members of ‘counter-revolutionary organizations and groups’, people who were preparing to carry out ‘armed revolution’ as well as those who could become the ‘ideologists’ of such a revolution. Anybody with any foreign links – especially links to Poland – was suspicious because they might receive ‘active assistance’ from abroad. The secret police also focused on those who were using anything that sounded like a ‘Ukrainian-chauvinist’ or ‘Petliurite’ slogan, and identified three major groups of such activists in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kremenchuk provinces, all important centres of strife during the civil war era.44

Towards the middle of March the situation had worsened. On 9 March, Balytsky reported ‘mass uprisings’ in sixteen districts of Ukraine. Most had been ‘pacified’ by the time of his report, but in Shepetivka district in the western part of the country, ‘anti-Soviet and criminal elements’, some in groups as large as 300 to 500 people, had armed themselves with sawn-off shotguns, hunting rifles and axes. The Shepetivka peasants had been fighting since February, when Balytsky himself had arrived in the district. On his orders the OGPU had brought in cavalry units, armed with machine guns and backed up by border guards and militia.⁴⁵ Balytsky claimed the OGPU had broken up the gang, but they had killed a Komsomol leader and were holding other communist leaders hostage; he feared the gang had made contact with another armed gang in a neighbouring district.⁴⁶ Within only a few weeks of the publication of ‘Dizzy with Success’, the rebellion seemed very close to spinning out of control.

Reading through the archival documentation of the 1930 rebellions, it is not always easy to separate fact from fiction. How well organized was the dissent in reality? How much were the secret policemen inventing conspiracies where none existed? How much were they ‘finding’ the nationalist movements that they were seeking? To what extent were they inventing a problem that they could later claim to have solved? The OGPU had, after all, invented the fictitious SVU only a year earlier. A few years later, Soviet secret policemen would manufacture hundreds of thousands of false accusations in the course of the Great Terror of 1937–8.

The archival accounts of the 1930 rebellion do at times sound deliberately embroidered, as if the OGPU was trying to show Moscow that it was faithfully following orders. In February 1930, for example, the OGPU conducted an operation against ‘counter-revolutionary kulak-white guard and bandit elements’ all across the Soviet Union, again arresting the largest numbers in Ukraine, where they identified seventy-eight individual cells of ‘anti-Soviet activists’. Among the most serious were the ‘Petliurivska’ bandits whom they believed had been organizing an armed uprising in the Kremenchuk district in central Ukraine, scheduled to take place in the spring of 1930. They identified the leader, ‘Manko’ – a name suspiciously similar to ‘Makhno’ – as a ‘former Petliura officer’ who had entered Ukraine illegally, crossing the Polish border in 1924.

The report on the operation quoted Manko: ‘When the state authorities carry out collectivization, they will ensure their influence over the masses, their eyes will be everywhere, as a result of which it will be difficult to approach them and our organizational efforts will lead to failure.’ His group was also said to have ‘set as its goal the creation of an independent Ukraine on the basis of the right to private ownership of land’ and the preservation of the Cossack class. Allegedly, Manko intended to launch an attack on the city of Kremenchuk by starting fires outside the town and taking over the train station and the telegraph office.47

Other groups were believed to harbour similar goals. Some were said to have links with one another, others were suspected of sowing traitorous ideas within the Red Army. Yet another group, in the western districts of Ukraine, had created a ‘kulak-Petliurite’ organization that was supposedly conducting ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’ and spreading ‘provocative rumours’ as well. The same report recorded the arrest of 420 members of ‘counter-revolutionary organizations and groups’ in the North Caucasus region, in the course of only five days, as well as arrests in the Volga regions too.⁴⁸ Balytsky himself recorded his visit to Tulchyn district in the spring of 1930, where he found armed rebels, trenches around the villages, and peasants shouting ‘Down with the Soviets’ and singing ‘Ukraine has not yet died’, the anthem of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in the era of the Central Rada.⁴⁹

The tone of these accounts can seem exaggerated and hysterical. Yet both documentary and memoir evidence does show that not all of these movements were invented. There was real violence, well organized and nationalist in character. In a number of places it was armed and contagious, spreading from village to village as peasants gained confidence from the actions and slogans of their neighbours.

In mid-March 1930, for example, a string of villages in the Tulchyn district staged protests, one following the next. The archival reports are clear: peasants were shouting, ‘We don’t want leaders who rob peasants!’ and ‘Down with the communists, who are leading the country to disaster!’ Even when they didn’t kill the local authorities, they drove them out of office. In 343 villages, peasants elected their own ‘starostas’, or traditional village elders, and refused to cooperate with the communists.50 In many places they also fired Soviet teachers, banned cooperatives and announced the return of free trade. Some of the villagers began to talk about organizing armed resistance, and a few passed around leaflets that the OGPU described darkly as having ‘an anti-Soviet character’. At one meeting those gathered called for property to be given back to the ‘kulaks’, and for the liquidation of the collective farms. On several occasions, rebels reportedly sang the national anthem. The victory in Tulchyn was short-lived: the OGPU blamed ‘Petliurists’ and called for ‘operational measures’. The province was duly divided into sectors, and each sector was assigned an armed OGPU cavalry unit.⁵¹ Balytsky told a colleague that he had been instructed, by Stalin himself, ‘not to make speeches but to act decisively’.⁵²

In several places the rebellions were not only genuinely political, they were also genuinely led by people who had played some role in the peasant rebellions, the Ukrainian national movement or the civil war. Certainly this was the case in Pavlohrad, a district in the Dnipropetrovsk province of eastern Ukraine, whose armed rebellion has now been extensively documented.⁵³ Even before the ‘March fever’ rebellions, the authorities expected violence in Pavlohrad itself, a town originally founded as a Cossack base. In the nineteenth century one of the villages in the Pavlohrad district took part in a revolt against local gentry; in 1919 many in the district had supported Makhno.⁵⁴ Anticipating violence after collectivization, local police in February 1930 arrested seventy-nine people and executed twenty-one of them for plotting rebellion.

Even after that several Pavlohrad leaders with prior military experience were still willing to resist. In March 1930, Kyrylo Shopin, a former soldier in the army of Hetman Skoropadsky, escaped arrest and began travelling through the region. He went from village to village encouraging peasants to revolt. Some of those who would eventually join him had previously fought for Petliura or Makhno.

Shopin’s efforts paid off in early April, when representatives from around the region met in Bohdanivka and began to plan their uprising. Many of those present had lost possessions during collectivization, and were partly motivated by the belief that they could get them back. But they had political goals as well, and they used political slogans: ‘Down with Soviet power’ and ‘Let’s fight for a different kind of freedom.’ After the first group meeting small rebel cells formed, somewhat chaotically, around the nearby countryside. On 4 April many of their members began arriving in Osadchi, a small hamlet near Bohdanivka, hoping to join the rebellion and expecting to be given weapons.

Precautions were taken: the rebels agreed that if the revolt were to fail, everyone who joined should claim that he had been forced against his will to take part. Their leaders tried to reach out to the soldiers of the Pavlohrad district militia, in the hopes that they would sign on as well. They outlined a plan: March on Pavlohrad, gather weapons, use them to storm Dnipropetrovsk and, eventually, take over the rest of Ukraine. From the documentation – the interrogations, investigations, memoirs, accounts written afterwards – it seems clear that the participants in the Pavlohrad uprising were convinced that they could succeed. All over Ukraine, they told one another, abused peasants would rise up and join them.

On 5 April they began their rebellion in Osadchi, where they murdered the local Soviet and party activists, and then moved on quickly to nearby villages, where others joined them. Arriving in Bohdanivka at mid-day, they rang the church bells, took control of a key bridge, and began fighting the local militia. Over the course of the day, the insurgents killed several dozen government figures, including party members, Komsomol members, village councillors and others. Towards the end of the day they managed to cut the telephone lines, but it was too late: the head of the village council had already telegraphed to Pavlohrad for help.

The Pavlohrad militia, which had not taken up the rebels’ call to join them, arrived in the evening. The rebellious peasants retreated, but in the meantime another group of insurgents had taken over the village council and party buildings in a nearby village, Ternivka. Finally, on 6 April, an armed OGPU unit arrived in Bohdanivka from Dnipropetrovsk – 200 men, fifty-eight on horseback. Balytsky had given them explicit orders, using the strongest language possible: ‘liquidate these counter-revolutionary bands’.

In the end, the fighting lasted no more than two days. Despite murdering so many officials, the peasant army never really had a chance. The mostly illiterate leaders had no communications or logistics, and not enough weapons. They were easily overpowered, arrested and killed. Thirteen of them died, a handful were badly injured.

More than 300 were detained, of whom 210 were convicted in a trial which, unlike the SVU trial, was firmly closed to the public: the party could not risk staging a ‘show trial’ for a genuine rebellion. The witnesses could not be so easily manipulated, the story could not be retold in such a way as to hide what had really happened: poor peasants, led by men with genuine military backgrounds, had taken up arms against the state. Nor could the survivors be allowed to live to tell the true story. On 20 May twenty-seven of them were executed.

The Pavlohrad rebellion was unusually brutal, but it was not unique. In March the OGPU had also been surprised by a rebellion in Kryvyi Rih province in eastern Ukraine, a region that had a ‘nearly 100 percent’ collectivization record and was considered docile. Although the arrest and deportations there had been ‘accompanied by some negative phenomenon’, according to an OGPU report, de-kulakization had been enthusiastically supported by poorer and middle-income peasants.

But a ‘change of mood’ followed orders to confiscate seed grain in anticipation of the spring sowing season. One local peasant was heard to declare that the collection of seed grain meant that ‘all bread will be taken out of Ukraine, and Ukraine will be left with nothing’. In another village someone expressed the fear that ‘they will take our last grain and leave the peasants starving’. Following Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with Success’ article, the OGPU men blamed ill humour on over-enthusiastic Kryvyi Rih officials putting pressure on peasants who were not ‘kulaks’. One set of officials had reportedly confiscated some ‘dirty linen’ from a poor peasant, and demanded milk and lard for his brigade; others had broken down the doors of peasant cottages, stripped the inhabitants and thrown them out on the street. In response, a mob of women gathered around a local party activist and shouted that Stalin had said that the collective farms were to be organized ‘voluntarily’. Others organized petitions demanding their land back, or had rushed to the collective farms to reclaim equipment and livestock.

Some of their demands went further. ‘Under the influence of anti-Soviet and kulak agitation’, the OGPU reported, peasants in the village of Shyroke made a series of ‘counter-revolutionary political demands’. Finally, on 14 March, a mob of 500 men and women surrounded the local government offices and demanded the return of seed grain, the dissolution of the Komsomol, the restitution of property confiscated or forcibly ‘donated’ to the collective farm, and the refund of monetary fines paid to the local authorities.55

Once again, the documentation makes clear that all these rebellions, in Tulchyn, Pavlohrad, Kryvyi Rih and elsewhere, were real. They represented an organized reaction to a much-hated policy, as well as to the violence used to enforce it; some of the people who led the revolts were, unsurprisingly, people who had opposed Soviet rule all along.

But even if the rebellions were real, the OGPU’s explanation of their sources and influence is harder to believe. The secret policemen in Stalin’s Soviet Union could not tell their superiors that their policy was failing, or that honest Soviet citizens opposed it for understandable reasons. Instead, they had to imply the influence of class enemies and foreigners, inventing or exaggerating links and connections. The report on Kryvyi Rih, for example, attributed all the violence to ‘anti-Soviet elements, kulaks and relatives of kulaks’: Karpuk, a ‘refugee from Poland’; Lisohor, the brother of an exiled kulak; Krasulia, a bootmaker, and thus a man who owned a bit of property.56 All of them belonged to suspect categories: people with foreign connections, with previously arrested family members, with any property at all.

Over and over again, officials also sought explanations for the strength of the rebellion in the province’s history, drawing attention especially to the rebellions of 1918–20. At one point, the OGPU assigned a group of officers to work across several districts, citing the ‘especially important political significance of the border zones and the historical past of these regions’. Among them were the districts of Volyn, Berdychiv, Mogilev, Vinnytsia, Kamianets and Odessa, all sites of major fighting in the previous decade.⁵⁷ Balytsky noted elsewhere that special care had to be taken in one region because it was the territory of the ‘Zabolotny gang’, one of the partisan units during the civil war.⁵⁸

This obsession with the civil war past was not unique to Ukraine. It spread to include the North Caucasus, where Soviet authorities also attributed violent resistance to collectivization to the influence of Cossacks as well as Ukrainian nationalists. It also encompassed Siberia and the Urals, where Soviet secret policemen targeted ‘former White Guard officers’. Violent resistance to collectivization in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Tatarstan and Bashkiria was also immediately understood to be anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary – again, not without reason. In the Fergana region of Central Asia, Red Army troops arrived to pacify the Basmachi guerrilla movement. Although it had been repressed a few years earlier, the movement was revived by anger at collectivization. Violent struggles also followed collectivization in the Caucasian autonomous republics of Chechnya and Dagestan.⁵⁹

But in Ukraine the strength of nationalism in the cities made this anger in the countryside more dangerous. In 1930, OGPU analysts returned repeatedly to the matter of city-country contacts, and to the links between intellectuals and peasants predicted in 1929. Some of these may have been real; others were clearly invented. On 21 March, Balytsky sent a report to Stanislav Kosior, the general secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and to Yagoda, now the boss of the OGPU: in a village in the Vinnytsia district, he had discovered a link between leaders of the local uprising and the SVU. Allegedly, a rebel there had declared, ‘After the liquidation of the SVU it is necessary to work according to other methods – to incite the ignorant masses to revolt.’ Other SVU members were ‘discovered’ in Vinnytsia in subsequent days. Balytsky congratulated himself for finding them, and indeed for predicting the influence of the SVU – an organization that he himself had conjured into existence. The cells, he wrote, ‘correctly confirm the SVU’s strong links with active cadres of rural counter-revolution and SVU’s expectations for an uprising in 1930–31’. He patted himself on the back: ‘it was only the timely liquidation of the SVU that disorganized the splinters of the organization, forcing them to act at their personal fear and risk’. Perhaps this is how Balytsky escaped criticism for failing to stop the rural uprisings: had he not rid Ukraine of the non-existent SVU, he was arguing, they might have been worse.60

During subsequent months the police kept up the search for new and undiscovered conspiracies. Even after the SVU had supposedly been rounded up, the OGPU was still anticipating the ‘strengthening of links between counter-revolutionary elements in the city and the countryside’, claiming that a wide range of rural organizations had their headquarters in towns. Counter-revolutionaries from the cities were allegedly roaming around Ukraine; in the western provinces of the republic, ‘a range of counter-revolutionary organizations (mainly Petliurite) liquidated in Ukraine … were tightly linked to Poland’.⁶¹

The search for the SVU and ‘Petliurites’ would continue well into the end of the decade. In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the ‘Great Terror’ – the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes – were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.