Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer. 1980
I have always remembered the winter of the last grain collections, the weeks of the great famine. And I have always told about it. But I did not begin to write it down until many years later.
And while I wrote, new memories kept rising to the surface. Suddenly, forgotten persons stepped forward, voices long silent began to speak. The lines wove into a marvelous net and pulled out of the dark depths of memory the shards of a submerged life. Certain people elicited others. Pains and joys that had died began to revive. And altogether new thoughts pecked their way out.
And while I wrote the rough drafts and read them to friends, questions arose. Ancient questions, seemingly stamped forever with the answers, rose up from the bottom like the floating horned mines of the First World War-rusty, but still dangerous. And completely new ones bobbed up unexpectedly. Questions put to history, the present day, myself.
How could all this have happened?
Who was guilty of the famine which destroyed millions of lives?
How could I have participated in it?
The books of Andrei Platonov, Aleksandr Iashin, Vasilii Belov, Sergei Zalygin, Boris Mozhaev and Fodor Abramov depict those people and those forces which ravaged, demoralized and destroyed the peasantry.
The novella Forever Flowing by Vasilii Grossman and The Gulag Archipelago (the chapter “The Peasant Plague”) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn record many awful, angry testimonies to and echoes of those disastrous events. Abroad there are scientific statistical, sociological and historical works on the subject.
These works are not known in our country. The subject itself is still prohibited. Even decades afterward, the famine of 1933 remains concealed, like a state secret.
But Goethe is right:
And if the truth may cause us harm, It still is better than a lie. And if it may inflict a wound, My friends, that wound our cure provides.
Writing down what I remembered long ago and recalled not so long ago, I decided to check my memory, to fill it out.
In the reading room of the Lenin Library in Moscow one encounters the hush of a hospital and the irregularly continuous, businesslike movement of a train station or factory.
Day after day I leafed through the yellowed, faded pages. Directives, reports, communiques. News items from the village reporters. Speeches of party dignitaries. Articles by known and unknown authors. Like those I once wrote or might have written.
The voices of those days joggled my memory. Through the dusty curtains of official jargon wisps of things began to show, to shine things not fully said, not really expressed, or else completely unutterable …
We were raised as the fanatical adepts of a new creed, the only true religion of scientific socialism. The party became our church militant, bequeathing to all mankind eternal salvation, eternal peace and the bliss of an earthly paradise. It victoriously surmounted all other churches, schisms and heresies. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were accepted as holy writ, and Stalin was the infallible high priest.
Factories, mines, blast furnaces, locomotives, tractors, workbenches, turbines were transformed into objects of a cult, the sacramental objects blessed from on high. “Technology solves everything!” Men genuflected to these objects in poetry, prose, painting, film, music …
518 and 1040! (518 new manufacturing plants and 1040 MTS-machine and tractor stations.) These figures never left the pages of the newspapers, they extended across millions of posters, they shone and sparkled on walls, they covered rooftops, they sounded in songs and recitations. We knew them by heart even today I remember them, and they meant as much to us as the names of the celebrated “stars” of movies, jazz, soccer and hockey mean to our grandchildren.
Every day the papers printed the totals of tractors, automobiles and threshers produced. The dispassionate magnitudes of statistics, the figures for plans, returns, sums obtained-held for us some spell-binding, cabalistic Pythagorean power. When the Stalingrad tractor factory began to produce 120 tractors a day, I experienced a real personal elation.
Statistics, tables, totals were also posted on the struggle for grain.
In 1926-27, 197 million poods of grain were collected in the Ukraine.
In 1927-28, considerably more-261 million poods.
But this was still not enough. The Trotskyites and other left Oppositionists advocated raising taxes, turning the screws on the kulaks. The rightists insisted on the more expedient course of commodity exchange: produce more agricultural tools, fabrics, shoes, consumer goods, so the peasants would of their own accord want to sell more grain.
In 1929, they collected 300 million poods.
In 1930, it jumped to 464 million!
These figures signified the victory of collectivization.
Everything seemed so pure and simple! In 1929 there were 3,266,000 individual peasant farmsteads in the Ukraine-an ocean of petty personal property! By the end Of 1930, 200,000 “kulak” farmsteads were liquidated, and a significant majority of middle and poor farmers (73.2 percent of the sowing area) were united into 24,191 kolkhozes.
Using this simple arithmetic, anyone could figure out that our countryside had become soviet. “The struggle for grain has been crowned with victory I”
Many things then began to be called a struggle. In the workshop they struggled for the plan, for the reduction of wastage, against absenteeism. In the school they struggled against laziness, retardation, lack of social conscience. The janitors struggled for clean sidewalks. Everyone struggled-physicians, literati, ditch diggers, accountants …
We deliriously sang out the refrain of the “Budennyi March,” one of the most popular songs in those years: “And all our life is but a struggle!”
For what, against whom and how exactly we should struggle at any given moment was determined by the party, its leaders. Stalin was the most perspicacious, the most wise (at that time they hadn’t yet started calling him “great” and “brilliant”). He said: “The struggle for grain is the struggle for socialism.” And we believed him unconditionally. And later we believed that unconditional collectivization was unavoidable if we were to overcome the capriciousness and uncertainty of the market and the backwardness of individual farming, to guarantee a steady supply of grain, milk and meat to the cities. And also if we were to reeducate millions of peasants, those petty landowners and hence potential bourgeoisie, potential kulaks, to transform them into laborers with a social conscience, to liberate them from “the idiocy of country life,” from ignorance and prejudice, and to accustom them to culture, to all the boons of socialism …
But in 1931 they collected only 434 million poods in the Ukraine – 30 million less than the preceding year.
Some attributed this to a drought; others to the poor work of the collectors; still others to the poor work of the kolkhozes. Almost everyone spoke of wrecking.
On February 13, 1932, the Committee of Collection under the Soviet of Labor and Defense (STO) was created. A week later, on February 21, a directive was issued on “contracting the seed of the new harvest.” The collectors were instructed to make a contract with the peasants by which the individual farmsteads would deliver to the state 25 to 30 percent of all their harvested seed, 50 percent of bean, 70 percent of sunflower.
(The day before this, the Central Executive Committee resolved to deprive of Soviet citizenship thirty-seven Mensheviks and SRs living abroad, and also Trotsky and the members of his family. Five years earlier he had been expelled from the party, in particular for “overestimating the kulak danger and underestimating the middle peasant.”)
In the spring of 1932 the newspapers and lecturers exulted: “The seed problem is solved!” Referring to this, the CC and the Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, in the resolution “On the Plan of Grain Collection and the Development of Kolkhoz Trade” of May 6,1932, promulgated “the introduction of new methods of grain trade.” All kolkhozniks and individual farmers who fulfilled the plan and delivered sowing seed were to be granted the right, after January 15, 1933, to trade grain freely at market prices. For the Ukraine the plan of grain collection was set at 356 million poods. That is, 108 million poods less than in 1930.
Naturally, I did not remember all these figures afterward. And only considerably later did I realize that the “new methods of kolkhoz trade” were a promise to restore a somewhat modified NEP.
The state was trying to recover the “link,” to smooth things over with the countryside which had not yet been thoroughly plundered. On July 25, 1932, the resolution of the CC and Sovnarkom “On the Strengthening of Revolutionary Legality” strictly forbade “forcibly socializing peasant property … arbitrarily setting fixed quotas for individual farmers … overriding kolkhoz democracy in particular ‘the principle of efficiency.” Forbidden also were “commanding … administrating … hindering kolkhoz trade.”
But on August 7,1932, a law was established “On the Preservation of the Property of State Enterprises, Kolkhozes and Cooperatives and the Strengthening of Socialist Ownership.” This law was conceived and written by Stalin personally. (See 1. Stalin, Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1952, Vol. 13, P. 409.) In the preamble it states: “Those who encroach on social property should be looked on as enemies of the people.”
This was the first official use of that concept which subsequently became commonplace in courts, newspapers, public speeches and private life. In 1938 Vyshinskii at the trials demanded that the enemies of the people – Bukharin, Piatakov, Rykov – be shot. The sentry on the prison camp watchtower would report: “Assuming the post for guarding the enemies of the people … relinquishing the post … ”
On August 22, 1932, a new resolution of the CC and Sovnarkom, “On the Struggle Against Speculation,” declared that the peasant who sold his grain without waiting for official permission ran the risk of being listed as a speculator. In this resolution there was no mention of legality or the courts; it obligated “the OGPU, the organs of prosecution and the local organs of power … to apply the sentence of confinement in a concentration camp for a period Of 5-10 years without the right of amnesty.” Such resolutions of the non-legislative departments (the Central Committee of the party) replaced and “supplemented” the laws, simultaneously entrusting judicial functions to the OGPU-the secret police!
Thus in the course of “the struggle for grain,” the foundations and pseudo-legal means were devised and propagandized for those kangaroo courts which in the following years condemned millions of people to suffering and death.
The August ukases had a deadly effect. They formed a counterpoint to the May-June resolutions, which promised free trade but remained mere pieces of paper.
However, neither then nor later did I feet these contradictions.
Abroad a worldwide crisis was raging. Every day the newspapers reported the hunger, the unemployment, the spread of demonstrations; they reported that Americans were burning grain, pouring milk into ditches, that Chinese were torturing, executing people.
And the same newspapers, telegrams, articles, sketches told about our new factories, blast furnaces, MTSs, our newer and newer successes and accomplishments, our grander and grander designs. True, there were more than a few alarming reports, accusatory items … One lagging kolkhoz took in a poor harvest. Bunglers in a trust failed to spy some wreckers. Some dishonest business executives were stealing. Unconscientious workers were taking days off or hiding their defects. Unconscientious kolkhozniks were sitting on their duffs ….
Our party, our state, waged war on the peasantry.
In August and September 1932, Pravda wrote that the peasants in the Ukraine were not delivering enough grain; they were “bazaaring” it, harboring it.
Molotov and Kaganovich came to our factory. At a meeting held outdoors after the first shift, they spoke of “mistakes committed in the Ukraine in the grain collection policy.” The thing I most remember from that occasion was the fact that the ashen, yellowish Molotov couldn’t pronounce the cluster “st”, and every time he named Stalin he strained and stammered. While expansive, jovial Kaganovich played his evidently well-established role of “fiery agitator” and “regular guy.” What they said about mistakes and shortcomings didn’t alarm anybody. The tone was not ominous. And they didn’t name any “concrete bearers of evil.”
But now, looking through the newspapers and journals of those years, I realize that by the beginning of September 1932, one could have felt the underground tremors of the approaching catastrophe.
In the June issue of Bolshevik of the Ukraine (No. 13-14) the dominant chord was sounded: “The resolution of the CC and the Sovnarkom on grain collections means that from this day on every kolkhoz becomes the complete manager and disposer of the major portion of seed it produces.” The same issue cited Kaganovich’s speech: “We fought and made the Revolution so that both the worker and the peasant would live better than before.” He ridiculed party and soviet workers who were afraid of “agriculture on the kolkhoz private plots … afraid of their own shadow.”
And in the August issue (No. 17-18), Vladimir Zatonskii declared that the party was leading to a “quick new blossoming and prosperity of the countryside,” and he warned the local powers against overbendings and deviations.
But then in September the same journal (No. 19-20) wrote in alarm that the plans of grain collection were not being fulfilled and the ones to blame were “the directors of the kolkhozes, the Communists, the directors of the party cells who joined the kulaks and the Petliurans and became not warriors for grain, but agents of the class enemy.”
By the beginning of October the Ukraine had fulfilled a total of 25.9 percent of the plan. This was attributed to the poor work of the low-level party organizations and the kolkhoz leadership.
In October, Bolshevik of the Ukraine (NO. 21-22) angrily exposed kolkhozes which were distributing grain “as advances” and for days of work, without yet giving anything to the state. According to the journal, “up to 30 percent of the workdays are ascribed to the directors and to complete outsiders of the same village-teachers, policemen, physicians.”
On November 18, Comrade Terekhov, in a report given to a meeting of the Kharkov party activists, already began to speak of “a threatening breakdown in the grain collections” which would come “as a gift to the kulak.” As the main cause of the failures he indicated “the outright idealization of the kolkhozes.” The party and the government, it turned out, had “overestimated” the kolkhozes; they had hoped the kolkhozes would honestly do their duty to the nation, deliver the grain and then trade freely. But instead the kolkhozes were “bazaaring the harvest, giving it away as advances, putting it into food supplies, making various funds,” He demanded that the grain “improperly” given to the kolkhozniks be taken back immediately and “real pressure be applied to the individual farmers.”
On November 19, the CC and Sovnarkom resolved to impose a new “one-time tax” on the individual farmsteads. In addition to all other requisitions, the peasants had to deliver to the state 100-170 percent of the agricultural tax already imposed on them, and the “kulak” farmsteads, 200 percent. Local authorities were empowered to raise, even to double, the rates of those who had delivered no grain.
On December 2, the CC and the Sovnarkom permitted the “free trade of grain in the Moscow oblast and the Tatar ASSR,” both of which had “fulfilled the plans of grain collection.” This was the carrot. But the sticks whipped all the more mercilessly.
On December 3, the Sovnarkom ordered that the kolkhoz directors who had given out grain to builders, policemen, hospitals, etc., from funds already accounted for be “prosecuted for the criminal expenditure of grain funds” and judged severely.
On December 6, the Sovnarkom determined “to put villages and kolkhozes which have not fulfilled their obligations in grain delivery on the blacklist.” Such villages were faced with “the immediate cessation of trade” and “the removal of all goods in stock from the cooperative and state stores.”
To this governmental decree it would be appropriate to add the cry of the marauding Volga Cossacks: “Hey, men, take the bow! Hands up! Your grain or your life!”
On December 7, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR resolved to remove from the jurisdiction of the village courts all cases involving “stealing of social property.” The village courts retained the right to try only petty theft (sums of no more than fifty rubles) and only of personal property.
This was a somewhat belated addition to Stalin’s law of August 7. The village courts could not give death sentences or long prison terms. But every person who encroached on state or kolkhoz property-on grain!-was a candidate for the death sentence.
On December 10 the Politbiuro of the CC of the All-Union CP(b) published its decision to begin a new purge of the party and for this period to admit no new candidates to the party.
On December 27, the Central Executive Committee issued a ruling on passports: they were to be introduced for city residents in order to facilitate “the counting of the population, the unburdening of the cities and the purging of kulak criminal elements from the cities.”
My father and a number of old men at the factory were disgruntled by this. They said the passport system followed the example of the tsarist police bureaucracy. I argued with them: how could they even make such a comparison?
But in fact the passport system laid an administrative and juridical cornerstone for the new serfdom; it provided one of the foundations for an unparalleled state totalitarianism. The “kulak elements” of which the cities should be cleansed proved to be all peasants who had left the countryside without the express permission of the local authorities. Once again, the passport system “tied down” the peasantry, as it had before the emancipation of 1861.
The system of obligatory registration, right up to the present day, represents an administrative surveillance over each and every citizen. And it limits the right of many if not all Soviet people to choose their place of residence. Thanks to Stalin’s passportization Of 1932-33, the Crimean Tatars may today be refused entry to the Crimea, the Volga Germans to the Volga, the Meskhovites and Greeks to Georgia, and political prisoners who have served their terms may be prohibited from returning to their native homes.
The struggle for grain had begun in 1932 with a strategic retreat. This was the situation in May and June.
But in August a sharp turn was taken. And the state launched a hectically disordered full-scale attack.
All the means of propaganda, all the powers of the regional administration the party and Komsomol apparatus, the courts, the procurator’s office, the GPU and the police were enlisted to strive for one goal, the acquisition of grain.
Our traveling newspaper was one of the countless number of hastily mobilized military units – or better, subunits-of the panicking grain front.
In January 1933, the commander in chief himself spoke out.
A plenum of the CC was held. Stalin read a report. He didn’t say a word about the threat of famine. Instead, he repeated again and again that the class struggle was intensifying, and those who were “inclined to the counterrevolutionary theory of the weakening of the class struggle and the withering away of the class struggle … were degenerates and double-dealers who should be driven out of the party.” Virtually the only conclusion to be drawn from his report was an appeal for “revolutionary vigilance.”
In his speech “On the Work in the Countryside,” he admitted that although more grain had been harvested in 1932 than in 1931, 1, the grain collection met with great difficulties.” He went on: “The announcement of kolkhoz trade means the legalization of a market price for grain higher than the price set by the state. Needless to say, this circumstance was bound to cause peasants to hesitate a bit in delivering grain to the state.”
Lenin had written about Stalin’s crudity back in his time. Almost all of Stalin’s polemical efforts were boorishly crude. And yet he minimized the mass reprisals against the peasantry in 1930, the forced collectivization and the plundering of millions of people, with the slighting phrase “dizziness from successes.” Concerning the law of August 7, 1932, which threatened hundreds of thousands of people with death, he said that he was “not afflicted with any particular softness.” And just as euphemistically he spoke about the failures of the grain collection.
“The personnel in the countryside failed to grasp the new situation there,” they did not foresee, did not comprehend the “recalcitrance of the peasants,” and therefore they did not do their duty “to spur on and enforce the grain collections by every possible means.” In a spirit of self-criticism, he admitted: “The CC and Sovnarkom have somewhat overestimated the Leninist tempering and perspicacity of our workers in the field.” At the same time, the kolkhozniks, unlike the individual farmers, were “relying not on themselves to care for the crops and to manage affairs sensibly, but on their directors”(!!)
Without beating around the bush, he stated: “The party can no longer restrict itself to individual acts of intervention in the process of agricultural development. It must now take into its own hands the management of the kolkhozes … it must enter into all the details of kolkhoz life,” etc.
Stalin maintained that one must not “overestimate the kolkhozes … turn them into icons.” Even though the kolkhoz was “a new socialistic form of organization in agriculture,” still the main thing was “not the form, but the content.” (The phrase “form of organization” is repeated seventeen times within four pages.)
He affirmed that the kolkhozes “not only are not guaranteed against the infiltration of anti-Soviet elements, but at first even present certain advantages for their use by counterrevolutionaries. “And he made a direct comparison between the kolkhozes and the soviets Of 1917, when they were “controlled by Mensheviks and SRs.” He recalled the Kronstadt slogan: “Soviets without Communists.”
At the time I understood these reasoning as an example of dialectical intelligence. But while writing and rewriting these pages, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Why, Stalin was frightened by the new forces which collectivization had awakened or might awaken. New unions of peasants, even if involuntary, artificial at first, might somewhere have become or might in the future become truly self-sufficient.
All opposition had been crushed, driven into exile and confined in political isolation camps (“politisolators”-the term for distant prisons). The kulaks had been resettled. And yet in the “recalcitrance of the peasants” Stalin sensed a new threat, all the more terrible because its bearers were by no means political or ideological opponents by no means “class enemies,” but rather millions of newly organized poor and middle peasants. They were led by such people as Cherednichenko, Vashchenko, Bubyr, hundreds of thousands of “low-level,” grass-roots Communists, who believed Stalin’s words, slogans, promises, who believed the propaganda put out by the CC and supported it unconditionally.
But more and more Stalin came to fear precisely his unreservedly, unselfishly devoted companions in arms; he saw in them a threat to the regime, founded as it was on the opposition of word and deed. More and more obviously the pompous proclamation of ideological principles opposed the zigzag “general line” of state politics.
Initially the plans for establishing agriculture as a cooperative enterprise and the rules for the kolkhozes provided for a socialized manner of life which to a certain extent was connected with the traditions of the village commune-the old Russian obshchina and the Ukrainian gromada. Such traditions and the possibility of their continuance did not contradict the principles proclaimed by the soviets in 1917. But they were foreign to the essence of Stalinist rule, which had already become an autocracy of bureaucratic serfdom.
The struggle for grain was an out-and-out political struggle, whether or not its rank-and-file participants realized it. The actual self-sufficiency inherent in the “new forms of organization” of the peasants frightened Stalin and his flunkies no less than his heirs were frightened a quarter of a century later by Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face.”
The instincts of a power-hungry man lent an analytical sharpness to Stalin’s limited, primitive, doctrinaire thought and suggested to him sufficiently effective ways to interpret and “reinterpret” reality.
In that same speech he again and again repeated the same accusations against the kolkhozniks and the “comrades in the field.”
And in conclusion he reiterated in an ecstasy of self-confession: “Only we Communists are guilty of all this … We are guilty of not seeing far enough … We are guilty of cutting ourselves off from the kolkhozes, of resting on our laurels … We are guilty of continuing to overestimate the kolkhozes as a form of organization … We are guilty of … not making clear the new tactics of the class enemy … ” (The italics are Stalin’s.)
A monarch, magnifying his own “I,” speaks of himself as “we.” On the lips of the General Secretary, “we” is substituted for “you.” This was the same sort of hypocrisy as the salutation “comrades,” as the rudimentary rituals of elections, summary reports and “collective agreements.”
The hypnotically incessant repetition of simple phrases was the distinguishing mark of Stalin’s speeches. As was the point-for-point catechism: question-answer; cause-effect; premise-conclusion. And the numeration of theses: in the first place, in the second …
The plodding seminary student is revealed in other characteristics: the intonation of an unthinking reciter; the monotone of a psalmist; the inquisitional manner of accusation, with attacks on heretics, apostates, sinners; the alternation of feigned “meekness” and fanatical zeal; the obligatory references to the “holy fathers”-Marx, Engels and Lenin-and to the “machinations of the devil”: enemies abroad, Trotskyites, kulaks.
Yet in his typical seminarian rhetoric there was present a certain individual originality. He would begin, as a rule, with simple truths: the promise of free trade must have acted on the peasants, the kolkhozniks work with less enthusiasm than the individual farmers, etc. Then, insistently repeating the obvious truth or the truthful-appearing half truth, he would lead his listeners and readers to false conclusions: enemies had slipped into the kolkhozes; the local authorities were blinded, distracted, demoralized, or else they had become conscious accomplices of the enemies, etc.
And these results he also repeated-insistently, laboriously, monotonously, like the mumbo-jumbo of a shaman. Fortified with quotations from Lenin and little jokes made by Stalin himself, the incantations inspired mass paranoia, produced a consciously organized, full-scale epidemic of mania, a psychotic syndrome of the persecutors and the persecuted. Soon such manias became an ineradicable feature of our public and private life.
The plenum of the CC decided to establish political departments in the MTS and sovkhozes. The system of centralized management of agriculture was thus expanded and complicated.
The tasks of the newly created establishments were stated without ambiguity: “To struggle against the robbery of kolkhoz goods, to struggle against outbreaks of sabotage intended to undermine the measures taken by the party and government in the area of grain and meat collection from the kolkhozes … ”
Politotdel (political department)-the name itself suggested war Politotdels were in the divisions, in the armies. The politotdels of the MTS were not designed so much to carry out political, organizational and propagandistic work in the machine and tractor stations themselves as to keep an eye on the kolkhozes: “to participate actively in the selection of the cadres of the MTS and the directors and employees of the kolkhozes servicing the MTS, keeping in view both the managerial level and the administrative agricultural personnel.”
The politotdels were under the direct supervision of the “political section [politsektor] of the regional or oblast land management board” or the republic’s Narkomzem-the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. These in turn were under the direct supervision of the political directory (politupravlenie) of the MTS of the USSR Narkomzem. In this way, new militarized party-police ministries, being independent of the local powers, formed a “conveyor belt” of administrative energy emanating from the center. And the kolkhoz party cells and the kolkhozes themselves turned out to be under a double subordination (the regional committees and regional executive committees retained their full power).
A centralized hierarchical state, it would seem, requires obedient and effective mechanisms of control. However, our party and state powers were imbued from the very outset with a fruitless rigmarole and bureaucratic runaround. At every crisis their power was magnified many times, as the irresponsible “higher-ups” shifted the responsibility for their inept orders onto the disconcerted “lower-downs,” and then the diligent executives were punished for the oversights of their superiors.
In the Ukraine during the nineteen months from August 1, 1930, to March 1, 1932, 942 executive personnel of the district party committees were removed from their posts. And in the next four months, 716 more.
From February 1, 1933, to November 1, 1933, 237 secretaries of the district party committees and 249 chairmen of the district executive committees were cashiered.
During the same time, a “purge” was made Of 120,000 members and candidates of the party: 27,000 were purged as “irresolute, corrupt, hostile to the working class.”
Thus the struggle for grain, the war of the power against the peasantry, metamorphosed into a self-destructive carnage. The party chiefs dealt cruelly with their subordinates-with the insufficiently vigilant or insufficiently obedient, with the too powerful and simply with the hapless who fell under the wheels at the next sharp turn of the “general line.”
On January 19, 1933, a new law was issued “On Supplying Seed to the State.” Instead of grain collections, a single grain tax was imposed, to be collected not from the harvest, not by contracts and not by fixed quotas, but “from the land actually under cultivation.”
On February 18, the Sovnarkom of the USSR permitted the introduction of grain trade in the Kiev and Vinita oblasts, the Central Black Earth oblast and Georgia.
On February 25, the CC and Sovnarkom resolved to extend a “seed subsidy” to kolkhozes and individual farmsteads left without any seed for sowing. For the Ukraine this was set at 20.3 million poods.
These were new carrots, but they came too late.
The villages of the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa areas were already starving. The generals of the grain front made their new tactical retreat over thousands of fresh graves.
The miseries caused by the chaotically inconsistent “struggle for grain” increased and spread just as chaotically and irregularly. In some places, right next to starving districts there were those where the people somehow made ends meet, and the local authorities even reported successes. Ten to twenty kilometers from desolate villages dying of starvation there remained communities and kolkhozes where only a few families had run out of grain; people whose stomachs had swollen from lack of food were being treated.
These strips of catastrophe provided material for the consolers, both the unconscionably witty and the conscientiously honest but naive. There, you see, on the same land, under the same objective conditions, everything is different. Because the party directors didn’t shake them up enough, didn’t chase out the enemies.
“There’s grain,” said the January issue of the journal Agitator for the Village. “You have only to break the kulak resistance.” And the Ukrainian biweekly The Kolkhoz Activist blasted “the wretched malcontents who, even though they have grain, have gone so far as to mortify themselves and their own kin, if only to arouse the discontent of other kolkhozniks.”
The CC of the All-Union CP(b) dismissed the secretary of the Kharkov obkom-R. Terekhov. This was the same man who in November of 1932 had demanded that the grain given to the kolkhozniks for their work be taken back immediately, and who in January of 1933 had confiscated the sowing seed in Popovka, driving Bubyr and our village correspondents to despair.
The party drove out a man who had overstepped his authority, an “overbender,” a perpetrator of the incipient famine. This gave credence to the other decisions and other reprisals taken against those declared guilty of all the misfortunes.
And so we continued to believe our rulers and our newspapers. We believed, despite what we ourselves had seen, learned, experienced.
Source: Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 248-265.