The shock of the missing millions
In a written report of 25 January 1937 to Stalin and Molotov, Ivan Kraval', the director of the census, provided a summary of the provisional results, one lacking the figures for the members of the NKVD and the Red Army, which were contained in a separate count. Furthermore, the summary also omitted the figures for people ‘in transit’ – i.e. on train or boat journeys. Kraval' estimated the figures for the NKVD and Red Army at 5.5 million and for people in transit at between 300,000 and 400,000. Taken together, that yielded a total of 162 million people, as opposed to 147 million for the 1926 census – i.e. an increase of 10.2 per cent overall and 1 per cent annually. In addition, Kraval' revealed the unevenness of population changes. There had been rapid growth in some regions, especially the towns and industrial areas, and stagnation in some others – he noted an ‘unfavourable natural movement of people in Ukraine (except for the Donbass), in Kazakhstan, in the RSFSR, in the regions of Azov and the Black Sea, in the North Caucasus, in the Volga German Autonomous Republic, in Saratov, Kuibyshev and the Kursk region – ‘in other words, the regions of the bitterest resistance of the kulaks to collectivization. The census statistics reveal that the impact of kulak resistance on the census had been significantly greater than had been indicated by the registering of births and deaths.’42
A further report of 14 March 1937 confirmed the original, provisional figures after a review, and admitted only a small proportion of errors. The total population is given as 162,003,225.43 In March 1937 the census figures for the separate count for the NKVD and the Red Army became available. The director responsible for this special count was Vladimir Tsesarskii, a major in state security. The NKVD count was subdivided into three sections: management personnel (Contingent A), the troops, police schools and fire brigade (Contingent B), and lastly the condemned and the inmates of prisons, detention units, camps and colonies of the NKVD, special settlers, labour colonies, etc. (Contingent C). According to Tsesarskii’s findings, there were no fewer than 1.8 million people in camps and prisons on 6 January 1937.44
The records for the census of 1937 incorporate these data for the NKVD and the Red Army without separating them out (for example, prisoners and deportees are listed by vocation or place of work). Thus the total number produced by the general census amounted to 157 million and was augmented by around 3 million people from the NKVD and the camps in the special censuses. Finally, there were around 2.1 million people in the count for the Red Army, making 162 million in all.45
This total, however, was far removed from the official population figure of no fewer than 170 to 172 million people announced early in 1934 and frequently repeated after that. This meant that, to judge by the official version, no fewer than 8 million people disappeared in the census or had not been included. Those who, like Ivan Kraval' or Mikhail Kurman, were responsible for the implementation of the census were now forced, doubtless in fear for their lives, to provide an explanation or else to revise and improve their figures as fast as they possibly could. Mikhail Kurman believed that the errors in the census were very minor – 0.5 per cent, or 1 million people – and that a further 2 million had been omitted from the count. This was largely a question of Kazakhs who had fled over the border to China. A further 2 to 2.5 million had been omitted as a result of the extreme shortness of time in which to collect the information – twenty-four hours – and also of organizational defects – too weak a network, inadequate training, but in part also of obstacles and resistance on the part of the population. The greatest number of those not included, however, derived in their opinion from the dead who had not been counted. ‘Of the number of cases of mortality not noted in the census, no fewer than 1 to 1.5 million must be deemed to be among those who did not form part of the general census (special settlers, concentration camp inmates and others). This data must obviously be within the NKVD’s camps.’ This statement by Kurman has been confirmed by the still surviving statistician Vaag Azatian, who in the 1960s described a telephone conversation Kraval' had had with Molotov, in which Kraval' is reported to have said: ‘We sent 4 million forms to the NKVD but received only 2 million back.’ Kraval' then put the phone down and apparently said, ‘That’s the end of it then.’46
Lastly, those responsible for the census brought forward one further factor in their own defence. This was that the registering of the population had been defective. The procedures for registering births and deaths – the registry offices – had evidently partly broken down during the chaos of the collectivization programme. There were many reasons not to register deaths: the chaotic conditions throughout a country ravaged by civil war; an institutional failure to cope with the phenomenon of mass death; the increasingly anonymous nature of dying and of the data itself. Kulaks disappeared into the towns, ‘dekulakizing themselves’, as it was called – people simply took over the papers of the dead. Moreover, propiska [registration] and vypiska [deregistration], the system of police registration that was indispensable for changing your address and place of work, a system that enabled the authorities to regain control over the gigantic movements of people, did not really function properly. In Moscow alone there were over 300,000 people living without propiska. At the beginning of 1937 only 40 per cent of the population of the USSR were properly included in the internal passport system.47 The collapse of the registration of ‘the living and the dead’ during the collectivization programme helped to maintain the fiction of a constant natural population growth, veiling the dramatic loss of human life through ‘excess mortality’, deportations and famine, so that, even before 1937, assumptions about population numbers had been far too high.
Whatever explanations were offered by the statisticians and demographers whose lives were at risk, they were unable to conceal the extent to which population growth had lagged behind the fantastic growth projections of the leadership, to say nothing of the actual decline in population. The child mortality figures were particularly alarming, as was the greater mortality among men, who constituted the greater proportion of the deportees, special settlers and camp inmates, and also the lower birth rate resulting from this catastrophic situation. Over 40 million people were struck down by famine.
In total, for the year 1933, there were circa 6 million more deaths than usual. As the immense majority of those deaths can be attributed directly to hunger, the death toll for the whole tragedy must therefore be nearly 6 million. The peasants of the Ukraine suffered worst of all, with 4 million lives lost. There were a million deaths in Kazakhstan, most of them among nomadic tribes who had been deprived of their cattle by collectivization and forced to settle in one place. The Northern Caucasus and the Black Earth region accounted for a million more.48
Even if the census of 1937 does not speak of deportations, executions and victims of famine, the data it compiled exposed the true dimensions of the catastrophe. The missing millions correspond fairly precisely to the losses that had arisen through the increased mortality caused by collectivization and the resulting famine.
Statistics as crime
The Party leadership was given a provisional summary of the census by Kraval' as early as 25 January 1937. The chief reason given for the failure of the 1927 census was the inadequate training given to the enumerators, which led to their overlooking many people.49 The data collections and analyses were initially available in only a few copies – three copies went to Stalin, Molotov and Mezhlauk; Kraval' kept one copy, five further copies went later to Yezhov, Iakovlev, Bauman, Popov and Kraval'’s deputy, Brand.50 The arrests started as early as March. Even the subsequent improvements to the statistics could not put a stop to the wave of repressions. The first people to be removed from their positions and arrested were the director of the Census Board, Olimpii Kvitkin, his deputy, Lazar' Brand (Brandgendler) and Mikhail Kurman, the head of section for population. Ivan Kraval' was arrested on 31 May 1937; he was condemned to death on 21 August and shot.51 The wave of repression gripped all those involved in the census, from t
he centre right down to the republics and then to the local level. In April a large number of divisional heads were removed: A. Kristin, E. Bettel'heim, I. Dik and V. Zaitsev, even though some of these had no connection to the census. Other victims of the repressive measures were M. Mudrik, head of Gosplan’s Central Administration for Economic Statistics (TsUNKhU), M. Zamatov (Kazakhstan), A. N. Asablin, E. A Kustolian and M. T. Varfolomeiev (Ukraine). Those arrested included the directors of Oblast administrations – A. Bobrov (Sverdlovsk Region), V. Strokovskii (Cheliabinsk Region) and L. Melamed (Orenburg Region). Many statisticians were shot, others returned to their duties after serving their sentences.
On 27 September 1937 Pravda published the Council of People’s Commissars’ decree about the further action to be taken:
In the light of the fact that the All-Union census of 6 January 1937 was conducted by the TsUNKhU52 of the Gosplan of the USSR with gross violation of basic principles and of the instructions issued by the government, the Council of the People’s Commissars of the USSR decrees: 1) the implementation of the count and the documentation of the count must be regarded as faulty; 2) the TsUNKhU of the Gosplan of the USSR shall be required to carry out an All-Union census in January 1939.53
The statisticians and demographers were designated ‘Trotskyite– Bukharinite spies’ and ‘enemies of the people’.54
On 10 December 1937, the All-Union Board for the 1939 census finally sent a secret letter, ‘On damaging distortions and organizational defects in the conduct of the 1937 census’. It is noteworthy that the definitive statement of the invalidity of the census did not arrive until eight months after the initial results that Kraval' had presented in January 1937. Was the leadership in two minds about how it should judge the results and respond to them? Statements by Kraval' at a meeting in May suggest that the wave of vigilance and denunciation following the February/March plenum of the Central Committee had also reached the census bureaucracy. On 16 May 1937, a meeting was held of the heads of the republican, regional and district organizations. Kraval' spoke of the statisticians’ great achievements, but also pointed out that they had overlooked something: ‘It is clear to each of us that, when someone is arrested, there are not only grounds for suspicion against him but also enough facts to justify the arrest … If it is necessary to isolate a person, that means he is guilty.’ All this obliged the officials involved in the census ‘to increase their vigilance and to scrutinize their entire organization from top to bottom’.55
What then happened to the arrested statisticians can be gleaned from a letter written from a camp in Kolyma by Lazar' Brand to the president of the Supreme Court of the USSR:
I am accused of belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization. This accusation is based on my own confession, on the statements of O. Kvitkin, the former chief of the Census Board of TsUNKhU, and Veisblit, a colleague from TsUNKhU. My ‘confession’ was forced by a series of coercive measures on the part of the investigating officials and by threats to me but also to my family – my wife and child – who were threatened with arrest if I refused to sign the relevant statement. To my knowledge, this threat became a reality in my wife’s case. I therefore signed the statement … As far as the statements of Kvitkin and Veisblit are concerned, they were not shown to me, although I asked to see them. Nor was it possible to question their accounts, although I tried to insist on that. Even if their statements were made, they are false from start to finish … It is completely clear that these ‘unmaskings’ are exactly like my own ‘confession’. Kvitkin’s statements have been similarly concocted, and since the investigating officials, Ivanov, Zagorodnyi and Kikin, have said several times that they will find ways to ‘squeeze’ out as many witness statements about my membership of a counter-revolutionary organization as they want (this was literally what they said), there is reason to believe that those statements were ‘squeezed out’ of Kvitkin in the same way.56
Brand also defended himself against the accusation of ‘sabotage’.
The claim that I had attempted to sabotage the census is just as false. Like the programme itself, the actual organization of the census was carefully worked out by a special commission under the chairmanship of Valeryi Mezhlauk. The plan put forward by TsUNKhU was radically modified by that commission. In effect, the commission proposed a completely new programme for conducting the census, one for which I bear no responsibility at all … For this reason the responsibility for flaws in the programme and the practical organization of the census cannot be laid at my door. Even less can I be accused of sabotage.57
By the end of the year the need to cancel out the results of the census confronted the leadership with a hugely costly task – the destruction of the leading ranks of Soviet statisticians and demographers and their technical achievements. The very thing that had been foreshadowed – that a census conducted in unfree conditions would produce results marked by those conditions: by the fear of speaking the truth or assuming responsibility for the results – was borne out by the reality, and indeed was surpassed in a way that could scarcely have been foreseen, namely by the destruction of the census statistics themselves. Whereas the political leadership had announced as late as the beginning of 1937 that Bolsheviks had no fear of figures, their present reaction showed that, although they had been kept well informed by the NKVD network, they could not stomach the truth delivered by the census figures. Following the liquidation of both the results and their authors, the leadership’s answer to the census was twofold. First, they decreed a new census whose results would be closer to their wishes, and then they announced their intention of introducing measures to ward off as far as possible a demographic disaster that threatened the nation’s ability to reproduce itself and hence the survival of the Soviet system itself. These measures included, in addition to new family legislation, a prohibition on abortions, a comprehensive propaganda campaign in favour of children, the creation of a dense network of nurseries, hygiene reforms to reduce infant mortality rates and combat disease and epidemics – in short, all the measures summed up under the name of ‘Stalinist Renaissance’ (Valentina B. Zhiromskaia).
However, having destroyed the analytical matrix which disclosed the contours of the nation and its people, and having sacrificed the very instrument that would enable them to interpret these things, the leadership, shocked and blinded, rushed to take the bull by the horns. They were overcome by a blind flight into terror, an intensification of violence whose excesses would surpass the very disasters that the census had just diagnosed, albeit somewhat cryptically. As a result, for the catastrophe that followed there were no longer any instruments that might have diagnosed what was to come.
8
A Stage for the Horrors of Industrialization: The Second Moscow Show Trial in January 1937
On 23 January, at 12.05, the second Moscow show trial began, dealing with the ‘criminal prosecution of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre’. This trial, coming barely five months after the start of the case against Zinoviev and Kamenev, could not produce defendants of equal calibre – with the exception of Karl Radek, a journalist who had achieved international recognition and an interlocutor of choice for everyone who had dealings with the Soviet leadership or the communist movement. Even so, the group of defendants had a clear profile. Ten of the seventeen accused were leading officials from the most important People’s Commissariats. Iurii Piatakov was deputy commissar for heavy industry, Leonid Serebryakov was head of the Central Administration for Transport and Freight, Jakov Lifshits was deputy commissar for the railways, Ivan Kniazev was active in the Commissariat for Transport, Boris Norkin was head of the Kemerovo chemical works, and Mikhail Stroilov was chief engineer of the Kuzbassugol' Coal Trust in Novosibirsk. Some of them had voted with the internal Party opposition in the past, but there could be no doubting their allegiance to the hard core of the Soviet industrialization project. They belonged to the elite who had been trained for the central ‘ministries’ involved in the process of industrializing Sovie
t society. They were tried-and-tested managers who had all occupied positions of responsibility. For this reason some have spoken of a ‘show trial of the Commissariat for Heavy Industry’ – a significant event, therefore, for the internal development of the USSR.1
The charges were as fantastic and absurd as in the first show trial. The accused were said to have formed a Trotskyist reserve or parallel centre that was to swing into action if the Zinoviev–Kamenev centre were exposed. Once again, the conspiracy aimed at the ‘violent overthrow of the Soviet government so as to transform the existing social order in the Soviet Union’, in order to bring about the ‘restoration of capitalism’ and make preparation for the defeat of the USSR in a future war – to be achieved by ‘active wrecking, diversionary and spying activities’ together with terrorist attacks on the Soviet leadership. The trial ended with death sentences by firing squad for thirteen accused; two were sentenced to ten years in gaol, and two to eight years each.2
As had emerged during the first show trial, it was evident that the outcome was determined from the outset. Anything could be asserted during the trial and any construction desired could be placed on it, because there were no proofs, but only the confessions of the accused. The interpretation of the evidence was left simply and exclusively to the ‘experience of the court’. Vyshinskii made no bones about the fact that this trial could dispense with all evidence. In a trial against conspirators no proofs were needed:
Moscow, 1937 Page 19
