The Ruling Elite

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The Ruling Elite Page 15

by Deanna Spingola


  After the USSR annexed the Baltic States, the Chicago Tribune relocated Day to Sweden to continue reporting as its Stockholm correspondent. Day accompanied Finnish troops in 1941 as they advanced into Soviet territory in the Continuation War of 1941-44. His passport had expired, and he attempted unsuccessfully to renew it. Technically, he was a stateless person. Toward the war’s end, he felt that it was essential for reporters to alert the West about the communist expansion into Eastern Europe behind the advancing Red Army. He relocated to Berlin where he became a commentator for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, a German state radio station. He broadcast to American forces in Europe from August 31, 1944, until April 1945.

  In the last weeks of the war, during a broadcast on March 29, 1945, Day said, “It is hard to believe that a Christian people should gang with a barbaric nation to try to exterminate another Christian nation, solely because the victim of this conspiracy expelled the Jews from its country.”353 Counterintelligence Corps officials arrested Day in May 1945 and incarcerated him along with Mildred Gillars and Herbert Burgman at Camp King, Oberursel, conditionally releasing him on December 24, 1946. Day then returned to his home, a single room, in Bad Tolz, Bavaria. On January 22, 1947, the Justice Department said that it was not interested in prosecuting Day for his anti-Soviet broadcasts during the war. On January 12, 1949, officials arrested him and charged him with treason, but the Justice Department soon dropped the case.

  WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE

  Ukraine: Assault against the Middle Class

  Russian Empress Catherine the Great issued an invitation on October 15, 1762, offering numerous incentives—freedom of religion, temporary tax exemption, interest-free loans, internal self-government, and eternal immunity from military conscription—to all foreigners who would come and populate the Volga region, developing the area and creating a buffer zone between the Russians and the Mongols to the east. In the first five years, almost thirty thousand German farmers and artisans settled in the area and founded three hundred villages. Over the next century, steppe nomads raided the region, and it took years for the Volga Germans to enrich the soil sufficiently to harvest abundant crops.

  Following Czar Alexander II’s liberation of twenty-three million serfs on March 3, 1861, many acquired title to their land, accelerating agricultural production. Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, was the home of traditional farmers, ethnic Ukrainians, and many Volga Germans who still owned and farmed the land. In 1871, Alexander II revoked the right of the German settlements to enjoy self-government. In 1874, he revoked their immunity from military conscription.354 The Volga German community numbered about 1.8 million by 1897.

  Volga Germans

  According to the 1914 census, there were 2,416,290 ethnic Germans in Russia when World War I erupted. The government viewed them as possible enemies or as having enemy sympathies and sought to purge all ethnic Germans from the empire. In 1915 and 1916, when Russia started losing the war, the government deported about two hundred thousand Germans from Volhynia, a historic region in Eastern Europe straddling Poland, Ukraine, and Bessarabia, to the German colonies in the lower Volga River. The government exiled many Germans to Siberia as enemies of the state. The chaos created by the Bolshevik Revolution of February 1917 prevented the deportation of the remaining Russian Germans.355

  World War I fractured the Austria-Hungary Empire, and thereafter various factions fought for Ukrainian territory, spurring the Ukrainian nationalist movement. During World War I, Russian Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin said that Russia was not just against the German Reich but also against the German people and said that they deserved to suffer discrimination and persecution.

  During the Ukrainian-Soviet War (1917-21), the Bolsheviks fought to prevent Ukraine’s independence. They invaded Ukraine on December 11 and 12, 1917, and brought the predominantly Christian nation under their control. In 1919, the Soviets began sending Christian pastors to the Siberian gulags. The Christian Volga Germans were of a different mentality than the atheistic revolutionaries.

  In 1921, officials divided Ukraine between the Soviet Union and Poland, with small areas going to Czechoslovakia and Romania. Partisan fighting continued against the Soviets until mid-1922. In response, the Red Army terrorized the countryside. The Bolshevik Revolution, followed by a civil war, halted the production of food and its distribution. Bolshevik expropriations created a horrific famine in 1921 and 1922 during which a quarter of the population starved to death. The Bolsheviks then imposed collectivization in the agricultural regions.356 Some Volga Germans enlisted with the White Army against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. The Red Army conducted fierce attacks on the Volga German communities.

  The 1921 famine affected twenty-five million people, particularly the Germans of the Lower Volga valley. Edgar Gross, using official government documents from the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1921, found that the famine had “hit the Volga German Commune especially hard.” Bernhard Bartels said that the German commune was the “center of the famine.”357 The famine led to the deaths of a third of the Volga German population. On February 20, 1924, the Soviet government upgraded the Volga German Workers’ Commune to the status of Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the first national autonomous unit in the Soviet Union. The government divided the ASSR into fourteen cantons.

  The Soviets relaxed their policies through the New Economic Policy (NEP), issued on March 21, 1921, which permitted the trade of foodstuffs but also included a food tax. Trotsky disapproved of the NEP and preferred the immediate suppression of the kulaks because of their widespread opposition to bolshevist policies. The change temporarily invigorated the country.358

  By 1923, because of the NEP, there was enough grain to feed the population and to export. However, Stalin’s industrialization process brought dire results. While the USSR had abundant produce, the peasants, who had suffered because of the scarcity of essential commodities, were reluctant to sell their products. Even if they received rubles for their products, they wondered if there would be merchandise to purchase. There were plenty of tanks, airplanes, and rounds of ammunition, but there were no refrigerators, washing machines, or toilets. By 1927, the discouraged peasants decided either to retain their products or simply to stop producing. In response, Stalin and his cronies decided to eliminate the hardest-working peasants, those they deemed smarter and wealthier, the middle class, by abolishing private land ownership and establishing collective farms. Stalin tasked units of the Red Army to occupy regions where high-producing farmed peasants resided.359

  In implementing the NEP, the Soviets ceased compulsory grain seizure and permitted the peasants to store and trade their grain. They forced the collaboration of workers and peasants. Some historians view this as a temporary cessation between the first Bolshevik assault against the peasantry (1919-22) and the final deadly onslaught (1928-33).360 In 1928, Stalin replaced the NEP with the first of thirteen five-year plans, implemented on January 5, 1930, which imposed a shift from independent to collectivized farming. American firms, with US government knowledge and approval, were involved in this new development in Russia.361

  By the end of the first plan, the USSR had more than 4,538 tanks, the foundation of Soviet industrialization and militarism. The program continued with the second five-year plan. The Soviets produced furnaces, dug coal ore mines, and established huge electricity and oxygen plants. Under the first two plans, the Soviets produced 21,573 warplanes. Under the third five-year plan, scheduled for completion in 1942, they intended to maintain massive production of high-quality armaments. Stalin, using terrorism, closed the country’s borders to prevent escape from the USSR. The secret police launched an assault against alleged “malevolent saboteurs,” factory workers found guilty of any production-line accident, breakage, or failure to meet production requirements.362

  This terror improved discipline and suppressed opposition since workers would not initiate strikes or demand
better wages. The Soviets imprisoned millions in slave-labor camps where they received no wages and were not provided housing, food, or clothing. They somehow had to acquire or build whatever they needed. They worked long hours and had no holidays, and officials could execute anyone for failure to fulfill production quotas. Soviet development of remote areas of Siberia and the Far East would have been impossible without slave-labor inmates and “special settlers,” millions of exiled deportees. The government determined the number of necessary workers, and then the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) arrested a sufficient number of people to meet the quota.363

  The Soviets were prepared to use brute force in their collectivization and dekulakization efforts. To meet their objective of kulak elimination, they employed death sentences, labor settlements, and deportation from the areas of collectivization. They executed tens of thousands of kulaks and expropriated their property for the collective farms. They deported hundreds of families to desolate, unpopulated areas of Siberia where there were no buildings. The deportees had to work day and night to build shelters to keep from freezing to death.

  To meet his industrialization objective, Stalin used Russia’s enormous resources and treasures, including its gold reserves, acquired during more than a century and found in churches, monasteries, libraries, imperial vaults, museums, czarist palaces, and in the homes of the rich. The Soviets confiscated and then exported and/or sold icons, paintings, statues, medals, books, antique furniture, Renaissance paintings, furs, gold, platinum, diamonds, and jewelry to people outside of the Soviet Union, all within a relatively short time. Russia also had massive natural resources in virtually unlimited quantities, including timber, which the Soviets assigned millions of people to cut down as the foundation for export efforts. Stalin also sent slave laborers to mine gold.364

  Stalin said, “Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes [the collectives] and sovkhozes.”365 On January 30, 1930, the Soviets sanctioned the extermination of the kulaks as a class, divided into three categories—those they would send to the gulags, those they would relocate to distant areas of the USSR, and those they would send to other parts of their province. There were twenty-five million Russian peasants, not including their families. There were fifteen million to eighteen million middle-income peasants, five million to eight million poor peasants and between 1.5 million and two million kulaks. Stalin wanted to incite the “village poor” against the kulaks by assuring them a reliable existence as workers in a kolkhoz, where the state would provide them with machinery and livestock seized from the kulaks. The peasants did not want collectivization, and the middle class bitterly opposed it. They gathered and concealed huge quantities of food in hidden storerooms. In despair, they slaughtered cattle, burned crops, and broke implements, conducting one of the biggest peasant revolts against a state power.366

  When Stalin’s new system was in full operation in February and March 1930, the number of collective farms grew from 59,400 with 4.4 million families to 110,200 farms with 14.3 million families. The government confiscated the land owned by the peasants who resisted collectivism and murdered them or exiled them to remote areas. People refer to this as “the liquidation of the kulaks,” a process that affected five million families. Instead of relinquishing their animals to the collective farms, many peasants killed them, while state policies reduced the number of cattle from 30.7 million in 1928 to 19.6 million in 1933. During this time, the number of sheep and goats fell from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 million to 12.1 million, and horses from 33.5 million to 16.6 million. State activity disrupted the planting season in 1930 and the years thereafter, dramatically reducing food production. The Soviets, like the British in India and Ireland, insisted on seizing food from the rural population to support the urban population. With insufficient food, the peasants starved.367

  Stalin used the nation’s resources—coal, nickel, manganese, petroleum, cotton, and other riches—to pay for foreign technology. In 1930, the Soviets’ main export was grain, along with timber and timber products and oil and oil products. Due to America’s overproduction, grain prices plummeted. In 1933, grain sales constituted only 8 percent of all Soviet export revenue. Just half of the grain that the Soviets exported in 1932 and 1933 would have fed millions and saved them from starvation and death, particularly in Ukraine. During the Soviets’ first five-year plan, America and soon Europe suffered an economic crisis. This contrived crisis contributed to Stalin’s expansion.

  During the collectivization campaign of 1929-33, Stalin’s forces targeted farmers who owned more than one cow or five or six more acres than their neighbors did. Agents now referred to those farmers as kulaks, or enemies of the poorer peasants. Vladimir Lenin called them “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine.”368 The government divided the peasantry into poor (bedniak), middle (seredniak), and wealthy (kulak) households. Then the government officially targeted the wealthy peasants for persecution and “dekulakization.” The Soviets applied the labels flexibly to punish any resistance to the government’s program. They also interchanged the term kulak with phrases like “anti-Soviet elements” or “anti-Soviet activities.”369

  Soviet officials enforced a systematic starvation of thousands of the previously self-sufficient souls who opposed collectivism. The confiscation of all grains and stock from personal and national supplies created a famine. Conservative estimates indicate that about 4.8 million people perished while others estimate the number as high as ten million. FDR granted the Soviets diplomatic recognition on November 16, 1933. In 1945, Stalin admitted to Winston Churchill that twelve million peasants died during the transition to collective farming.370 After World War I, all newly created nations were obligated to sign minority rights treaties as a condition for diplomatic recognition, and this requirement applied to the recently reorganized nation of Russia under the Soviet thugs.371 The starvation in Ukraine was similar to the desperate situation during the Dust Bowl in the United States.

  The Soviet government reduced bread rations, bringing great suffering since more and more families had no access to bread cards. Meanwhile, Soviet agents, seizing grain from farmers, including ethnic Germans, left many without supplies, grain, and seed reserves. If the farmers failed to provide the grain, the government fined them or sentenced them to forced labor, ordering the forfeiture of all property. In two villages, not one of the thousand farms had any cows. Even the collective farm had only forty starving cows and sixty pigs. The ethnic Germans regularly appealed to the government for German citizenship rights. Those exiled Germans were in Ukraine as a result of the Versailles Treaty. Desperate villagers ate ersatz food or went to the closest town and traded clothes or whatever else they had for bread. A kilogram of bread was almost ten rubles. The Soviets deceived the villagers, forced them to relinquish their livestock and grain, and promised there would be plenty to eat if they joined the collective farms. But the rations were insufficient, and the underfed workers ended up begging for food.372

  Reports of the Mass Genocide

  In 1932 and 1933, writer Arthur Koestler was living in Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine. He described the famine during that terrible winter when starvation killed many children in the countryside. Prior to a horrific death, they resembled “embryos out of alcohol bottles.” In his travels by rail through the countryside, he saw crowds of begging peasants with swollen hands and feet. He saw mothers extending their starving infants with “wobbly heads” and swollen bellies. Soon thereafter, the authorities required train conductors to pull down window shades on all trains traveling through the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Volga basin. Despite the circumstances, the local newspapers were full of positive reports about industrial progress with no mention of a famine. Koestler said, “The enormous land was covered wit
h a blanket of silence.” At the same time Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times from 1922 to 1936, was pushing for recognition of the USSR.373

  Toward the end of March 1933, Malcolm Muggeridge began writing articles for the Guardian about the desperate situation, criticizing collectivism and the Soviets’ “vastly over-optimistic estimates for the spring harvest” when in fact there was insufficient grain to properly feed the people. Muggeridge documented his claims of a “widespread famine” by traveling in the affected areas and describing the starving population. “I mean starving, in its absolute sense, not undernourished as, for instance, most Oriental peasants… and some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat.” The peasants said, “We have nothing. They have taken everything away…” Muggeridge wrote. “It was true, the famine is an organized one.” It was more than a famine. It was “a military occupation, worse, active war.”374

  Although people had been starving and dying during the winter, official reports indicated that deaths on a massive scale began in early March 1933 when the snow melted. People had swollen stomachs, faces, and legs. They were unable to contain their urine. They consumed anything that they could fine—mice, rats, sparrows, marmots, and other small animals, ants, earthworms, and boiled snails. They had consumed all of the dogs and cats in the villages. If they lived near a river, they caught fish. They ground up animal bones to create flour and ate weeds and other items.375

  Muggeridge reported that the occupying soldiers and Soviet representatives in each community consumed whatever food that the government sent. These well-fed agents continued to control and coerce the kulaks while “searching their barns and cellars for hidden grain and hoarded food.” Muggeridge saw “fields choked with weeds, cattle dead, and people starving and dispirited, no horses for plowing or for transport, not even adequate supplies of seed for the spring sowing.” He saw “deserted villages,” leading him to believe that the government had deported masses of people and that collectivization was a colossal, deliberate failure. Other villages reeked of death. Lethargic people could be seen dressed in rags with swollen bodies, evidence of advanced starvation. They told Muggeridge that the government had taken the food away, causing famine in the “most fertile parts of Russia.”376

 

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