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 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 peop
le, 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, espe
cially 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
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine Page 17
